After I finish this novel, I read a lot of second resource, not only in English, but also in Chinese. The most of them are focus on the love element in the novel, but I want to say that there is not only Love in the story, but also discrimination in the story. The proud white French girl and a yellow rich man have an important conflict status in the story.
The French girl proud of her noble blood since she was born, even she is very poor. However, she thinks that she is a white person and this is the good reason for her to discriminate the man. In the story, the writer not only one time to describe that the man is thin, weakness and always emphasize that he is Chinese.
The man who is very rich in Saigon and his money is the only reason for the girl to approach to him. In frond of the girl’s face, the man cried and shows his fear about the war and his father. He is a yellow man who can not compare with her.
We can found much evidence to show us that the girl is look upon the man. Therefore, this novel not only talks about the love, but also shows us that the discrimination is go deep into the girl’s heart.
6/23/2010
It's Time the Stone Consented to Bloom,
CORONA
By Paul Celan
transl. by John Felstiner
Autumn nibbles its leaf from my hand: we are friends.
By Paul Celan
transl. by John Felstiner
Autumn nibbles its leaf from my hand: we are friends.
We shell time from the nuts and teach it to walk:
time returns into its shell.
In the mirror is Sunday,
in the dream comes sleeping,
the mouth speaks true. 
My eyes goes down to my lover's loins:
we gaze at each other,
we speak dark things,
we love one another like poppy and momory,
we slumber like wine in the seashells,
like the sea in the moon's blood-jet.
We stand at the window embracing, they watch from the street:
it's time people knew!
It's time the stone consented to bloom,
a heart beat for unrest.It's time it came time.
It is time.
It is time.
The Lover -------How beautiful name that make people can not breathe. The lover in the novel is “thin, lacking in strength, weakness”(Donnadieu 38) and painful, helpless…He is full of anger and sadness, but he is too small to do nothing. He has been oppressed by the big history background. There are full of inequality and not free. The fear of war, death, love and life make them feel incapable to do anything.
Person should make a concession in history.
The love is untenable is not means she does not love. Duras also doubt that maybe she use some love which she dose not know to love that man. In addition, she find that she love her younger brother when he dead. He belongs to her pass beautiful memory.
Lover is like a blooming white daisy which is white and aught. Its heart is white. Maybe one day, when the wind blows its all petals and the petals follow the soil; we can know that some beautiful things appear in our life.
Person should make a concession in history.
The love is untenable is not means she does not love. Duras also doubt that maybe she use some love which she dose not know to love that man. In addition, she find that she love her younger brother when he dead. He belongs to her pass beautiful memory.
Lover is like a blooming white daisy which is white and aught. Its heart is white. Maybe one day, when the wind blows its all petals and the petals follow the soil; we can know that some beautiful things appear in our life.
6/22/2010
Still the Second Resource
This second resource is talk about that the writer use Michael Riffaterre's theory analysis the film about The Lover. I think this theory also can help us to understand Marguerite Donnadieu's writing form in The Lover.
Using Riffaterre to rehabilitate The Lover
By Siobhan Brownlie
In this article I shall use Michael Riffaterre's theory of intertextuality to re-examine the film The Lover. The film has been widely seen as a seriously inadequate adaptation of Marguerite Duras's novel L'amant. I shall show, however, how certain Riffaterrian "ungrammaticalities" in the film, inconsistencies and unusual elements, can be understood as approximating the subtle complexity of the novel. Riffaterre's theory thus provides a new and interesting way of analyzing film adaptations.
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In the discussion of film adaptation the concept of "intertextuality" has served the useful purpose of transcending the moralistic statements often associated with "fidelity," although the latter notion remains important. Stam proposes the concept of "intertextual dialogism," whereby a film is conceived as a turn in an ongoing dialogical process such that it bears the traces of multiple intertexts (64). Film adaptation can be conceived as the reproduction and transformation of intertexts through various processes such as selection, amplification, popularization, and reculturalization. These processes are conditioned by the material and financial contingencies specific to cinema, and by ambient target culture discourses and ideology reflected in studio style, ideological fashion, political constraints, auteur's predilections, economic advantage, and evolving technology (Stam 68-69).
As compared with Stam's notion of dialogism that conceptualizes a simultaneity or forward movement of evolving texts, Riffaterre proposes a backward-looking search for intertexts for the purposes of elucidation. Riffaterre is well known for his detailed and perspicacious readings of poetry, and for a theoretical framework explaining his practice of reading that seems to have been elaborated independently from work by other theorists. For Riffaterre there are two stages of reading: the heuristic/referential stage producing meaning and the retroactive/hermeneutic stage producing significance. The text is first read in a linear fashion in which the referential or mimetic dominates. If there are aspects that do not fit a mimetic reading, a second reading is made to gain an understanding of non-referential aspects such as tropes, ambiguities, contradictions, and sound patterns that create meaning. The second semiotic reading elucidates what Riffaterre terms "ungrammaticalities," anything unusual (formal or semantic) or which does not fit mimesis, in particular ambiguities, contradictions, and indeterminacies. Ungrammaticalities are understood through reference to other texts, termed intertexts, which may be conventional forms and styles, cliches and formulae, fragments of texts or entire texts. For Riffaterre every ungrammaticality is a sign of grammaticality elsewhere: "the poetic sign has two faces: textually ungrammatical, intertextually grammatical; displaced and distorted in the mimesis system, but in the semiotic grid appropriate and rightly placed" (Semiotics 164).
For Riffaterre an intertext may be aleatory (the reader may or may not enrich his or her understanding by bringing intertextual knowledge to the reading) or determinate (there is an intertext that is signaled by ungrammaticality, and which is necessary for comprehension of the text). In the latter case the reader may not be knowledgeable of a specific intertext, but an intertext will be presupposed because of the deictic intertextual trace of ungrammaticality. There may be more than one pertinent intertext: overdetermination provides multiple motivations for words used. In connection with intertextuality, Riffaterre also takes up the Peircean notion of "interpretant" as a mediating sign that explains the relationship between two signs such as the text and the intertext. An example of an interpretant is the phoenix, the symbol of eternity (and thus potentially of prostitution) that evokes also flame and flight. This interpretant links Mallarme's text "Le Tom-beau de Charles Baudelaire" 'Charles Baudelaire's Tomb' to Baudelaire's "Crepuscule du soir" 'Evening Twilight' in the following passages: Il allume hagard un immortel pubis Dont le vol selon le reverbere decouche 'Gas lights up wildly an immortal pubes whose flight sweeps away from home following the street lamp' (Mallarme) and A travers les lueurs que tourmentent le vent la Prostitution s 'allume dans les rues 'Through the lights which the wind torments, Prostitution is lit up in the streets' (Baudelaire) (Riffaterre, "La trace").
There have been various criticisms of Riffaterre's theory of reading and intertextuality. In his discussion of the reading process Riffaterre does not take fully into account the issue of the readers' competence and background, which are multiple and varied. Individual readers bring various presuppositions to reading, and there is a dialectical relationship between text and reader. In Riffaterre the issue of interpretation is oversimplified: he tends to think that all can be elucidated in a univocal manner by reference to the pertinent intertext. He does not allow for multiple and open-ended interpretations of texts; indeterminacy cannot simply be "solved." The concepts of determinate and aleatory intertexts are therefore problematic (Allen 126-30). However, Riffaterre's concepts may be useful tools in examining film adaptations: despite the potential oversimplification, the double reading for mimesis and semiosis, as well as the procedure of intertextual elucidation, are worth exploring.
In my case study of the film The Lover by filmmaker Jean-Jacques Annaud and related texts, I apply Riffaterre's ideas on intertextuality. The starting point is the notion of an "ungrammaticality." In Riffaterrian terminology this term has a wide extension. I apply it to the film The Lover as an aspect that strikes the viewer as unusual or inexplicable. The next step is to survey the main texts pertinent to the film to be referred to for the purposes of elucidation. Potentially the main intertexts are the novel L'amant by Marguerite Duras, its translation The Lover, and a second novel (1) by Duras, L'amant de la Chine du Nord. It is not entirely clear on what exactly the film screenplay was based. According to Laure Adler's account, Duras wrote an initial screenplay, which was used by Jean-Jacques Annaud and scriptwriter Gerard Brach in conjunction with the novel L'amant to produce the final screenplay in French. Annaud apparently said that he was mostly inspired by the book (561-62). The filmed screenplay is in English; it is a translation by Eric Sterling Collins of the French script adaptation (Avant-Scene Cinema 5). It is not clear either whether the screenplay translator referred to the existing English translation of the book The Lover. Having withdrawn from the film project, Duras published L 'amant de la Chine du Nord, which is based on her initial screenplay. All the different versions recount the story of the affair between a poor adolescent French girl and a wealthy older Chinese man in Indochina of the early 1930s, inspired by Duras's own youthful experience.
Critics of the film would indicate that it contains in fact few "ungrammaticalities" as compared with Duras's novel, L'amant. The film has been dismissed as being conventional arty soft porn. A more serious criticism is that Annaud turned Duras's nouveau roman style text into a simple linear autobiographical account of a sexual encounter, which not only eliminates the rich modernist complexity of the novel, but recuperates the work into a patriarchal and imperialist ideology that is in contradiction with the novel. In Bonnigal's words: The reduction of L'amant to its carnality excises the novel's
intellectual content and debases Duras's text to conservative and
queasy erotica in which the postcolonial self is silenced and the
female subject is reappropriated and re-exposed to patriarchal
voyeurism. (9) (2)
Another critic Randall is particularly interested in the notion of voyeurism. He finds that Annaud's film panders to the scopophilic, coercing the male viewer into inhabiting a culturally conditioned desire for objectification and dominance. This contrasts with Duras's novel, which defeats the voyeuristic impulse by double-coding, combining the realist and romanticized paradigms with self-reflexive anti-illusionist strategies (101). Given that the film explicitly sets forth the notion that it represents Duras's work by means of an initial scene that depicts the writer writing the book, the charge of misrepresentation seems all the more important. (3)
In contrast to the usual reaction to The Lover, I contend that a close viewing of the film reveals ungrammaticalities that on the one hand can be understood through reference to intertexts following the Riffaterrian procedure, and on the other hand serve to undermine the criticisms of the film. It is true that the film revolves around the sexual encounter, although there are also references to the importance of another discovery for the girl: the fact that she wants to become a writer. It is true that the film is representational and in the main linear (apart from one flashback near the beginning to the girl's stay in Sadec), which contrasts greatly with the novel L'amant, remarkable for its discontinuity, digressions, and mixing of events in different time periods. (4) Ungrammaticalities can be considered, however, to upset a simple reading of the film. These ungrammaticalities concern primarily the role and nature of the narration/voiceover that is an important feature of the film. The voiceover is provided by an older actress who represents the girl of the story grown old, and who is reminiscing about her youth. In the following discussion I will consider first ungrammaticalities that clearly derive from, indeed are copied from the book, before examining aspects that are specific to the filmic medium.
The first feature of the film to be discussed is the discrepancy between the kind of language in the characters' dialogues and in the voiceover narration and commentary. The dialogues are simple and banal in their language; (5) whereas the voiceover is much more profound, providing insights into characters and situations, and it has a particular poetic quality with repetitions, and some unusual imagery and vocabulary. Here is a short example of voiceover narration: [...] To write, that's what I see beyond the moment in that great
desert under the features of which I see the extent of my life [...]
The nature of the voiceover narration is elucidated by reference to one of the principal intertexts, the book L'amant. The narration consists primarily of an English rendering of parts of the French novel, and it is the striking style of the novel that is conveyed. Here is the corresponding passage to the above in the novel: Je vais ecrire des livres. C'est ce que je vois au-dela de
l'instant, dans le grand desert sous les traits duquel m'apparait
l'etendue de ma vie. (Duras, L'amant 126) (6)
Annaud explains that he deliberately used Duras's text in the voiceover, not only in order to be "faithful" to the literariness of the book, but also to distance himself at times from the generally over-riding filmic concreteness of the event, spoken dialogue, and the image by giving way to the alienated abstractness, the music, and pleasure of written words in the voiceover text (Alion 82).
A noticeable aspect of the voiceover narration is the shifting between first-person and third-person reference to the girl. Initially the first-person pronoun is used: "At 18 I aged [...] Look at me. I'm 15 and a half. It's the crossing of the river. When I go back to Saigon, it's as though I'm on a journey [...]." Then there is a switch to the third person: "He came that Thursday afternoon to the boarding house. He came to wait for her with the big black car" (my emphasis). In the recounting of the first love scene the third person for the girl is continued: "She touches the softness of the sex, of the skin, she caresses the gold hue, the unknown novelty [...]." However, shortly after the first love-making the first person is reverted to: "I had asked him to do it again and again, to do it to me." Sometimes there is a quick change between first person and third. In the following quotation from the narration, the first person "we" is used, then the girl is referred to as "the little one": We are lovers. Every day we go back to the bachelor's room. We can't
stop loving. This takes place in the sleazy district of Cholon every
evening. Every evening the little one comes to receive the pleasure
that makes one scream, from this dark man, this man from Cholon,
from China.
The first person is reverted to in the narration about the girl's family: "Now and then, I go back to the house in Sadec, to the horror of the house in Sadec [...]," and in following scenes of the family's meal at the restaurant with the Chinese man, the headmistress's meeting with the mother, and the scene at the beach between the girl and the Chinese man. However, at the end of the film the third person is adopted to recount the scene on the boat departing for France: "It was when the boat uttered its first farewell and the gangway had been hauled up [...] that she had wept." The third person used at this point for both main characters in the film gives a striking depiction, a portrait, of their final contact that unifies the film by mirroring their very first meeting: She was leaning on the railing like the first time on the ferry. She
knew he was watching her, she was watching him too [...]
The third person is continued for the rest of the film, during the boat trip when the girl realizes that she may have loved the Chinese man, and in recounting how years later he had phoned her in Paris. At this point the narrator/writer could be close to the age of the character, and thus it is surprising that the third person is used.
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As well as the shifts between first person and third person in the voiceover, there is ambiguity with regard to the first person. Sometimes "I" clearly refers to the young girl, whereas sometimes "I" refers to the narrator; at times the reference could be to both. Within the same passage there may be a shift from one to the other, as in the following: I still see the place of distress, shipwrecked, the distempered
walls, the slatted shutters giving onto the furnace, the soiling of
the blood. I remember well, the room is dark, it's surrounded by the
never-ending clamour of the town [...] my body was in that public
noise, this passing-by from the outside, exposed. The sea, I
thought, the immensity.
The first "I" in "I still see" is the narrator, the old woman, who is reminiscing; similarly "I remember well." The phrase "my body" is ambiguous given the previous uses of "I" for the narrator: is she thinking of her body when she was a young girl, or is she thinking of her body as an entity unchanging over time in its essence? This ambiguity acts as a transition to the final "I" in "I thought," which refers to the young girl, and her thoughts at that moment.
The uses of the pronouns in the film voiceover text constitute ungrammaticalities in the form of unusual use and indeterminacy. These ungrammaticalities can be understood with reference to the text of L'amant. The exact same features are present in the book, where they form an idiosyncratic use and have a specific significance: the concept of a coherent single self is challenged, and the reader/viewer is made to accept multiplicity, non-exclusive contradiction and uncertainty, and is invited to participate in the production of identity and meaning (Ramsay 34). Randall considers that the book L'amant "destructures" the voyeuristic impulse since the vacillating first- and third-person narrative perspectives impede the socially imposed imperative to forget the fiction's artifice. He argues, on the other hand, that the film's "rapacious scenes of simulated seduction, copulation, and prostitution coerce the male viewer into voyeuristic objectification" (101). We have seen, however, that the film too contains some oscillation between first and third person, and therefore at times highlights the nature of film as a construction and positioning entity. Just as in the book, the shift to third person highlights self-reflexivity and the girl/narrator taking charge, observing herself and others, inviting others to observe her, observing others observing her, and therefore undoing surreptitious voyeurism of viewers: the girl is not simply a passive object for the secretive male gaze.
Another unusual linguistic feature of the voiceover text is the mixture of verb tenses. The story is narrated using variously present tenses, preterit tense, and past perfect tense. Sometimes changes between tenses occur rapidly within the same section of narration. Here are some examples of the different tenses:
So that day I'm going back to Saigon. I'm wearing my Cavery shoes and my man's hat [...] He came that Thursday afternoon to the boarding house. He came to wait for her with the big black car [...] Now and then I go back to the house in Sadec, to the horror of the house in Sadec [...] She had wept because she had thought of that man from Cholon, her lover, and suddenly she wasn't sure of not having loved him with a love she hadn't seen because it had lost itself in the story [...]
This tense variation can be elucidated by reference to L'amant, which contains an analogous mixture. The shifting of time/tense reflects the shifting multiple points of view of a narrator who is omniscient but also has a point of view situated in the time that the writing and the evocation of the emotion of the writing is creating (Ramsay 41). Past and present do not belong to a continuum, but confront each other in various ways in the person of the narrator. It is the interplay of images of the self, rather than development through time, which characterizes the narrative procedure in L 'amant (Sankey 63). Tense also inscribes emotional intensity in several ways: the eternal time-lessness of the present tense in the description of the primal scene of the meeting of the girl and the Chinese man on the ferry; and the brutal breaking of the circuit of desiring and being desired by the distancing of the past perfect tense at the end of the book/film (Sankey 64, 66).
Having discussed unusual aspects of the voiceover that can be traced directly to the text L'amant, I shall now examine ungrammaticalities that involve specificities of the filmic medium. The voiceover is provided by the alluring voice of Jeanne Moreau, representing the girl of the story grown old. The girl played by Jane March has a British accent, and it is inconceivable in the real world that her accent could change into Jeanne Moreau's French-American accent when she is older. Furthermore Jeanne Moreau is a very accomplished actress, whereas Jane March's acting leaves much to be desired; this is reflected in delivery of words encompassing prosodic features such as intonation, rhythm, and pauses. The effect of the discrepancy between the two voices can be interpreted and understood in relation to the book L'amant. (7) As mentioned earlier with reference to pronoun usage in the voiceover, the notion of unified self is questioned in the book, and a confused and multiple self posited through diverse linguistic and compositional means. The film, a different semiotic medium with different resources at its disposal, can use sound in the form of two different accents and delivery for one character in order to effect this same questioning. In L 'amant there is also a questioning of the certainty of events and of linear time (partly through use of verb tenses, as discussed above): the simultaneous presence of the starkly contrasting young girl's and older woman's voices in the film emphasizes the bringing together of the present and the past, of events and memories/recountings/reconstruction of events--the (im)possibility of recovering the past self through the present self (Ramsay 27).
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The narrator's words serve to reinforce the action or scene on screen, adding a verbal poetic description to the image, or giving background information or a character's thoughts. However, there is quite often a discrepancy between what is being shown on the screen and the narrator's words. This can be a minor discrepancy, such as the narrator recounting a generalization whereas the scene depicts a particular instance. An example of both particularity and generalization in the narration concerns the ferry scene when the girl and the Chinese man first meet. The narrator says "It's the crossing of the river [...] That day it's the end of the school holidays, I don't remember which one." This is a very particular and special day shown on screen and narrated as "that day," but there is also generalization in the narration with regard to the return from the school holidays: the repetitiveness of the event is such that the narrator does not remember at the end of which particular holiday the meeting took place. Noticeable too are instances when the narrator starts to recount something before it is shown on the screen; or conversely the narrator recounts information relevant to a previous scene when a new scene has started. In this way the voiceover creates links between images and scenes, and upsets strictly linear time by telescoping present and past, or present and future. An example of the latter is when the two girls are dancing in the dormitory, and the voiceover starts to recount that the Chinese man came to pick up the girl that day, before the Chinese man's car is shown on the screen. Telescoping of scenes and of time is a feature of the book L'amant.
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The most striking discrepancy between voiceover and image is at the beginning of the first love scene in the bachelor's room. The Chinese man is sitting down; the girl is standing facing him; the camera is behind the girl; the man slowly lowers the straps of her dress, we see the top of her bare back. The voiceover during this scene is the following: He tore the dress off, he tore the little white cotton underpants
off, and he carried her like that naked to the bed.
These words are translated from the book L'amant. For a film that has been accused of being soft porn, it is interesting that a visual representation of the words is refrained from. There is a clear division between the audio and the visual. This kind of discrepancy or ungrammaticality can be understood by referring to an intertext not yet mentioned, the films that Duras directed herself. The audio/visual split is a technique much exploited by Duras, the filmmaker. Deleuze discusses this characteristic of Duras's films in which the visual and sound present two autonomous images, constantly separated, disassociated, non-totalizable but irrationally linked. The film does not lose unity, rather there is a more complex relationship between the visual and sound: Deleuze considers that each medium expresses what was unable to be expressed by the other. In speaking of Duras's film India Song he also says that the visual and sound give different perspectives on a story, a story that can be infinitely both the same and different (329-35). This could be said of The Lover in the example above: two different recountings of the story are presented simultaneously, which has the effect of questioning notions of reality, truth, and history.
In discussing L'amant de la Chine du Nord, which contains cinematic elements, Bonnigal points out that Duras's separation of the audio/visual represents the separation of what is seen and what is heard with regard to the "I," thus conveying the subject's hybridity. Bonnigal also says that this cinematic device is reminiscent of the strategies of reappropriation and estrangement characteristic of colonial resistance to the presence of authority, an undoing of whole and coherent authority (7). The disruptive strategy allows the writer/filmmaker Duras to "expose, deconstruct and transcend the stereotypes and romanticizations that must be read as markers of an ideology (imperialist and patriarchal) against which [she] positions herself" (8). Bonnigal considers that Annaud's film has reduced Duras's work to stereotypes only, whereas Duras in fact uses stereotypes in order to transcend them. I contend, however, that in the film The Lover there are instances where Durassian techniques such as the audio/visual split save the film from total appropriation into commercial cinema and mainstream rhetoric.
A further unusual feature of the film that concerns the use of voiceover is the way the voiceover is integrated into dialogues of characters. Quite often the characters are conversing, the voiceover intervenes, and then the characters continue their conversation. In two cases a piece of information given by the narrator is inserted in the middle of a dialogue. The first example of this occurs during the first meeting of the girl and the Chinese man on the ferry; the voiceover gives background information on the newly introduced character, the Chinese man. The second example takes place during a discussion between the girl and the Chinese man in an outdoor restaurant. The voiceover intervenes in the conversation to give a general comment about the relationship: Chinese. She's the sole heiress. I'm the sole heir. The date has
been set for years. That's another reason I came back from France.
Girl. You love her?
Chinese. No, I don't know her. For us marriages are arranged by the
families.
Voiceover. We know that a future together is unthinkable. So we
speak of the future in a casual manner, without any involvement,
detached.
Chinese. And the two families get together to hide their wealth
away. It's so much in the customs of ancient or modern China. We
don't think we could do anything any other way.
More attention-catching and most unusual is when the shifts from dialogue participant to voiceover and back are rapid as in the following (see the section in bold) that comes from the first love-making scene. The startling effect here is that the girl stops talking, and the narrator becomes almost like a voice participating in a dialogue with the Chinese man:
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Girl. I want you to do as you usually do with other women.
Chinese. Is that what you want?
Girl. Yes.
Chinese. I know you'll never love me.
Girl. I don't know. I don't want you to talk.
Voiceover. He tore the dress off. He tore the little white cotton
underpants off. And he carried her like that naked to the bed.
Voiceover. Once on the bed.
Chinese. You're too little.
Voiceover. Fear overcomes him.
Chinese. I can't.
Voiceover. He says it's not true, that she's too little. That he
can't do such a thing. So [silence] So she's the one who does it.
Her eyes closed. She undresses him [...]
This quick exchange procedure is specific to filmic techniques and resources: it conveys heightened emotion. The voiceover narration also adds reflexive depth to emotional scenes. Another case occurs in a scene between the narrator and the family characters when the girl returns to her home, although this time the exchange is less rapid. The scene is confrontational between older brother Pierre, the mother, and the girl; Pierre and the mother show anger in their suspicion that the girl is having an affair with the Chinese man. The narrator's voice intervenes twice in the angry conversation, here using "I" as if to voice the inarticulate feelings and thoughts of the girl, and calmly stating that this family of ruin and shame, of hate and love is where the girl (I) feels the most deeply assured of herself.
The striking use of voiceover within dialogues together with the other unusual features and techniques relating to the voiceover reproduce characteristics of the book L'amant: the fluidity between or telescoping of self and other, past and present, the lack of clear boundaries and blocking together of contrasting elements (Ramsay 54). Furthermore, the voiceover brings a particular dimension to the film: the question of memory, commentary, and reflection, and thus greater richness and complexity. It is largely because of the voiceover technique and its ungrammaticalities that the film is saved from being totally realist and from denying self-reflexive elements.
As far as camera techniques are concerned, the most unusual aspect of the film concerns close-ups and extreme close-ups on several occasions. Near the start of the film when the girl is on the ferry, following the voiceover words: "Look at me. I'm 15 and a half," the camera moves to show artistic close-ups of the girl's plaited hair, mended dress neckline, and tatty sequined high-heeled shoes. Two scenes of extreme close-ups are particularly noticeable. At the very beginning of the film a microscopic moving view of skin with hairs becomes paper on which the writer is writing; and the final love scene is filmed with a whirl of extreme close-ups of parts of the body, including shots between the undulating stomachs of the lovers. In these scenes we no longer recognize the body as a distinct or whole entity, or two bodies as two separate entities. Here fragmentation and hybridity are valorized (mirroring the book L'amant) against the background of generally conventional cinematography in the rest of the film. In parallel to the book, unusual camera techniques draw attention to the materiality of the construction of a story.
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The different aspects of the film discussed above, namely the contrast of characters' and narrator's voices and language, the split between audio and visual, the indeterminacies of pronouns and mixture of verb tenses in the voiceover text, the merging of narration and characters' dialogue, and camera techniques that highlight fragmentation, all produce ungrammaticalities that can be understood in terms of the film's intertexts. Although the film is a response to dominant commercial and ideological pressures mentioned by Stam (69, 75), the moments of ungrammaticality challenge aesthetic (classic realist) and ideological (patriarchal and imperialist) mainstreaming in line with the book L'amant, which proves to be the determinate intertext. At these moments the interpretant, the link between film (text) and intertexts, is "modernist destabilization" (Riffaterre "La trace").
The case study of The Lover has shown that Riffaterre's notions of ungrammaticality and intertextuality are useful and enriching in examining a film adaptation. These notions have helped to achieve a deeper understanding of the film, whereas previous critics had overlooked subversive aspects created by the infiltration of intertextual traces into the film. In Riffaterrian terms, a second semiotic reading is necessary.
Siobhan Brownlie
The University of Manchester, England
Notes
(1) The genre of these works is not certain; they could be termed "autofictions" (Ramsay 38).
(2) Bonnigal considers that the cause of the "disfiguration" undertaken by the film is the commercial motivation of Hollywood-dominated cinema that has affected French cinema from the 1980s onwards (8). Stam says that the mainstreaming of works like L'amant stems from dominant cinema's "ideologically driven failure of nerve to deal with the aesthetic implications of novelistic modernism" (75).
(3) Annaud himself says that he was faithful to his personal understanding of the book and its themes: "Je ne dis pas que je suis reste fidele au roman, mais je pretends avoir ete fidele a la facon dont je l'ai recu" 'I don't say that I was faithful to the novel, I claim that I was faithful to the way I received it' (Alion 82).
(4) L'amant de la Chine du Nord is linear and non-digressive as compared with L'amant.
(5) The dialogues occasionally contain oddness in English expression with respect to interrogative forms, which could be explained as the result of literal translation from a French text, for example: "You're who?" (following the French "Vous etes qui?" (Duras, L 'amant de la Chine du Nord 37), "You love her?" 'And you?' In the voiceover narration there is also the use of "the sex" meaning "penis" (a literal translation from the French).
(6) In this case it is interesting to note that the rendering of the main sentence given in the published translation of the book is different from the screenplay, the screenplay text being closer to the original French. Here is the book translation: "I'm going to write. That's what I see beyond the present moment, in the great desert in whose form my life stretches out before me." (Duras, The Lover 103)
(7) Some may consider that the choice of actresses reveals simply a weakness in Annaud's directorial skills. My interest is in the effects of the contrasting voices, and not in Annaud's motivations or level of skill.
Works Cited
Adler, Laure. Marguerite Duras. Paris: Gallimard, 1998.
Alion, Yves. "Entretien avec Jean-Jacques Annaud." L'Avant-Scene Cinema. L'amant: Un film de Jean-Jacques Annaud 500 (2001): 79-84.
Allen, Graham. Intertextuality. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.
L'Avant-Scene Cinema. L'amant: Unfilm de Jean-Jacques Annaud 500, 2001.
Bonnigal, Dorothee. "Authoritative Appropriation or Authoritarian Containment? Western Patriarchy Revisiting Marguerite Duras's L'Amant." Romance Languages Annual 8 (1997): 5-10.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: L'image-temps. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1985.
Duras, Marguerite. L'Amant. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1984.
______. L'Amant de la Chine du Nord. Paris: Gallimard, 1991.
______. The Lover. Trans. Barbara Bray. First published 1985. New York: Pantheon, 1997.
The Lover. Dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud. Perf. Jane March and Tony Leung. Renn Productions, Burrill Productions, Films A2, 1991.
Ramsay, Raylene L. The French New Autobiographies: Sarraute, Duras, and Robbe-Grillet. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1996.
Randall, David. "Transcriptions--The Translation of Self-reflexive Fiction into Film: Marguerite Duras's The Lover." West Virginia University Philological Papers 45 (1999): 94-102.
Riffaterre, Michael. Semiotics of Poetry. Methuen: London, 1978.
______. "La trace de l'intertexte." La Pensee 204 (1980): 4-18.
Sankey, Margaret. "Time and Autobiography in L'Amant by Marguerite Duras." Australian Journal of French Studies 25.1 (1988): 58-70.
Stam, Robert. "Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation." Film Adaptation. Ed. James Naremore. London: Athlone, 2000. 54-76.
Brownlie, Siobhan
Source Citation
Brownlie, Siobhan. "Using Riffaterre to rehabilitate The Lover." Literature-Film Quarterly 36.1 (2008): 52+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 23 June 2010.
Using Riffaterre to rehabilitate The Lover
By Siobhan Brownlie
In this article I shall use Michael Riffaterre's theory of intertextuality to re-examine the film The Lover. The film has been widely seen as a seriously inadequate adaptation of Marguerite Duras's novel L'amant. I shall show, however, how certain Riffaterrian "ungrammaticalities" in the film, inconsistencies and unusual elements, can be understood as approximating the subtle complexity of the novel. Riffaterre's theory thus provides a new and interesting way of analyzing film adaptations.
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In the discussion of film adaptation the concept of "intertextuality" has served the useful purpose of transcending the moralistic statements often associated with "fidelity," although the latter notion remains important. Stam proposes the concept of "intertextual dialogism," whereby a film is conceived as a turn in an ongoing dialogical process such that it bears the traces of multiple intertexts (64). Film adaptation can be conceived as the reproduction and transformation of intertexts through various processes such as selection, amplification, popularization, and reculturalization. These processes are conditioned by the material and financial contingencies specific to cinema, and by ambient target culture discourses and ideology reflected in studio style, ideological fashion, political constraints, auteur's predilections, economic advantage, and evolving technology (Stam 68-69).
As compared with Stam's notion of dialogism that conceptualizes a simultaneity or forward movement of evolving texts, Riffaterre proposes a backward-looking search for intertexts for the purposes of elucidation. Riffaterre is well known for his detailed and perspicacious readings of poetry, and for a theoretical framework explaining his practice of reading that seems to have been elaborated independently from work by other theorists. For Riffaterre there are two stages of reading: the heuristic/referential stage producing meaning and the retroactive/hermeneutic stage producing significance. The text is first read in a linear fashion in which the referential or mimetic dominates. If there are aspects that do not fit a mimetic reading, a second reading is made to gain an understanding of non-referential aspects such as tropes, ambiguities, contradictions, and sound patterns that create meaning. The second semiotic reading elucidates what Riffaterre terms "ungrammaticalities," anything unusual (formal or semantic) or which does not fit mimesis, in particular ambiguities, contradictions, and indeterminacies. Ungrammaticalities are understood through reference to other texts, termed intertexts, which may be conventional forms and styles, cliches and formulae, fragments of texts or entire texts. For Riffaterre every ungrammaticality is a sign of grammaticality elsewhere: "the poetic sign has two faces: textually ungrammatical, intertextually grammatical; displaced and distorted in the mimesis system, but in the semiotic grid appropriate and rightly placed" (Semiotics 164).
For Riffaterre an intertext may be aleatory (the reader may or may not enrich his or her understanding by bringing intertextual knowledge to the reading) or determinate (there is an intertext that is signaled by ungrammaticality, and which is necessary for comprehension of the text). In the latter case the reader may not be knowledgeable of a specific intertext, but an intertext will be presupposed because of the deictic intertextual trace of ungrammaticality. There may be more than one pertinent intertext: overdetermination provides multiple motivations for words used. In connection with intertextuality, Riffaterre also takes up the Peircean notion of "interpretant" as a mediating sign that explains the relationship between two signs such as the text and the intertext. An example of an interpretant is the phoenix, the symbol of eternity (and thus potentially of prostitution) that evokes also flame and flight. This interpretant links Mallarme's text "Le Tom-beau de Charles Baudelaire" 'Charles Baudelaire's Tomb' to Baudelaire's "Crepuscule du soir" 'Evening Twilight' in the following passages: Il allume hagard un immortel pubis Dont le vol selon le reverbere decouche 'Gas lights up wildly an immortal pubes whose flight sweeps away from home following the street lamp' (Mallarme) and A travers les lueurs que tourmentent le vent la Prostitution s 'allume dans les rues 'Through the lights which the wind torments, Prostitution is lit up in the streets' (Baudelaire) (Riffaterre, "La trace").
There have been various criticisms of Riffaterre's theory of reading and intertextuality. In his discussion of the reading process Riffaterre does not take fully into account the issue of the readers' competence and background, which are multiple and varied. Individual readers bring various presuppositions to reading, and there is a dialectical relationship between text and reader. In Riffaterre the issue of interpretation is oversimplified: he tends to think that all can be elucidated in a univocal manner by reference to the pertinent intertext. He does not allow for multiple and open-ended interpretations of texts; indeterminacy cannot simply be "solved." The concepts of determinate and aleatory intertexts are therefore problematic (Allen 126-30). However, Riffaterre's concepts may be useful tools in examining film adaptations: despite the potential oversimplification, the double reading for mimesis and semiosis, as well as the procedure of intertextual elucidation, are worth exploring.
In my case study of the film The Lover by filmmaker Jean-Jacques Annaud and related texts, I apply Riffaterre's ideas on intertextuality. The starting point is the notion of an "ungrammaticality." In Riffaterrian terminology this term has a wide extension. I apply it to the film The Lover as an aspect that strikes the viewer as unusual or inexplicable. The next step is to survey the main texts pertinent to the film to be referred to for the purposes of elucidation. Potentially the main intertexts are the novel L'amant by Marguerite Duras, its translation The Lover, and a second novel (1) by Duras, L'amant de la Chine du Nord. It is not entirely clear on what exactly the film screenplay was based. According to Laure Adler's account, Duras wrote an initial screenplay, which was used by Jean-Jacques Annaud and scriptwriter Gerard Brach in conjunction with the novel L'amant to produce the final screenplay in French. Annaud apparently said that he was mostly inspired by the book (561-62). The filmed screenplay is in English; it is a translation by Eric Sterling Collins of the French script adaptation (Avant-Scene Cinema 5). It is not clear either whether the screenplay translator referred to the existing English translation of the book The Lover. Having withdrawn from the film project, Duras published L 'amant de la Chine du Nord, which is based on her initial screenplay. All the different versions recount the story of the affair between a poor adolescent French girl and a wealthy older Chinese man in Indochina of the early 1930s, inspired by Duras's own youthful experience.
Critics of the film would indicate that it contains in fact few "ungrammaticalities" as compared with Duras's novel, L'amant. The film has been dismissed as being conventional arty soft porn. A more serious criticism is that Annaud turned Duras's nouveau roman style text into a simple linear autobiographical account of a sexual encounter, which not only eliminates the rich modernist complexity of the novel, but recuperates the work into a patriarchal and imperialist ideology that is in contradiction with the novel. In Bonnigal's words: The reduction of L'amant to its carnality excises the novel's
intellectual content and debases Duras's text to conservative and
queasy erotica in which the postcolonial self is silenced and the
female subject is reappropriated and re-exposed to patriarchal
voyeurism. (9) (2)
Another critic Randall is particularly interested in the notion of voyeurism. He finds that Annaud's film panders to the scopophilic, coercing the male viewer into inhabiting a culturally conditioned desire for objectification and dominance. This contrasts with Duras's novel, which defeats the voyeuristic impulse by double-coding, combining the realist and romanticized paradigms with self-reflexive anti-illusionist strategies (101). Given that the film explicitly sets forth the notion that it represents Duras's work by means of an initial scene that depicts the writer writing the book, the charge of misrepresentation seems all the more important. (3)
In contrast to the usual reaction to The Lover, I contend that a close viewing of the film reveals ungrammaticalities that on the one hand can be understood through reference to intertexts following the Riffaterrian procedure, and on the other hand serve to undermine the criticisms of the film. It is true that the film revolves around the sexual encounter, although there are also references to the importance of another discovery for the girl: the fact that she wants to become a writer. It is true that the film is representational and in the main linear (apart from one flashback near the beginning to the girl's stay in Sadec), which contrasts greatly with the novel L'amant, remarkable for its discontinuity, digressions, and mixing of events in different time periods. (4) Ungrammaticalities can be considered, however, to upset a simple reading of the film. These ungrammaticalities concern primarily the role and nature of the narration/voiceover that is an important feature of the film. The voiceover is provided by an older actress who represents the girl of the story grown old, and who is reminiscing about her youth. In the following discussion I will consider first ungrammaticalities that clearly derive from, indeed are copied from the book, before examining aspects that are specific to the filmic medium.
The first feature of the film to be discussed is the discrepancy between the kind of language in the characters' dialogues and in the voiceover narration and commentary. The dialogues are simple and banal in their language; (5) whereas the voiceover is much more profound, providing insights into characters and situations, and it has a particular poetic quality with repetitions, and some unusual imagery and vocabulary. Here is a short example of voiceover narration: [...] To write, that's what I see beyond the moment in that great
desert under the features of which I see the extent of my life [...]
The nature of the voiceover narration is elucidated by reference to one of the principal intertexts, the book L'amant. The narration consists primarily of an English rendering of parts of the French novel, and it is the striking style of the novel that is conveyed. Here is the corresponding passage to the above in the novel: Je vais ecrire des livres. C'est ce que je vois au-dela de
l'instant, dans le grand desert sous les traits duquel m'apparait
l'etendue de ma vie. (Duras, L'amant 126) (6)
Annaud explains that he deliberately used Duras's text in the voiceover, not only in order to be "faithful" to the literariness of the book, but also to distance himself at times from the generally over-riding filmic concreteness of the event, spoken dialogue, and the image by giving way to the alienated abstractness, the music, and pleasure of written words in the voiceover text (Alion 82).
A noticeable aspect of the voiceover narration is the shifting between first-person and third-person reference to the girl. Initially the first-person pronoun is used: "At 18 I aged [...] Look at me. I'm 15 and a half. It's the crossing of the river. When I go back to Saigon, it's as though I'm on a journey [...]." Then there is a switch to the third person: "He came that Thursday afternoon to the boarding house. He came to wait for her with the big black car" (my emphasis). In the recounting of the first love scene the third person for the girl is continued: "She touches the softness of the sex, of the skin, she caresses the gold hue, the unknown novelty [...]." However, shortly after the first love-making the first person is reverted to: "I had asked him to do it again and again, to do it to me." Sometimes there is a quick change between first person and third. In the following quotation from the narration, the first person "we" is used, then the girl is referred to as "the little one": We are lovers. Every day we go back to the bachelor's room. We can't
stop loving. This takes place in the sleazy district of Cholon every
evening. Every evening the little one comes to receive the pleasure
that makes one scream, from this dark man, this man from Cholon,
from China.
The first person is reverted to in the narration about the girl's family: "Now and then, I go back to the house in Sadec, to the horror of the house in Sadec [...]," and in following scenes of the family's meal at the restaurant with the Chinese man, the headmistress's meeting with the mother, and the scene at the beach between the girl and the Chinese man. However, at the end of the film the third person is adopted to recount the scene on the boat departing for France: "It was when the boat uttered its first farewell and the gangway had been hauled up [...] that she had wept." The third person used at this point for both main characters in the film gives a striking depiction, a portrait, of their final contact that unifies the film by mirroring their very first meeting: She was leaning on the railing like the first time on the ferry. She
knew he was watching her, she was watching him too [...]
The third person is continued for the rest of the film, during the boat trip when the girl realizes that she may have loved the Chinese man, and in recounting how years later he had phoned her in Paris. At this point the narrator/writer could be close to the age of the character, and thus it is surprising that the third person is used.
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As well as the shifts between first person and third person in the voiceover, there is ambiguity with regard to the first person. Sometimes "I" clearly refers to the young girl, whereas sometimes "I" refers to the narrator; at times the reference could be to both. Within the same passage there may be a shift from one to the other, as in the following: I still see the place of distress, shipwrecked, the distempered
walls, the slatted shutters giving onto the furnace, the soiling of
the blood. I remember well, the room is dark, it's surrounded by the
never-ending clamour of the town [...] my body was in that public
noise, this passing-by from the outside, exposed. The sea, I
thought, the immensity.
The first "I" in "I still see" is the narrator, the old woman, who is reminiscing; similarly "I remember well." The phrase "my body" is ambiguous given the previous uses of "I" for the narrator: is she thinking of her body when she was a young girl, or is she thinking of her body as an entity unchanging over time in its essence? This ambiguity acts as a transition to the final "I" in "I thought," which refers to the young girl, and her thoughts at that moment.
The uses of the pronouns in the film voiceover text constitute ungrammaticalities in the form of unusual use and indeterminacy. These ungrammaticalities can be understood with reference to the text of L'amant. The exact same features are present in the book, where they form an idiosyncratic use and have a specific significance: the concept of a coherent single self is challenged, and the reader/viewer is made to accept multiplicity, non-exclusive contradiction and uncertainty, and is invited to participate in the production of identity and meaning (Ramsay 34). Randall considers that the book L'amant "destructures" the voyeuristic impulse since the vacillating first- and third-person narrative perspectives impede the socially imposed imperative to forget the fiction's artifice. He argues, on the other hand, that the film's "rapacious scenes of simulated seduction, copulation, and prostitution coerce the male viewer into voyeuristic objectification" (101). We have seen, however, that the film too contains some oscillation between first and third person, and therefore at times highlights the nature of film as a construction and positioning entity. Just as in the book, the shift to third person highlights self-reflexivity and the girl/narrator taking charge, observing herself and others, inviting others to observe her, observing others observing her, and therefore undoing surreptitious voyeurism of viewers: the girl is not simply a passive object for the secretive male gaze.
Another unusual linguistic feature of the voiceover text is the mixture of verb tenses. The story is narrated using variously present tenses, preterit tense, and past perfect tense. Sometimes changes between tenses occur rapidly within the same section of narration. Here are some examples of the different tenses:
So that day I'm going back to Saigon. I'm wearing my Cavery shoes and my man's hat [...] He came that Thursday afternoon to the boarding house. He came to wait for her with the big black car [...] Now and then I go back to the house in Sadec, to the horror of the house in Sadec [...] She had wept because she had thought of that man from Cholon, her lover, and suddenly she wasn't sure of not having loved him with a love she hadn't seen because it had lost itself in the story [...]
This tense variation can be elucidated by reference to L'amant, which contains an analogous mixture. The shifting of time/tense reflects the shifting multiple points of view of a narrator who is omniscient but also has a point of view situated in the time that the writing and the evocation of the emotion of the writing is creating (Ramsay 41). Past and present do not belong to a continuum, but confront each other in various ways in the person of the narrator. It is the interplay of images of the self, rather than development through time, which characterizes the narrative procedure in L 'amant (Sankey 63). Tense also inscribes emotional intensity in several ways: the eternal time-lessness of the present tense in the description of the primal scene of the meeting of the girl and the Chinese man on the ferry; and the brutal breaking of the circuit of desiring and being desired by the distancing of the past perfect tense at the end of the book/film (Sankey 64, 66).
Having discussed unusual aspects of the voiceover that can be traced directly to the text L'amant, I shall now examine ungrammaticalities that involve specificities of the filmic medium. The voiceover is provided by the alluring voice of Jeanne Moreau, representing the girl of the story grown old. The girl played by Jane March has a British accent, and it is inconceivable in the real world that her accent could change into Jeanne Moreau's French-American accent when she is older. Furthermore Jeanne Moreau is a very accomplished actress, whereas Jane March's acting leaves much to be desired; this is reflected in delivery of words encompassing prosodic features such as intonation, rhythm, and pauses. The effect of the discrepancy between the two voices can be interpreted and understood in relation to the book L'amant. (7) As mentioned earlier with reference to pronoun usage in the voiceover, the notion of unified self is questioned in the book, and a confused and multiple self posited through diverse linguistic and compositional means. The film, a different semiotic medium with different resources at its disposal, can use sound in the form of two different accents and delivery for one character in order to effect this same questioning. In L 'amant there is also a questioning of the certainty of events and of linear time (partly through use of verb tenses, as discussed above): the simultaneous presence of the starkly contrasting young girl's and older woman's voices in the film emphasizes the bringing together of the present and the past, of events and memories/recountings/reconstruction of events--the (im)possibility of recovering the past self through the present self (Ramsay 27).
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The narrator's words serve to reinforce the action or scene on screen, adding a verbal poetic description to the image, or giving background information or a character's thoughts. However, there is quite often a discrepancy between what is being shown on the screen and the narrator's words. This can be a minor discrepancy, such as the narrator recounting a generalization whereas the scene depicts a particular instance. An example of both particularity and generalization in the narration concerns the ferry scene when the girl and the Chinese man first meet. The narrator says "It's the crossing of the river [...] That day it's the end of the school holidays, I don't remember which one." This is a very particular and special day shown on screen and narrated as "that day," but there is also generalization in the narration with regard to the return from the school holidays: the repetitiveness of the event is such that the narrator does not remember at the end of which particular holiday the meeting took place. Noticeable too are instances when the narrator starts to recount something before it is shown on the screen; or conversely the narrator recounts information relevant to a previous scene when a new scene has started. In this way the voiceover creates links between images and scenes, and upsets strictly linear time by telescoping present and past, or present and future. An example of the latter is when the two girls are dancing in the dormitory, and the voiceover starts to recount that the Chinese man came to pick up the girl that day, before the Chinese man's car is shown on the screen. Telescoping of scenes and of time is a feature of the book L'amant.
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The most striking discrepancy between voiceover and image is at the beginning of the first love scene in the bachelor's room. The Chinese man is sitting down; the girl is standing facing him; the camera is behind the girl; the man slowly lowers the straps of her dress, we see the top of her bare back. The voiceover during this scene is the following: He tore the dress off, he tore the little white cotton underpants
off, and he carried her like that naked to the bed.
These words are translated from the book L'amant. For a film that has been accused of being soft porn, it is interesting that a visual representation of the words is refrained from. There is a clear division between the audio and the visual. This kind of discrepancy or ungrammaticality can be understood by referring to an intertext not yet mentioned, the films that Duras directed herself. The audio/visual split is a technique much exploited by Duras, the filmmaker. Deleuze discusses this characteristic of Duras's films in which the visual and sound present two autonomous images, constantly separated, disassociated, non-totalizable but irrationally linked. The film does not lose unity, rather there is a more complex relationship between the visual and sound: Deleuze considers that each medium expresses what was unable to be expressed by the other. In speaking of Duras's film India Song he also says that the visual and sound give different perspectives on a story, a story that can be infinitely both the same and different (329-35). This could be said of The Lover in the example above: two different recountings of the story are presented simultaneously, which has the effect of questioning notions of reality, truth, and history.
In discussing L'amant de la Chine du Nord, which contains cinematic elements, Bonnigal points out that Duras's separation of the audio/visual represents the separation of what is seen and what is heard with regard to the "I," thus conveying the subject's hybridity. Bonnigal also says that this cinematic device is reminiscent of the strategies of reappropriation and estrangement characteristic of colonial resistance to the presence of authority, an undoing of whole and coherent authority (7). The disruptive strategy allows the writer/filmmaker Duras to "expose, deconstruct and transcend the stereotypes and romanticizations that must be read as markers of an ideology (imperialist and patriarchal) against which [she] positions herself" (8). Bonnigal considers that Annaud's film has reduced Duras's work to stereotypes only, whereas Duras in fact uses stereotypes in order to transcend them. I contend, however, that in the film The Lover there are instances where Durassian techniques such as the audio/visual split save the film from total appropriation into commercial cinema and mainstream rhetoric.
A further unusual feature of the film that concerns the use of voiceover is the way the voiceover is integrated into dialogues of characters. Quite often the characters are conversing, the voiceover intervenes, and then the characters continue their conversation. In two cases a piece of information given by the narrator is inserted in the middle of a dialogue. The first example of this occurs during the first meeting of the girl and the Chinese man on the ferry; the voiceover gives background information on the newly introduced character, the Chinese man. The second example takes place during a discussion between the girl and the Chinese man in an outdoor restaurant. The voiceover intervenes in the conversation to give a general comment about the relationship: Chinese. She's the sole heiress. I'm the sole heir. The date has
been set for years. That's another reason I came back from France.
Girl. You love her?
Chinese. No, I don't know her. For us marriages are arranged by the
families.
Voiceover. We know that a future together is unthinkable. So we
speak of the future in a casual manner, without any involvement,
detached.
Chinese. And the two families get together to hide their wealth
away. It's so much in the customs of ancient or modern China. We
don't think we could do anything any other way.
More attention-catching and most unusual is when the shifts from dialogue participant to voiceover and back are rapid as in the following (see the section in bold) that comes from the first love-making scene. The startling effect here is that the girl stops talking, and the narrator becomes almost like a voice participating in a dialogue with the Chinese man:
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Girl. I want you to do as you usually do with other women.
Chinese. Is that what you want?
Girl. Yes.
Chinese. I know you'll never love me.
Girl. I don't know. I don't want you to talk.
Voiceover. He tore the dress off. He tore the little white cotton
underpants off. And he carried her like that naked to the bed.
Voiceover. Once on the bed.
Chinese. You're too little.
Voiceover. Fear overcomes him.
Chinese. I can't.
Voiceover. He says it's not true, that she's too little. That he
can't do such a thing. So [silence] So she's the one who does it.
Her eyes closed. She undresses him [...]
This quick exchange procedure is specific to filmic techniques and resources: it conveys heightened emotion. The voiceover narration also adds reflexive depth to emotional scenes. Another case occurs in a scene between the narrator and the family characters when the girl returns to her home, although this time the exchange is less rapid. The scene is confrontational between older brother Pierre, the mother, and the girl; Pierre and the mother show anger in their suspicion that the girl is having an affair with the Chinese man. The narrator's voice intervenes twice in the angry conversation, here using "I" as if to voice the inarticulate feelings and thoughts of the girl, and calmly stating that this family of ruin and shame, of hate and love is where the girl (I) feels the most deeply assured of herself.
The striking use of voiceover within dialogues together with the other unusual features and techniques relating to the voiceover reproduce characteristics of the book L'amant: the fluidity between or telescoping of self and other, past and present, the lack of clear boundaries and blocking together of contrasting elements (Ramsay 54). Furthermore, the voiceover brings a particular dimension to the film: the question of memory, commentary, and reflection, and thus greater richness and complexity. It is largely because of the voiceover technique and its ungrammaticalities that the film is saved from being totally realist and from denying self-reflexive elements.
As far as camera techniques are concerned, the most unusual aspect of the film concerns close-ups and extreme close-ups on several occasions. Near the start of the film when the girl is on the ferry, following the voiceover words: "Look at me. I'm 15 and a half," the camera moves to show artistic close-ups of the girl's plaited hair, mended dress neckline, and tatty sequined high-heeled shoes. Two scenes of extreme close-ups are particularly noticeable. At the very beginning of the film a microscopic moving view of skin with hairs becomes paper on which the writer is writing; and the final love scene is filmed with a whirl of extreme close-ups of parts of the body, including shots between the undulating stomachs of the lovers. In these scenes we no longer recognize the body as a distinct or whole entity, or two bodies as two separate entities. Here fragmentation and hybridity are valorized (mirroring the book L'amant) against the background of generally conventional cinematography in the rest of the film. In parallel to the book, unusual camera techniques draw attention to the materiality of the construction of a story.
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The different aspects of the film discussed above, namely the contrast of characters' and narrator's voices and language, the split between audio and visual, the indeterminacies of pronouns and mixture of verb tenses in the voiceover text, the merging of narration and characters' dialogue, and camera techniques that highlight fragmentation, all produce ungrammaticalities that can be understood in terms of the film's intertexts. Although the film is a response to dominant commercial and ideological pressures mentioned by Stam (69, 75), the moments of ungrammaticality challenge aesthetic (classic realist) and ideological (patriarchal and imperialist) mainstreaming in line with the book L'amant, which proves to be the determinate intertext. At these moments the interpretant, the link between film (text) and intertexts, is "modernist destabilization" (Riffaterre "La trace").
The case study of The Lover has shown that Riffaterre's notions of ungrammaticality and intertextuality are useful and enriching in examining a film adaptation. These notions have helped to achieve a deeper understanding of the film, whereas previous critics had overlooked subversive aspects created by the infiltration of intertextual traces into the film. In Riffaterrian terms, a second semiotic reading is necessary.
Siobhan Brownlie
The University of Manchester, England
Notes
(1) The genre of these works is not certain; they could be termed "autofictions" (Ramsay 38).
(2) Bonnigal considers that the cause of the "disfiguration" undertaken by the film is the commercial motivation of Hollywood-dominated cinema that has affected French cinema from the 1980s onwards (8). Stam says that the mainstreaming of works like L'amant stems from dominant cinema's "ideologically driven failure of nerve to deal with the aesthetic implications of novelistic modernism" (75).
(3) Annaud himself says that he was faithful to his personal understanding of the book and its themes: "Je ne dis pas que je suis reste fidele au roman, mais je pretends avoir ete fidele a la facon dont je l'ai recu" 'I don't say that I was faithful to the novel, I claim that I was faithful to the way I received it' (Alion 82).
(4) L'amant de la Chine du Nord is linear and non-digressive as compared with L'amant.
(5) The dialogues occasionally contain oddness in English expression with respect to interrogative forms, which could be explained as the result of literal translation from a French text, for example: "You're who?" (following the French "Vous etes qui?" (Duras, L 'amant de la Chine du Nord 37), "You love her?" 'And you?' In the voiceover narration there is also the use of "the sex" meaning "penis" (a literal translation from the French).
(6) In this case it is interesting to note that the rendering of the main sentence given in the published translation of the book is different from the screenplay, the screenplay text being closer to the original French. Here is the book translation: "I'm going to write. That's what I see beyond the present moment, in the great desert in whose form my life stretches out before me." (Duras, The Lover 103)
(7) Some may consider that the choice of actresses reveals simply a weakness in Annaud's directorial skills. My interest is in the effects of the contrasting voices, and not in Annaud's motivations or level of skill.
Works Cited
Adler, Laure. Marguerite Duras. Paris: Gallimard, 1998.
Alion, Yves. "Entretien avec Jean-Jacques Annaud." L'Avant-Scene Cinema. L'amant: Un film de Jean-Jacques Annaud 500 (2001): 79-84.
Allen, Graham. Intertextuality. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.
L'Avant-Scene Cinema. L'amant: Unfilm de Jean-Jacques Annaud 500, 2001.
Bonnigal, Dorothee. "Authoritative Appropriation or Authoritarian Containment? Western Patriarchy Revisiting Marguerite Duras's L'Amant." Romance Languages Annual 8 (1997): 5-10.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: L'image-temps. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1985.
Duras, Marguerite. L'Amant. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1984.
______. L'Amant de la Chine du Nord. Paris: Gallimard, 1991.
______. The Lover. Trans. Barbara Bray. First published 1985. New York: Pantheon, 1997.
The Lover. Dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud. Perf. Jane March and Tony Leung. Renn Productions, Burrill Productions, Films A2, 1991.
Ramsay, Raylene L. The French New Autobiographies: Sarraute, Duras, and Robbe-Grillet. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1996.
Randall, David. "Transcriptions--The Translation of Self-reflexive Fiction into Film: Marguerite Duras's The Lover." West Virginia University Philological Papers 45 (1999): 94-102.
Riffaterre, Michael. Semiotics of Poetry. Methuen: London, 1978.
______. "La trace de l'intertexte." La Pensee 204 (1980): 4-18.
Sankey, Margaret. "Time and Autobiography in L'Amant by Marguerite Duras." Australian Journal of French Studies 25.1 (1988): 58-70.
Stam, Robert. "Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation." Film Adaptation. Ed. James Naremore. London: Athlone, 2000. 54-76.
Brownlie, Siobhan
Source Citation
Brownlie, Siobhan. "Using Riffaterre to rehabilitate The Lover." Literature-Film Quarterly 36.1 (2008): 52+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 23 June 2010.
The Second Resource ---------Good Resource and Help Me to Read
This is a good second resource and it is very helpful for me to read the novel..
"Coming into being": mourning, adolescence and creativity in Duras's The Lover
By Laurie Vickroy
Marguerite Duras's The Lover, a fictionalized memoir of her troubled adolescence in Indochina, is narrated from the points of view of age and youth. Though the "older" voice gives perspective and shapes the representation of the youthful self, this is not simply a dialogue or contrast between youth and age. They are intertwined in ways that suggest equally that as the artist recreates the teen Duras, the latter has given birth to the voice of the artist. The novel chronicles loss [of family, innocence, a great love), mourning and discovery. Her recreation of what she has lost with frequent references to death suggest a process of remembering and mourning in her writing. Psychoanalyst Henry Krystal describes adolescence as a transition into adulthood and a time when an individual develops the ability to grieve (63). In this portrait of her development as an adolescent, Duras chronicles her growing capacity to grieve as she tells of individuating herself from her anguished family. Her increased independence coincides with discovering she wants to be a writer, a vocation which provides her the means to frequently revisit this period of trauma and loss in her oeuvre. (1) Though a time of loss, Duras also recreates it as the original context for developing her creative imagination, her ability to relate to others outside her family, and to experience differentiation and sexuality, which all help her transition towards an adult identity. This essay explores the ways Duras's narrative voices reveal or enact the process of growth and mourning and how these concepts are inextricably bound together and mutually generating in her text.
When Duras set out to write The Lover in 1983, she was recovering from a near brush with death. She had been an alcoholic most of her life, and it began to imperil her health. She was hospitalized, and with the help of her close companion, Yann Andrea, she stopped drinking and recovered for a time. At this point she was almost 70 years old and would live another twelve years (until 1996) and write some of her most recognized work. In interviews late in her career (1970s and 1980s) she expressed a need to connect with her audience, and a need to risk exposing intimate details of her life to establish this connection and further motivate her writing (Armel 70, 92, 94). The Lover itself provides clues as to the urgency of her purpose in its writing. She, as narrator, says previously she has suppressed her past. "I've written a good deal about the members of my family, but then they were still alive, my mother and my brothers. And I skirted around them, skirted around all these things without really tackling them.... Before I spoke of clear periods, those on which the light fell. Now I'm talking about the hidden stretches of that same youth, of certain facts, feelings, events that I buried" (7-8). One senses a need to explore this territory again, better equipped with the will, the insight and writing skills than what she had in earlier narratives like The Sea Wall. Her elder narrative perspective provides psychological consequences the younger could not know--the link between her love for her family and for her lover, for instance. She also gives readers a sense that this past still continues to rule her life and will probably not be fully resolved.
In the books I've written about my childhood ... I wrote about ... our love for one another, and our terrible hatred too, in that common family history of ruin and death which was ours whatever happened, in love or in hate, and which I still can't understand however hard I try, which is still beyond my reach, hidden in the very depths of my flesh, blind as a newborn child.... I'm still there watching those possessed children, as far away from the mystery now as I was then. I've never written, I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door. (25)
Her art and her life are bound to her experiences in this family, long dead, that she is still trying to understand
The context of trauma from which this story has been told, and Duras's obsessive returns to it throughout her work, underlie her incorporation of the responses of spliting and self-numbing into her narrative, reflecting the trauma survivor's struggle "with how to cohere and how to absorb and in some measure confront what one as had thrust upon one, what one has been exposed to" (Lifton 163-64). As Suzette Henke has observed about many women's contemporary autobiographies, Duras may have felt compelled to reconstruct and reassess the past and reinvent the self in narrative. Further, the narrative of The Lover recreates the sense of dislocation inherent to traumatic experience Which resists, direct access to memory of it (Caruth Unclaimed 8) through a creation of present and past selves which are simultaneously, split and connected. Duras structures her narrative in a non-linear way: in fragments that represent memories of particular moments, partial portraits of herself and others, or as needed information offered to the reader to clarify, chronology as her narrative shifts frequently between past and present. She is retelling part of her youth from the distance of old age. More importantly, these kinds of fragments are recreations of the uncertainties and gaps in traumatic memory. She uses particular foci, a face, an image, or a feeling, to provide connections between the pieces, so that the text does not read like random thoughts, but the connections are implicit from the artist's point of view and imagination.
Object relations theorists who look at the origins and purposes of art discuss its value in seeking the reparation of lost objects, in externalizing the internal world of the artist, and in articulating contemplation and mourning. (2) One mark of human development is the ability to live in a world of symbols apart from ourselves. Melanie Klein believed that learning symbolic representations included finding substitutions for primary love objects or other losses in symbols which also represent creative expressiveness and a defense against anxiety (Hinshelwood 450). Hanna Segal posits that artists "create a world [in their art].... The creation of this inner world ... is unconsciously also a recreation of a lost world" (86-87). Such reparation gives rise to aesthetically beautiful art which may help the individual adapt to reality, and may ease the dread of loss, or enable separation (Segal 94-96). Duras simultaneously mourns what is lost and shows us the creation of her life as a writer which will help her recover fragments of that lost past in ways that are symbolically meaningful to herself rather than factually accurate.
Duras bears witness to the pain and suffering of her family in Indochina in the 1920s and 1930s in The Lover. She mourns their physical deaths prematurely in a sense because for her the colonial exploitation her mother underwent and the subsequent psychological disintegration of the family were the most powerful, if symbolic, deaths for her. A family turned to "stone" because of the mother's constant defeats (cheated by officials, given land washed yearly by the sea, failed attempts to build sea walls) and her consequent failure to nurture her children. Duras focuses on when when they were most reduced to poverty (relative to other colonials, but not natives), locked in shame and self hatred such that they consider it demeaning to show feeling or to engage in life. All family members suffer emotional abandonment. The older brother seeks substitutes in dominating the family (which the mother allows), in opium addiction and petty tyranny. His violence detroys the younger brother's psyche so utterly that the older brother for Duras becomes a symbol of destruction and death, even of war. She resists destructive powers that crush the innocent by bearing witness to his cruelty and her other brother's pain. Family relations become bound up with a modern critique of colonialism and other forms of oppression. She bears the responsibility of the survivor, the only one of the family left to acknowledge their existence and suffering. Carrying out this responsibility "has enormous therapeutic value" (Lifton 138) offering Duras some conselation but also may serve readers in working through the relationship between individual and oppressive forces.
Loss and attempts at reparation are key themes of the novel and of the adolescent Duras's life as she seeks a substitute for lost nurturance in her Chinese lover. Though their relations are characterized by an intense sexual vitality and he is a source of emotional comfort, bearing witness to her pain, this relationship is also emotionally mired in her continuing attachment to her family. This connection carries on fears of abandonment and disintegration. She tells her lover she continues to fear for her mother and feels powerless to help her. Her relation to the fictional lover (and even moreso Duras's actual lover) was predicated on financial gain (Adler 57). Further, the couple come to relize there is no future for them, largely because of racial and class differences, expressed most strongly by her family and his father. Faltering between possibility and doom, guilt and obsession, Duras's description of their relationship is permeated with imagery and symbols that combine life and death elements.
The connections between death and "symbolization"--that is, articulating one's inner world--as theorized by Robert Lifton, are evidenced in Duras's novel. This struggle is associated with the voice of the mature writer. Lifton posits that symbolization replaces instinct, and thus takes on the struggle for vitality, and ultimately, for symbolic immortality" (134). The life/death interaction infuses her work for a number of reasons: it indicates an act of mourning, a way of remembering her now dead family, and a way of recounting traumatic experiences which bring their own connections to death or death-equivalent experience (speaking in emotional terms) such as "separation and fear of disintegration" and emotional deadness (Lifton 134). Such experiences are "precursors of imagery and symbolization" according to Lifton, who concludes that "in the end, imagery, symbolization, and meaning are in a life-death model or paradigm" (134).
Trauma involves the unconscious struggle to confront things "thrust upon" you and this confrontation with traumatic events and even death is never absolute, rather "it's always a mixture of how much you can take in and how much you keep out" (136). Duras represents this mixture in the doubling of herself in the narrative between she/I, and in the emotional shifts between defensive numbing and passion in the girl, as she sometimes calls herself. (3) Emotional numbing often impairs symbolization, contributing to the emotional stasis of the most severely traumatized. Duras demonstrates how as a girl she must reach out of the destructive and stagnant mindset of her family and overcome numbing by finding means to reconnect with emotions and expression. This process begins with discovering her sexuality, which offers new possibilities of being, described in the image of herself dressed androgynously and seductively. Her sexuality (and economic need) leads in turn to her taking a lover with whom, fortunately, she can talk and reveal her pain. Finally, these changes seem to happen along with her discovery she wants to be a writer. Duras's own attempts to write are well underway by the time she is 17 (Adler 69). These all become part of individuating from her family's entrenched ways of being and perceptions which "have to be shattered for there to be new insight" (Lifton 134). Duras's writing creates a new imagery of fluidity and discovery to replace the static and dishonest family portraits of her mother's posed photos. (4)
The struggles between past and future, old and new expression, and stasis and discovery, are enacted in Duras's interconnected life/death imagery. As her birth family has been associated largely with death and disintegration, her clandestine life with her lover is portrayed as a passionate embrace of sexuality, potential and quasi-parental nurturing. These life force: aspects are counterbalanced by a complex array of death symbolism. The older Duras's narrative voice brings with it knowledge of mortality, of loss and doom. However, there is also the suggestion that the writing, the work of art, reaches beyond the limitations of death (in a later work, The North China Lover, she says to her lover that books will live on after them). Death is the finishing point between the two lovers (her lover states many years later that he will love her "until death"--the last words of the novel), but their memory recreated through narrative art can endure beyond death. They love or experience pleasure frequently "unto death" (43, 74, 83). The expression "unto death" implies both in English and French an act of excess and repetition, a symbol of the absolute limits to which physical connection can be taken. It seems also to become that final reality that everyone ultimately comes up against, except the artist has another option, recreation in a form that reaches beyond death.
There are several further references to death in relation to their situation. As they know they are near the end of their relationship (his father will not let them marry, she will return to France) the lowers' pleasure becomes" `inconsolable." The lovers' rendez-vous apartment, where she has also lost her innocence, becomes increasingly "a place that's intolerable, bordering on death, a place of violence, pain, despair, and dishonor" (75). Comparing herself with other women in the colonies who have taken forbidden lovers, they experience a "hankering for death," that is, seek oblivion in love, a pleasure born of what is not tolerated. Death becomes a symbol of freedom from social constraints and a measure of passion. Moeeover, the elder Duras describes her younger body as "not finished ... continually coming into being ... stretching beyond sight, toward risk, toward death, it's nimble, it launches itself wholly into pleasure as if it were grown up, adult ..." (99). Here she describes her body as projecting itself into the future, behaving beyond limitations. Her body's potential staves off conventional identity, determinism, even challenging death. Her body is a place of change and growth that ,more positively captures the flux of life before dissolution and death, the situation of adolescence, embodyihg the potential for growth, connection and creativity (and death--eventually).
Since it is in this changing body that she discovers her need to be a writer, Duras thus evokes connections between her body, her creativity, sexuality, power, intelligence, love and separation. As the elder Duras looks back to her younger self, her youthful viltality becomes the point of entry into the quest for symbolic immortality.
To understand the importance of adolescent identity portrayed by Duras, we must look at the story she continues to tell and consider the context in which the story is told. Duras speaks as a girl on the edge of adolescence. Developmentally, adolescence is a period of incredible change and growth as young adults experience sexual maturity, withdraw from adult protection, and re-evaluate their values. Also, during this time adolescents begin to clarify consciousness of self, both personally and within social interactions. "It is a time when personal meaning is defined by social experiences. The young person defines for herself what she is experiencing in her relationships with others and her world" (Konopka 7). Due to the powerful social and cultural effects on developing adolescents, we must not only look at the identity or voice of the young adult, but the sound and position from which the voice is spoken. Michelle Fine and Pat MacPherson, reiterating the work of Valerie Walkerdine, refer to this adolescent occurrence as the "negotiation of multiple selves" (Johnson, Roberts, and Worrell 11). This "negotiation" occurs when adolescent females must learn to place themselves within different contexts and discover identity through different experiences and different people. These contexts are "not just settings or doings or relationships; contexts are within the self and outside the self" (11). According to this theory, questions about identity, such as "Who am I?" expand to include details from the surrounding situations and developmental experiences.
Throughout The Lover, Duras's voice is resolute and dynamic, spoken and silent, childlike and mature. Like the often contradictory and continually evolving voices of adolescence, Duras's voice reflects herself and the context from which she speaks. Typical of adolescence, this identity is mutable and unpredictable. Duras writes, "What I want to seem I do seem ... I can become anything anyone wants me to be. And believe it" (Duras 18). According to Lyn Brown and Carol Gilligan, "... the sounds of one's voice changes in resonance depending on the relational acoustics: whether one is heard or not heard, how one is responded to (by oneself and by, other people)" (20). The dynamic nature of the adolescent voice in The Lover mirrors the very, essence of adolescent development. As Duras relives her experiences during the transition from childhood to adulthood, she captures the passion and intensity of adolescent experience. Further, as she begins to develop her voice as a writer, she uses this talent as another method to explore her identity. She realizes the power of the written word to create multiple selves possessing infinite interpretations. Her changing identity gives her a voice, a connection between her family, her lover. the environment, and a reaction against the silence of the family. Duras writes, "Suddenly it's deliberate. Suddenly I see myself as another, as another would be seen, outside myself, available to all, available to all eyes ..." (13). As Duras continues to recreate herself with contingens upon different relationship and situations, her narrative style reflects her development. As the adolescent Duras deliberately creates an identity based on her surroundings, she learns her writing can undergo similar mutations. This portion of the study will examine the position of the adolescent voice within the text and an examination of the relationship between Duras's development as a writer and as a woman.
One consideration in understanding Duras's adolescent experience is the sound and position of her voice within the novel. Through an examination of the perspective of the story told, the listener can begin to position the speaker/ writer within the story. Largely narrated in first-person, The Lover slips occasionally into a distanced third-person narration. Interestingly, this shift occurs frequently in the scenes exploring sexual awakening with the lover from Cholen. For example, "She doesn't look him in the face," and, "She touches him. Touches the softness of his sex, his skin ..." (38). The shifts between first-and third-person seem not to follow any particular narrative pattern, and certainly do not distinguish between the speaker of the past and the Duras of the present. "For the narrative ... is written predominantly in the present tense (regardless of the particular time period being evoked) and with a high degree of vividness and immediacy that effectively erases the very distinction between past and present" (Morgan 273). Some readers feel that the inclusion of the third-person perspective is meant to interrupt autobiography with a convention of fiction, "that is Duras, the public figure and author narrating, becomes Duras, a literary character, narrated in her own story" (273). While some critics suspect Duras of purposeful evasion, this narrative split lends authenticity to the narrative. The narrator is both a participant in and an observer of her development. The distance of the third-person narration and intimacy of first-person create an authentic tension: that of a girl discovering and being discovered, loving and being loved, taking and being taken. Duras portrays herself, even as a teenager, as someone reliving, recreating, and revising her experiences both as a first-person participant and a third-person observer.
After an examination of the perspective of Duras's adolescent voice, a study of the context from which the voice rises is useful. Adolescents develop most of their values and ideas--their identities--from various sources, such as families, peers, teachers, ethnic cultures, and spiritual structures (Johnson, Roberts, Worell 11). Further, "... although strains may emerge in the relationship of the teen with the family, family dynamics and interaction, including parenting style, remain major influences in an adolescent's development of identities" (11). According to the National Longitudenal Study on Adolescent Health, one of the key contributors to adolescent health is family connectivity. Therefore, examining the context of family is important for understanding the voice of adolescent girls.
Tangled in a web of abuse, suffering, and poverty, the interplay between the members of the Duras family has an undeniable and immeasurable effect on the narrator. While The Lover is primarily a novel about a young girl's relationship with an older lover, with the development of the doomed affair Duras begins to contemplate her familial relationships. She realizes that she shares a bond with her siblings, a bond forged by dysfunction and shared despair, "We're united in a fundamental shame at having to live. It's here we are at the heart of our common fate, the fact that all three of us are our mother's children ..." (55). She recognizes the ambivalence she feels for her sociopathic older brother--the attraction, "I was always held hack by a sense of danger, or the sinister attraction he exerted on everyone" (53); the hatred, "I wanted to kill--my elder brother, I wanted to kill him ..." (7); and her powerlessness before him, "My desire obeys my elder brother ..." (52). His attitudes will determine the family's and her own insensitive treatment of the lover. On the other hand, she feels nothing but adoration for her younger brother. Her devotion is most evident as Duras writes of the pain she suffers from her brother's early death years later, "My younger brother. Dead. At first it's incomprehensible, and then suddenly, from all directions, from the ends of the earth, comes pain ... I ceased to exist except for pain ..." (104). Duras recognizes the conflicts between the siblings, and yet writes of their common love for their mother:" ... different as we all three were from one another, all three loved her in the same way" (55).
Certainly, the most defining familial connection with The Lover is the one between Duras and her mother. Mother-daughter relationships are crucial to healthy female adolescent identity. According to Adrienne Rich, "Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other ... a knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other" (Rich 220). Duras loves her mother, she detests her mother, she fears her mother, and she exists because of her mother. She refers to her as, "The beast, my mother, my love" (The Lover22) and tries to please while at the same time pity her. The effects of the mother's beatings, her madness, her inconsistencies, and her favor toward the eldest son permeate Duras's person. As a child (and as a woman) she is so affected by her mother she remembers, "my dreams were of my mother, never of Christmas tree, always just her ... telling of innocence, her savings, her hopes" (46). Duras participates in the common female adolescent struggle between identification with and dissassociation from her mother. She separates herself from the identity and influence of her mother as she pursues her lover. As the adolescent Duras begins to form an identity in relationships and situations outside of the family, she knows" ... that the time has now come when she can no longer escape certain duties toward herself. And that her mother will know nothing of this ..." (35)
While she suffers under her mother's abusive hand, Duras still vies for maternal love and attention. Rich describes this phenomenon. "There is ... in most of us, a girl-child still longing for a woman's nurture, tenderness, and approval, a woman's power exerted in our defense, a woman's smell and touch and voice, a woman's strong arms around us in moments of fear and pain" (224). She disobeys her mother as she pursues her lover, yet in this act of rebellion, Duras feels the unbreakable bond with her mother. When the narrator considers the seduction of the wealthy Chinese man, she feels that her mother in her desperation would have condoned the prostitution that she herself was too weak to suggest: "The child knows her pursuit of the wealthy would have been condoned by her mother, if she'd dared, if she'd had the strength, if the pain of net thoughts hadn't been there every day, wearing her out" (25). The adolescent Duras struggles, childlike, for her mother's approval. Even her pursuit of sexual pleasure in the seduction of the Chinese man carries with it a financial benefit to make her mother happy, "And that's why the child already knows how to divert the interest people take in her to the interest she takes in money. That makes her mother smile" (24). It is this approval generally lavished instead on her older brother, for which the young girl continues to strive.
In the search for personal identity, adolescent girls struggle with the boundary between self and mother. While driven by a natural and healthy adolescent desire for personal and sexual experimentation, Duras must examine where her mother's identity stops and her own begins. Troughout The Lover the narrator tries on different selves, both in reaction to and in anticipation of her mother. Symbolizing her different selves is perhaps Dura's clothing. Her gold lame shoes, felt-brimmed fedora, and dark cherry lipstick set her apart from from her mother's old clothes, but instead she creates a new, sexually provocative style, distinguished from not only her mother, but other adolescents as well.
Within the context of her family (particularly within mother-daughter relationship) occurs the creation of Duras the writer/artist. Her search for an identity outside of the family and her acknowledgement of her creative self occur simultaneously. With the necessary separation and independence from family occurring in adolescence comes exclusion and potential loneliness. From the first time Duras meets her lover "she knew: she's excluded from the family for the first time and forever" (35). And yet she knows that, "I'm still part of the family, it's there I live, to the exclusion of everywhere else" (75). However, it is within the boundaries of her family, even in "... its aridity, its terrible harshness, its malignance" that she is "... most deeply sure of myself at the heart of my essential certainty, the certainty that later on I'll be a writer" (75). She further begins the necessary separation with her mother's identity as she discovers her desire to write. She writes, "I've told my mother: That's what I want to do--write" (21). The mother's disapproval does not temper Duras's desire. With this identification comes the power of not only using her writing to extend beyond the suffering of the family, but the possibility to continue to write of their experiences long after her mother ceases to exist. Yet even with this power comes Duras's realization of the futility of ever separating herself completely from the familial experiences. She recognizes her artistic identity within the "story" of her family when she writes, "I think I have a vague desire to be alone, just as I realize I've never been alone any more since I left childhood behind and the family of the hunter. I'm going to write" (103).
Just as Duras's voice is tempered by the inner society of her family, it is also shaped by the society and culture in which she lives. The context of ethnicity and culture is another important consideration in adolescent identity. For young adults, "developing a consciousness and acceptance of the values and perspectives of their culture aids their development of a personal identity" (Johnson, Roberts, Worell 12). However, the natural beauty and freedom of her youth cannot compensate for the cultural restrictions of the society of Sadec. Faced with the powerlessness of her mother against the male-dominated government, Duras learned early the political power underpinning relationships. In a society concerned with social class, Duras was affected by the exclusivity of the white citizens; she was accepted because of her race and yet shunned because of her poverty and sexual promiscuity. She is aware of her reputation and imagines other colonials' perspectives: "The news spreads fast in Sadec. The clothes she wears are enough to show. The mother has no idea, and none about how to bring up a daughter" (88). Although she is favored because of her French heredity, she feels the separation between herself and "the athletic little white girls who learn the crawl in the pool at the Sporting Club" (89). Further, she is ostracized because her lover is Chinese; cross-cultural dating is considered taboo. Duras writes of herself, reflecting the sentiments of society, "Every morning the little slut goes to have her body caressed by a filthy Chinese millionaire" (89). As an adolescent, she realizes the boundaries of both culture and ethnicity. As she makes choices outside of cultural norms, her identity is affected by the results of her behavior. Duras's behavior alienates her from her peer group; yet her age restricts her from the freedom of adulthood. While she is accepted because of her ethnicity, she is rejected because of her poverty. Thus her consciousness of herself within her society is skewed; she must look to herself to make sense of her cultural position.
Duras's coming-of-age experience reflects the paradoxes continuing to thwart the development of healthy women in a patriarchal society. Duras speaks as a girl on the edge of adolescence, a developmental stage with both personal and cultural significance. As women come of age in our Western culture, and are forced to reconcile their personal experiences and desires with those encouraged and accepted culturally, they risk losing "their vitality, their resilience, their immunity to depression, their sense of themselves and their character" (Brown, Gilligan 2). Attributed not only to biology but to culture as well, these losses have recently been explored for their psychological and traumatic effects on identity. Unfortunately, many times the adolescent response to these losses is yet another loss--the loss of voice. Yet, while some teenage girls (especially in later adolescence) have suffered this phenomenon, Brown's research discovered another adolescent voice (typically in earlier adolescence) struggling to be heard. This voice is one of strength and political resistance, expressing the disconnection and disassociation experienced while trying to transition into the dominant (and patriarchal) culture. The linkages she makes between sources of sociopolitical power and individual suffering in The Lover outline how Duras, marginalized at an early age due to her gender and class, explored her personal resistance to cultural and societal norms even in adolescence. Hers was a voice struggling to be heard above a family dominated by a tryrannical brother and abusive mother and a culture dominated by colonial and patriarchal voices. When her society, including her family, silenced her with alienation and abuse she honed her skills as a writer and artist, using her experiences, and the resulting silence, to fan the flames of her future resistance. Not only is writing a tool toward understanding herself and her family, it is a reaction to her cultural circumstances. Duras acknowledges that writing will be her escape from the restrictions of her family and her colonial surroundings. She tells her mother, "... what I wanted more than anything in the world was to write, nothing else but that, nothing" (22). Her mother refuses to answer verbally, but her body language suggests that she associates Duras's desire to write with her power to grow beyond her circumstances. Her mother says, "one day she'll / Duras/ go, she'll manage to escape" (22). The adolescent Duras's voice, her identity as a writer, resounds above and beyond her personal experiences. She uses her voice to express disconnection and dissatisfaction with the cultural mores of which she must be part. Her identity is affected by both her positive and negative reactions to the contexts of culture and ethnicity.
Along with developing a cultural and ethnic identity, adolescents are faced with the consideration of their sexuality, including gender identity. As adolescents mature physically, they begin to focus their attention on their sexual identities--on their attraction to others as well as their own sexual attractiveness. According to Susan Basow and Lisa Rubin, "Girls become more concerned with how women are "supposed" to behave at the same time that others, especially males; start reacting to them in markedly gendered ways" (Johnson, Roberts, Worell 13). At the age of fifteen and a half, Duras begins her own search for sexual and gender identity. In The Lover, the narrator speaks frequently and openly about herself: how her appearance is related to her identity. Deliberately, she chooses her clothes, her felt-brimmed hat, her red press, and gold lame shoes in order to project her identity--a worldly child capable of pleasure. Her blatant sexuality is captured in the symbol of her hat, "I try it on just for fun ... and see that there, beneath the man's hat, the thin awkward shape, the inadequacy of childhood, has turned into something else ... Has become ... a provoking choice of nature, a choice of the mind (12-13). Perhaps her hat, masculine in nature, adds power to her appearance, a power culturally associated with masculinity. Her hat, combined with her young and unformed body, also creates an androgynous and contradictory appearance. She is aware of the control she possesses over her body and image. Changing her identity begins with changing her clothes. Duras, as other adolescent girls, is interested in how others perceive her. She stands outside of herself and writes, "Suddenly I see myself as another, as another would be seen, outside myself, available to all eyes, in circulation for cities, journeys, desire" (13). A close reader hears Duras identify the power of beauty, pleasure, and desire. She says, "I could get it wrong, could think I'm beautiful like women who really are beautiful, like women who are looked at, just because people really do look at me a lot. I know it's not a question of beauty, though, but of something else ... mind, for example" (18). This "something else" could also be her blossoming artistic sensibilities. Already Duras recognizes the complexity of identity--how each choice (choices manipulated by her)lead to her sense of self.
Directly related to the pursuit of gender identity is the definition of sexual identity. According to Gisela Konopka, D.S.W.; "A phenomenon particular to adolescence that never occurs again in the life of the individual is the process of developing sexual maturation" (6). The development of sexuality is the development of a healthy, sexual self. Within the relationship with the Chines lover from Cholon, the adolescent Duras discovers her sexuality, and beings to seek personal definitions for words such as pleasure, love, and desire. Duras describes her adolescent self as unformed, without previous definition: "... this body it's not like other bodies, it's not finished, in the room it keeps growing, it's still without set form, continually coming into being, not only there where it's visible but elsewhere too ..." (99). Duras, unlike many of her adolescent peers, is in control of her sexuality. She pursues her desires freely and deliberately. She enters willingly into the relationship with her lover; in fact, she is seductress, "... she was attracted to him already on the ferry. She was attracted to him. It depended on her alone" (37). At their first meeting, she is in control of the interaction, "She tells him she doesn't want him to talk, what she wants is for him to do as he usually does with the women he brings to his flat" (37-38). Perhaps a part of her motivation comes from the desire to individuate her identity from her mother; Duras seeks to fulfill what the mother is lacking. Duras transposes the roles of mother and daughter as she writes of "... the final, decisive knowledge that their mother was a child" (39). Unlike the sexuality expressed by the adolescent girl, Duras writes that her mother "never knew pleasure" (39). Through her sexual coming-of-age, Duras desperately escapes the fate that befell her mother, who admits, "I was very serious ... I lost the taste for my own pleasure" (93). Duras compares the blossoming of her own voice, full of potential and adolescent optimism, with her mother's own lack of identity. The adolescent girl, only fifteen years old, acknowledges her desire and pursues her need for pleasure. She is creating the boundaries of self. She gives voice to her sexual awakening, naming it as "The sea formless, simply beyond compare" (38).
With the lover from Cholon, Duras makes the passage from girl to woman. The memory of the affair, the image of the snapshot never taken, continues with Duras throughout her life, gaining strength and importance with time. With her lover she experiences sexual pleasure. The man from Cholon offers Duras further insight into her own identity, and her place within a sexual relationship. "He tells me ... that he knew right away ... that I'd be like this after my first love, that I'd love love ... I'm pleased with all he's foretold and say so" (42). The relationship is significant in many ways; he is her first lover and her first escape from the grasp of her family's emotional oppression. Further, Duras is affected by what the relationship is not. Adolescence is a time for trying on relationships, learning what is needed and what is not. The cultural and racial implications of their love, combined with their age difference, makes a lasting union impossible. The acknowledgement from the beginning of their affair of its inevitable conclusion lends a certain urgency and futility to their love. Perhaps this certain "death" extends the possibilities within their affair--they love without abandon while they can. Their love is almost incestuous, "He takes her as he would his own child" (101) and is tainted with images of pain and death. She speaks of her lover toward the end of the affair, "It was as if he loved the pain, loved it as he'd loved me, intensely, unto death perhaps ..." (110). The intensity and ambivalence of her feelings is an authentic expression of her adolescence. Her voice captures the immediacy and urgency of adolescent experience, the pulse of sexual awakening. Her descritions are vibrant and beautiful, "He breates her in, the child, his eyes shut he breathes in her breath ..." (99). Her body is more than a physical expression of sexuality, "Stretching beyond sight, toward risk, toward death, it's nimble, it launches itself wholly into pleasure as it were grown up, adult, it's without guile, and it's frighteningly intelligent" (99). Her love, doomed from the start, is created by pain and pleasure both. Duras's lover, and her blossoming sexual identity, are the focal point on which the novel revolves. This experience defines Duras's adolescent image and becomes a focus of her art throughout her life.
Duras's relationship with Helene Lagonelle, and the desire it brings, provides further exploration of sexual identity. She is "worn out with desire for Helene Lagonelle" (74) and begins to transpose the position of Helene and her lover. She is fascinated with Helene's beauty, desires Helene's body and her innocence. Duras imagines herself taking Helene "... with me to where every evening my eyes shut, I have imparted to me the pleasure that makes you cry out" (74). Duras wants to share her pleasure, her lover, with her friend. She sees Helene "... as being of one flesh with the man from Cholon, but in a shining, solar, innocent present, in a continual self-flowering which springs out of each action ..." (74). The lover and friend overlap and fuse identities, and finally, "Helene Lagonelle is from China" (74). This blurring of sexual and gender boundaries is predominant in adolescence as young adults begin to crystallize definitions of friendship and romantic relationship within their peer groups. The consideration of homosexual experimentation is significant (and typical) in adolescent development. The desire for experimentation outside of preconceived cultural and societal boundaries is a natural urge facing many young adults. Although no evidence exists of an actual physical relationship between the two young women, her friend Helene takes a place, alongside of the lover, as the two figures Duras remembers. "I haven't forgotten Helene Lagonelle. I haven't forgotten the bondsman" (75). This peer relationship, along with the desires and choices it brings, is a critical component in the development of Duras's identity, the character of Helen presents Duras with a contrast of her own. Through a study of (and desire for) Helene, Duras is able to more clearly identify herself. Her relationships with a young woman and the Chinese lover challenge the expectations of her culture. Just as her body is still forming, full of possibility and without boundaries, so are her desires. Further, the characters of Helen and the lover are both feminized in the novel; each are overpowered by the masculine image of Duras (wearing the hat). The lover is described as, "The body is thin, lacking in strength, in muscle ..." (38). Perhaps her choice to pursue writing is a further expression of masculine power. Traditionally a male profession, writing offers Duras the freedom and control to extend beyond her circumstances limited both by her gender and her culture.
Duras demonstrates how her artist's voice emerged from the powerful shifts in her youthful identity, prompted by the dynamism of adolescence, sexual discovery and her will to break with her family. Resisting the sullen silence of those who have emotionally abandoned her, she asserts power over her appearance, seeks comfort and sex with a lover and uses her own voice in articulating her situation to another outside her family. The lover is her first "reader" in a sense. He offers her the safety of love and shared marginalization within which to speak her concerns. He arouses and satifies her primal instincts, seeing her as a child lover who needs comfort. In this safe space she can grow but also begin the process of mourning. Although the young Duras does not speak to him when she is with her family, her feelings emerge when alone with him: "kisses on the body bring tears. Almost like a consolation. At home I don't cry ..." (46); "our first confidants are our lovers" (60). He becomes her witness, as she is for her mother, embracing her passion and her agony: "His face against hers he receives her tears, crushes her to him, mad with desire for her tears, for her anger" (101); "He lays his head on me and weeps to see me weep" (46). As her troubled family life in Indochina provides the contexts for much of her fiction, the possibilities for the adult self aroused in adolescence with the lover's presence create the several roles of the artist that are evoked by The Lover : that of transcendent survivor, witness, lyrical writer, and framer of possibilities.
NOTES
1) Duras revisits the Indochina setting and her family members in her novels The Sea Wall (1952), The Vice Consul (1966), The Lover, The North China Lover (1991), and in her dramas Whole Days in the Trees (1968) and L'Eden Cinema(1977)
2) See Hanna Segal's Art and the Depressive Position," and Marion Milner's "The Role of Illusion in Symbol Formation."
3) See chapter four of Laurie Vickroy's Trauma and Survival.
4) The mother's posed photos are illusionary depictions of a family increasingly doomed to chaos and insanity. The daughter's "images," however, are not fixed but fleeting recovered moments. Her narrative images differ from the mother's in that she tries to reveal rather than conceal the family's madness (Vickroy "Pilling the Void").
WORKS CITED
Adler, Laure. Marguerite Duras: A Life. Trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Armel, Aliette. Marguerite Duras et l'autobiographie. Paris: Le Castor Astral. 1990.
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.
Duras, Marguerite. The Lover. Trans. Barbara Bray. New York: Pantheon, 1985.
--.The North China Lover. Trans. Leigh Hafrey. New York: The New Press, 1992.
--.The Sea Wall. Trans. Herma Briffault. New York: Harper and Row, 1986.
Brown, Lyn Mikel. Raising Their Voices: The Politics of Girls' Anger. Cambridge: Harvard Uricersity Press, 1998.
Brown, Lyn and Carol Gilligan. Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Hinshelwood, R.D. & Dictionary of Kleinian Thought. London: Free Association Books, 1989.
Johnson, Norine G., Roberts, Michael C.,and Judith Worrell. eds. Beyond Appearance: A New Look at Adolescent Girls. American Psychological Association. Washington, D.C., 1999,
Klein, Melanie. "The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego." The Selected Melanie Klein. Ed. Juliette Mitchell. New York: The Free Press, 1986 95-111.
Konopka, Gisela, D.S.W. "Requirements for Healthy Development of Adolescent Youth. "Adolescence 8.31 (Fall 1973): 8:31, pp. 1-26.
Krystal, Henry. Integration and Self-Healing. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1988.
Lifton, Robert Jay. Interview with Cathy Caruth. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 128-47.
Milner, Marion. "The role of illusion in symbol formation." Int. J. Psycho-Anal (1953) 34:181-95.
Morgan, Janice. "Fiction and Autobiography/Language and Silence: L'Amant by Duras. "The French Review. 63,2, December 1989: 63,2, 271-278.
Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born. Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986.
Segal, Hanna. "Art and the depressive position." Dream, Phantasy and Art. London: Routledge, 1991, 85-100.
Vickroy, Laurie. "Filling the Void: Transference, Love, Being and Writing in Duras's L'Amant." Marguerite Duras Lives On. Ed. Janine Ricouart. New York: University Press of America, 1988, 123-36.
--Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2002. Laurie Vickroy, Ph.D.
and Steohanie Reichwein
Dept. of English
College of Liberal Arts
and Sciences
Bradley University
Vickroy, Laurie
Source Citation
Vickroy, Laurie. "'Coming into being': mourning, adolescence and creativity in Duras's The Lover." Journal of Evolutionary Psychology (2003): 92+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 22 June 2010.
"Coming into being": mourning, adolescence and creativity in Duras's The Lover
By Laurie Vickroy
Marguerite Duras's The Lover, a fictionalized memoir of her troubled adolescence in Indochina, is narrated from the points of view of age and youth. Though the "older" voice gives perspective and shapes the representation of the youthful self, this is not simply a dialogue or contrast between youth and age. They are intertwined in ways that suggest equally that as the artist recreates the teen Duras, the latter has given birth to the voice of the artist. The novel chronicles loss [of family, innocence, a great love), mourning and discovery. Her recreation of what she has lost with frequent references to death suggest a process of remembering and mourning in her writing. Psychoanalyst Henry Krystal describes adolescence as a transition into adulthood and a time when an individual develops the ability to grieve (63). In this portrait of her development as an adolescent, Duras chronicles her growing capacity to grieve as she tells of individuating herself from her anguished family. Her increased independence coincides with discovering she wants to be a writer, a vocation which provides her the means to frequently revisit this period of trauma and loss in her oeuvre. (1) Though a time of loss, Duras also recreates it as the original context for developing her creative imagination, her ability to relate to others outside her family, and to experience differentiation and sexuality, which all help her transition towards an adult identity. This essay explores the ways Duras's narrative voices reveal or enact the process of growth and mourning and how these concepts are inextricably bound together and mutually generating in her text.
When Duras set out to write The Lover in 1983, she was recovering from a near brush with death. She had been an alcoholic most of her life, and it began to imperil her health. She was hospitalized, and with the help of her close companion, Yann Andrea, she stopped drinking and recovered for a time. At this point she was almost 70 years old and would live another twelve years (until 1996) and write some of her most recognized work. In interviews late in her career (1970s and 1980s) she expressed a need to connect with her audience, and a need to risk exposing intimate details of her life to establish this connection and further motivate her writing (Armel 70, 92, 94). The Lover itself provides clues as to the urgency of her purpose in its writing. She, as narrator, says previously she has suppressed her past. "I've written a good deal about the members of my family, but then they were still alive, my mother and my brothers. And I skirted around them, skirted around all these things without really tackling them.... Before I spoke of clear periods, those on which the light fell. Now I'm talking about the hidden stretches of that same youth, of certain facts, feelings, events that I buried" (7-8). One senses a need to explore this territory again, better equipped with the will, the insight and writing skills than what she had in earlier narratives like The Sea Wall. Her elder narrative perspective provides psychological consequences the younger could not know--the link between her love for her family and for her lover, for instance. She also gives readers a sense that this past still continues to rule her life and will probably not be fully resolved.
In the books I've written about my childhood ... I wrote about ... our love for one another, and our terrible hatred too, in that common family history of ruin and death which was ours whatever happened, in love or in hate, and which I still can't understand however hard I try, which is still beyond my reach, hidden in the very depths of my flesh, blind as a newborn child.... I'm still there watching those possessed children, as far away from the mystery now as I was then. I've never written, I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door. (25)
Her art and her life are bound to her experiences in this family, long dead, that she is still trying to understand
The context of trauma from which this story has been told, and Duras's obsessive returns to it throughout her work, underlie her incorporation of the responses of spliting and self-numbing into her narrative, reflecting the trauma survivor's struggle "with how to cohere and how to absorb and in some measure confront what one as had thrust upon one, what one has been exposed to" (Lifton 163-64). As Suzette Henke has observed about many women's contemporary autobiographies, Duras may have felt compelled to reconstruct and reassess the past and reinvent the self in narrative. Further, the narrative of The Lover recreates the sense of dislocation inherent to traumatic experience Which resists, direct access to memory of it (Caruth Unclaimed 8) through a creation of present and past selves which are simultaneously, split and connected. Duras structures her narrative in a non-linear way: in fragments that represent memories of particular moments, partial portraits of herself and others, or as needed information offered to the reader to clarify, chronology as her narrative shifts frequently between past and present. She is retelling part of her youth from the distance of old age. More importantly, these kinds of fragments are recreations of the uncertainties and gaps in traumatic memory. She uses particular foci, a face, an image, or a feeling, to provide connections between the pieces, so that the text does not read like random thoughts, but the connections are implicit from the artist's point of view and imagination.
Object relations theorists who look at the origins and purposes of art discuss its value in seeking the reparation of lost objects, in externalizing the internal world of the artist, and in articulating contemplation and mourning. (2) One mark of human development is the ability to live in a world of symbols apart from ourselves. Melanie Klein believed that learning symbolic representations included finding substitutions for primary love objects or other losses in symbols which also represent creative expressiveness and a defense against anxiety (Hinshelwood 450). Hanna Segal posits that artists "create a world [in their art].... The creation of this inner world ... is unconsciously also a recreation of a lost world" (86-87). Such reparation gives rise to aesthetically beautiful art which may help the individual adapt to reality, and may ease the dread of loss, or enable separation (Segal 94-96). Duras simultaneously mourns what is lost and shows us the creation of her life as a writer which will help her recover fragments of that lost past in ways that are symbolically meaningful to herself rather than factually accurate.
Duras bears witness to the pain and suffering of her family in Indochina in the 1920s and 1930s in The Lover. She mourns their physical deaths prematurely in a sense because for her the colonial exploitation her mother underwent and the subsequent psychological disintegration of the family were the most powerful, if symbolic, deaths for her. A family turned to "stone" because of the mother's constant defeats (cheated by officials, given land washed yearly by the sea, failed attempts to build sea walls) and her consequent failure to nurture her children. Duras focuses on when when they were most reduced to poverty (relative to other colonials, but not natives), locked in shame and self hatred such that they consider it demeaning to show feeling or to engage in life. All family members suffer emotional abandonment. The older brother seeks substitutes in dominating the family (which the mother allows), in opium addiction and petty tyranny. His violence detroys the younger brother's psyche so utterly that the older brother for Duras becomes a symbol of destruction and death, even of war. She resists destructive powers that crush the innocent by bearing witness to his cruelty and her other brother's pain. Family relations become bound up with a modern critique of colonialism and other forms of oppression. She bears the responsibility of the survivor, the only one of the family left to acknowledge their existence and suffering. Carrying out this responsibility "has enormous therapeutic value" (Lifton 138) offering Duras some conselation but also may serve readers in working through the relationship between individual and oppressive forces.
Loss and attempts at reparation are key themes of the novel and of the adolescent Duras's life as she seeks a substitute for lost nurturance in her Chinese lover. Though their relations are characterized by an intense sexual vitality and he is a source of emotional comfort, bearing witness to her pain, this relationship is also emotionally mired in her continuing attachment to her family. This connection carries on fears of abandonment and disintegration. She tells her lover she continues to fear for her mother and feels powerless to help her. Her relation to the fictional lover (and even moreso Duras's actual lover) was predicated on financial gain (Adler 57). Further, the couple come to relize there is no future for them, largely because of racial and class differences, expressed most strongly by her family and his father. Faltering between possibility and doom, guilt and obsession, Duras's description of their relationship is permeated with imagery and symbols that combine life and death elements.
The connections between death and "symbolization"--that is, articulating one's inner world--as theorized by Robert Lifton, are evidenced in Duras's novel. This struggle is associated with the voice of the mature writer. Lifton posits that symbolization replaces instinct, and thus takes on the struggle for vitality, and ultimately, for symbolic immortality" (134). The life/death interaction infuses her work for a number of reasons: it indicates an act of mourning, a way of remembering her now dead family, and a way of recounting traumatic experiences which bring their own connections to death or death-equivalent experience (speaking in emotional terms) such as "separation and fear of disintegration" and emotional deadness (Lifton 134). Such experiences are "precursors of imagery and symbolization" according to Lifton, who concludes that "in the end, imagery, symbolization, and meaning are in a life-death model or paradigm" (134).
Trauma involves the unconscious struggle to confront things "thrust upon" you and this confrontation with traumatic events and even death is never absolute, rather "it's always a mixture of how much you can take in and how much you keep out" (136). Duras represents this mixture in the doubling of herself in the narrative between she/I, and in the emotional shifts between defensive numbing and passion in the girl, as she sometimes calls herself. (3) Emotional numbing often impairs symbolization, contributing to the emotional stasis of the most severely traumatized. Duras demonstrates how as a girl she must reach out of the destructive and stagnant mindset of her family and overcome numbing by finding means to reconnect with emotions and expression. This process begins with discovering her sexuality, which offers new possibilities of being, described in the image of herself dressed androgynously and seductively. Her sexuality (and economic need) leads in turn to her taking a lover with whom, fortunately, she can talk and reveal her pain. Finally, these changes seem to happen along with her discovery she wants to be a writer. Duras's own attempts to write are well underway by the time she is 17 (Adler 69). These all become part of individuating from her family's entrenched ways of being and perceptions which "have to be shattered for there to be new insight" (Lifton 134). Duras's writing creates a new imagery of fluidity and discovery to replace the static and dishonest family portraits of her mother's posed photos. (4)
The struggles between past and future, old and new expression, and stasis and discovery, are enacted in Duras's interconnected life/death imagery. As her birth family has been associated largely with death and disintegration, her clandestine life with her lover is portrayed as a passionate embrace of sexuality, potential and quasi-parental nurturing. These life force: aspects are counterbalanced by a complex array of death symbolism. The older Duras's narrative voice brings with it knowledge of mortality, of loss and doom. However, there is also the suggestion that the writing, the work of art, reaches beyond the limitations of death (in a later work, The North China Lover, she says to her lover that books will live on after them). Death is the finishing point between the two lovers (her lover states many years later that he will love her "until death"--the last words of the novel), but their memory recreated through narrative art can endure beyond death. They love or experience pleasure frequently "unto death" (43, 74, 83). The expression "unto death" implies both in English and French an act of excess and repetition, a symbol of the absolute limits to which physical connection can be taken. It seems also to become that final reality that everyone ultimately comes up against, except the artist has another option, recreation in a form that reaches beyond death.
There are several further references to death in relation to their situation. As they know they are near the end of their relationship (his father will not let them marry, she will return to France) the lowers' pleasure becomes" `inconsolable." The lovers' rendez-vous apartment, where she has also lost her innocence, becomes increasingly "a place that's intolerable, bordering on death, a place of violence, pain, despair, and dishonor" (75). Comparing herself with other women in the colonies who have taken forbidden lovers, they experience a "hankering for death," that is, seek oblivion in love, a pleasure born of what is not tolerated. Death becomes a symbol of freedom from social constraints and a measure of passion. Moeeover, the elder Duras describes her younger body as "not finished ... continually coming into being ... stretching beyond sight, toward risk, toward death, it's nimble, it launches itself wholly into pleasure as if it were grown up, adult ..." (99). Here she describes her body as projecting itself into the future, behaving beyond limitations. Her body's potential staves off conventional identity, determinism, even challenging death. Her body is a place of change and growth that ,more positively captures the flux of life before dissolution and death, the situation of adolescence, embodyihg the potential for growth, connection and creativity (and death--eventually).
Since it is in this changing body that she discovers her need to be a writer, Duras thus evokes connections between her body, her creativity, sexuality, power, intelligence, love and separation. As the elder Duras looks back to her younger self, her youthful viltality becomes the point of entry into the quest for symbolic immortality.
To understand the importance of adolescent identity portrayed by Duras, we must look at the story she continues to tell and consider the context in which the story is told. Duras speaks as a girl on the edge of adolescence. Developmentally, adolescence is a period of incredible change and growth as young adults experience sexual maturity, withdraw from adult protection, and re-evaluate their values. Also, during this time adolescents begin to clarify consciousness of self, both personally and within social interactions. "It is a time when personal meaning is defined by social experiences. The young person defines for herself what she is experiencing in her relationships with others and her world" (Konopka 7). Due to the powerful social and cultural effects on developing adolescents, we must not only look at the identity or voice of the young adult, but the sound and position from which the voice is spoken. Michelle Fine and Pat MacPherson, reiterating the work of Valerie Walkerdine, refer to this adolescent occurrence as the "negotiation of multiple selves" (Johnson, Roberts, and Worrell 11). This "negotiation" occurs when adolescent females must learn to place themselves within different contexts and discover identity through different experiences and different people. These contexts are "not just settings or doings or relationships; contexts are within the self and outside the self" (11). According to this theory, questions about identity, such as "Who am I?" expand to include details from the surrounding situations and developmental experiences.
Throughout The Lover, Duras's voice is resolute and dynamic, spoken and silent, childlike and mature. Like the often contradictory and continually evolving voices of adolescence, Duras's voice reflects herself and the context from which she speaks. Typical of adolescence, this identity is mutable and unpredictable. Duras writes, "What I want to seem I do seem ... I can become anything anyone wants me to be. And believe it" (Duras 18). According to Lyn Brown and Carol Gilligan, "... the sounds of one's voice changes in resonance depending on the relational acoustics: whether one is heard or not heard, how one is responded to (by oneself and by, other people)" (20). The dynamic nature of the adolescent voice in The Lover mirrors the very, essence of adolescent development. As Duras relives her experiences during the transition from childhood to adulthood, she captures the passion and intensity of adolescent experience. Further, as she begins to develop her voice as a writer, she uses this talent as another method to explore her identity. She realizes the power of the written word to create multiple selves possessing infinite interpretations. Her changing identity gives her a voice, a connection between her family, her lover. the environment, and a reaction against the silence of the family. Duras writes, "Suddenly it's deliberate. Suddenly I see myself as another, as another would be seen, outside myself, available to all, available to all eyes ..." (13). As Duras continues to recreate herself with contingens upon different relationship and situations, her narrative style reflects her development. As the adolescent Duras deliberately creates an identity based on her surroundings, she learns her writing can undergo similar mutations. This portion of the study will examine the position of the adolescent voice within the text and an examination of the relationship between Duras's development as a writer and as a woman.
One consideration in understanding Duras's adolescent experience is the sound and position of her voice within the novel. Through an examination of the perspective of the story told, the listener can begin to position the speaker/ writer within the story. Largely narrated in first-person, The Lover slips occasionally into a distanced third-person narration. Interestingly, this shift occurs frequently in the scenes exploring sexual awakening with the lover from Cholen. For example, "She doesn't look him in the face," and, "She touches him. Touches the softness of his sex, his skin ..." (38). The shifts between first-and third-person seem not to follow any particular narrative pattern, and certainly do not distinguish between the speaker of the past and the Duras of the present. "For the narrative ... is written predominantly in the present tense (regardless of the particular time period being evoked) and with a high degree of vividness and immediacy that effectively erases the very distinction between past and present" (Morgan 273). Some readers feel that the inclusion of the third-person perspective is meant to interrupt autobiography with a convention of fiction, "that is Duras, the public figure and author narrating, becomes Duras, a literary character, narrated in her own story" (273). While some critics suspect Duras of purposeful evasion, this narrative split lends authenticity to the narrative. The narrator is both a participant in and an observer of her development. The distance of the third-person narration and intimacy of first-person create an authentic tension: that of a girl discovering and being discovered, loving and being loved, taking and being taken. Duras portrays herself, even as a teenager, as someone reliving, recreating, and revising her experiences both as a first-person participant and a third-person observer.
After an examination of the perspective of Duras's adolescent voice, a study of the context from which the voice rises is useful. Adolescents develop most of their values and ideas--their identities--from various sources, such as families, peers, teachers, ethnic cultures, and spiritual structures (Johnson, Roberts, Worell 11). Further, "... although strains may emerge in the relationship of the teen with the family, family dynamics and interaction, including parenting style, remain major influences in an adolescent's development of identities" (11). According to the National Longitudenal Study on Adolescent Health, one of the key contributors to adolescent health is family connectivity. Therefore, examining the context of family is important for understanding the voice of adolescent girls.
Tangled in a web of abuse, suffering, and poverty, the interplay between the members of the Duras family has an undeniable and immeasurable effect on the narrator. While The Lover is primarily a novel about a young girl's relationship with an older lover, with the development of the doomed affair Duras begins to contemplate her familial relationships. She realizes that she shares a bond with her siblings, a bond forged by dysfunction and shared despair, "We're united in a fundamental shame at having to live. It's here we are at the heart of our common fate, the fact that all three of us are our mother's children ..." (55). She recognizes the ambivalence she feels for her sociopathic older brother--the attraction, "I was always held hack by a sense of danger, or the sinister attraction he exerted on everyone" (53); the hatred, "I wanted to kill--my elder brother, I wanted to kill him ..." (7); and her powerlessness before him, "My desire obeys my elder brother ..." (52). His attitudes will determine the family's and her own insensitive treatment of the lover. On the other hand, she feels nothing but adoration for her younger brother. Her devotion is most evident as Duras writes of the pain she suffers from her brother's early death years later, "My younger brother. Dead. At first it's incomprehensible, and then suddenly, from all directions, from the ends of the earth, comes pain ... I ceased to exist except for pain ..." (104). Duras recognizes the conflicts between the siblings, and yet writes of their common love for their mother:" ... different as we all three were from one another, all three loved her in the same way" (55).
Certainly, the most defining familial connection with The Lover is the one between Duras and her mother. Mother-daughter relationships are crucial to healthy female adolescent identity. According to Adrienne Rich, "Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other ... a knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other" (Rich 220). Duras loves her mother, she detests her mother, she fears her mother, and she exists because of her mother. She refers to her as, "The beast, my mother, my love" (The Lover22) and tries to please while at the same time pity her. The effects of the mother's beatings, her madness, her inconsistencies, and her favor toward the eldest son permeate Duras's person. As a child (and as a woman) she is so affected by her mother she remembers, "my dreams were of my mother, never of Christmas tree, always just her ... telling of innocence, her savings, her hopes" (46). Duras participates in the common female adolescent struggle between identification with and dissassociation from her mother. She separates herself from the identity and influence of her mother as she pursues her lover. As the adolescent Duras begins to form an identity in relationships and situations outside of the family, she knows" ... that the time has now come when she can no longer escape certain duties toward herself. And that her mother will know nothing of this ..." (35)
While she suffers under her mother's abusive hand, Duras still vies for maternal love and attention. Rich describes this phenomenon. "There is ... in most of us, a girl-child still longing for a woman's nurture, tenderness, and approval, a woman's power exerted in our defense, a woman's smell and touch and voice, a woman's strong arms around us in moments of fear and pain" (224). She disobeys her mother as she pursues her lover, yet in this act of rebellion, Duras feels the unbreakable bond with her mother. When the narrator considers the seduction of the wealthy Chinese man, she feels that her mother in her desperation would have condoned the prostitution that she herself was too weak to suggest: "The child knows her pursuit of the wealthy would have been condoned by her mother, if she'd dared, if she'd had the strength, if the pain of net thoughts hadn't been there every day, wearing her out" (25). The adolescent Duras struggles, childlike, for her mother's approval. Even her pursuit of sexual pleasure in the seduction of the Chinese man carries with it a financial benefit to make her mother happy, "And that's why the child already knows how to divert the interest people take in her to the interest she takes in money. That makes her mother smile" (24). It is this approval generally lavished instead on her older brother, for which the young girl continues to strive.
In the search for personal identity, adolescent girls struggle with the boundary between self and mother. While driven by a natural and healthy adolescent desire for personal and sexual experimentation, Duras must examine where her mother's identity stops and her own begins. Troughout The Lover the narrator tries on different selves, both in reaction to and in anticipation of her mother. Symbolizing her different selves is perhaps Dura's clothing. Her gold lame shoes, felt-brimmed fedora, and dark cherry lipstick set her apart from from her mother's old clothes, but instead she creates a new, sexually provocative style, distinguished from not only her mother, but other adolescents as well.
Within the context of her family (particularly within mother-daughter relationship) occurs the creation of Duras the writer/artist. Her search for an identity outside of the family and her acknowledgement of her creative self occur simultaneously. With the necessary separation and independence from family occurring in adolescence comes exclusion and potential loneliness. From the first time Duras meets her lover "she knew: she's excluded from the family for the first time and forever" (35). And yet she knows that, "I'm still part of the family, it's there I live, to the exclusion of everywhere else" (75). However, it is within the boundaries of her family, even in "... its aridity, its terrible harshness, its malignance" that she is "... most deeply sure of myself at the heart of my essential certainty, the certainty that later on I'll be a writer" (75). She further begins the necessary separation with her mother's identity as she discovers her desire to write. She writes, "I've told my mother: That's what I want to do--write" (21). The mother's disapproval does not temper Duras's desire. With this identification comes the power of not only using her writing to extend beyond the suffering of the family, but the possibility to continue to write of their experiences long after her mother ceases to exist. Yet even with this power comes Duras's realization of the futility of ever separating herself completely from the familial experiences. She recognizes her artistic identity within the "story" of her family when she writes, "I think I have a vague desire to be alone, just as I realize I've never been alone any more since I left childhood behind and the family of the hunter. I'm going to write" (103).
Just as Duras's voice is tempered by the inner society of her family, it is also shaped by the society and culture in which she lives. The context of ethnicity and culture is another important consideration in adolescent identity. For young adults, "developing a consciousness and acceptance of the values and perspectives of their culture aids their development of a personal identity" (Johnson, Roberts, Worell 12). However, the natural beauty and freedom of her youth cannot compensate for the cultural restrictions of the society of Sadec. Faced with the powerlessness of her mother against the male-dominated government, Duras learned early the political power underpinning relationships. In a society concerned with social class, Duras was affected by the exclusivity of the white citizens; she was accepted because of her race and yet shunned because of her poverty and sexual promiscuity. She is aware of her reputation and imagines other colonials' perspectives: "The news spreads fast in Sadec. The clothes she wears are enough to show. The mother has no idea, and none about how to bring up a daughter" (88). Although she is favored because of her French heredity, she feels the separation between herself and "the athletic little white girls who learn the crawl in the pool at the Sporting Club" (89). Further, she is ostracized because her lover is Chinese; cross-cultural dating is considered taboo. Duras writes of herself, reflecting the sentiments of society, "Every morning the little slut goes to have her body caressed by a filthy Chinese millionaire" (89). As an adolescent, she realizes the boundaries of both culture and ethnicity. As she makes choices outside of cultural norms, her identity is affected by the results of her behavior. Duras's behavior alienates her from her peer group; yet her age restricts her from the freedom of adulthood. While she is accepted because of her ethnicity, she is rejected because of her poverty. Thus her consciousness of herself within her society is skewed; she must look to herself to make sense of her cultural position.
Duras's coming-of-age experience reflects the paradoxes continuing to thwart the development of healthy women in a patriarchal society. Duras speaks as a girl on the edge of adolescence, a developmental stage with both personal and cultural significance. As women come of age in our Western culture, and are forced to reconcile their personal experiences and desires with those encouraged and accepted culturally, they risk losing "their vitality, their resilience, their immunity to depression, their sense of themselves and their character" (Brown, Gilligan 2). Attributed not only to biology but to culture as well, these losses have recently been explored for their psychological and traumatic effects on identity. Unfortunately, many times the adolescent response to these losses is yet another loss--the loss of voice. Yet, while some teenage girls (especially in later adolescence) have suffered this phenomenon, Brown's research discovered another adolescent voice (typically in earlier adolescence) struggling to be heard. This voice is one of strength and political resistance, expressing the disconnection and disassociation experienced while trying to transition into the dominant (and patriarchal) culture. The linkages she makes between sources of sociopolitical power and individual suffering in The Lover outline how Duras, marginalized at an early age due to her gender and class, explored her personal resistance to cultural and societal norms even in adolescence. Hers was a voice struggling to be heard above a family dominated by a tryrannical brother and abusive mother and a culture dominated by colonial and patriarchal voices. When her society, including her family, silenced her with alienation and abuse she honed her skills as a writer and artist, using her experiences, and the resulting silence, to fan the flames of her future resistance. Not only is writing a tool toward understanding herself and her family, it is a reaction to her cultural circumstances. Duras acknowledges that writing will be her escape from the restrictions of her family and her colonial surroundings. She tells her mother, "... what I wanted more than anything in the world was to write, nothing else but that, nothing" (22). Her mother refuses to answer verbally, but her body language suggests that she associates Duras's desire to write with her power to grow beyond her circumstances. Her mother says, "one day she'll / Duras/ go, she'll manage to escape" (22). The adolescent Duras's voice, her identity as a writer, resounds above and beyond her personal experiences. She uses her voice to express disconnection and dissatisfaction with the cultural mores of which she must be part. Her identity is affected by both her positive and negative reactions to the contexts of culture and ethnicity.
Along with developing a cultural and ethnic identity, adolescents are faced with the consideration of their sexuality, including gender identity. As adolescents mature physically, they begin to focus their attention on their sexual identities--on their attraction to others as well as their own sexual attractiveness. According to Susan Basow and Lisa Rubin, "Girls become more concerned with how women are "supposed" to behave at the same time that others, especially males; start reacting to them in markedly gendered ways" (Johnson, Roberts, Worell 13). At the age of fifteen and a half, Duras begins her own search for sexual and gender identity. In The Lover, the narrator speaks frequently and openly about herself: how her appearance is related to her identity. Deliberately, she chooses her clothes, her felt-brimmed hat, her red press, and gold lame shoes in order to project her identity--a worldly child capable of pleasure. Her blatant sexuality is captured in the symbol of her hat, "I try it on just for fun ... and see that there, beneath the man's hat, the thin awkward shape, the inadequacy of childhood, has turned into something else ... Has become ... a provoking choice of nature, a choice of the mind (12-13). Perhaps her hat, masculine in nature, adds power to her appearance, a power culturally associated with masculinity. Her hat, combined with her young and unformed body, also creates an androgynous and contradictory appearance. She is aware of the control she possesses over her body and image. Changing her identity begins with changing her clothes. Duras, as other adolescent girls, is interested in how others perceive her. She stands outside of herself and writes, "Suddenly I see myself as another, as another would be seen, outside myself, available to all eyes, in circulation for cities, journeys, desire" (13). A close reader hears Duras identify the power of beauty, pleasure, and desire. She says, "I could get it wrong, could think I'm beautiful like women who really are beautiful, like women who are looked at, just because people really do look at me a lot. I know it's not a question of beauty, though, but of something else ... mind, for example" (18). This "something else" could also be her blossoming artistic sensibilities. Already Duras recognizes the complexity of identity--how each choice (choices manipulated by her)lead to her sense of self.
Directly related to the pursuit of gender identity is the definition of sexual identity. According to Gisela Konopka, D.S.W.; "A phenomenon particular to adolescence that never occurs again in the life of the individual is the process of developing sexual maturation" (6). The development of sexuality is the development of a healthy, sexual self. Within the relationship with the Chines lover from Cholon, the adolescent Duras discovers her sexuality, and beings to seek personal definitions for words such as pleasure, love, and desire. Duras describes her adolescent self as unformed, without previous definition: "... this body it's not like other bodies, it's not finished, in the room it keeps growing, it's still without set form, continually coming into being, not only there where it's visible but elsewhere too ..." (99). Duras, unlike many of her adolescent peers, is in control of her sexuality. She pursues her desires freely and deliberately. She enters willingly into the relationship with her lover; in fact, she is seductress, "... she was attracted to him already on the ferry. She was attracted to him. It depended on her alone" (37). At their first meeting, she is in control of the interaction, "She tells him she doesn't want him to talk, what she wants is for him to do as he usually does with the women he brings to his flat" (37-38). Perhaps a part of her motivation comes from the desire to individuate her identity from her mother; Duras seeks to fulfill what the mother is lacking. Duras transposes the roles of mother and daughter as she writes of "... the final, decisive knowledge that their mother was a child" (39). Unlike the sexuality expressed by the adolescent girl, Duras writes that her mother "never knew pleasure" (39). Through her sexual coming-of-age, Duras desperately escapes the fate that befell her mother, who admits, "I was very serious ... I lost the taste for my own pleasure" (93). Duras compares the blossoming of her own voice, full of potential and adolescent optimism, with her mother's own lack of identity. The adolescent girl, only fifteen years old, acknowledges her desire and pursues her need for pleasure. She is creating the boundaries of self. She gives voice to her sexual awakening, naming it as "The sea formless, simply beyond compare" (38).
With the lover from Cholon, Duras makes the passage from girl to woman. The memory of the affair, the image of the snapshot never taken, continues with Duras throughout her life, gaining strength and importance with time. With her lover she experiences sexual pleasure. The man from Cholon offers Duras further insight into her own identity, and her place within a sexual relationship. "He tells me ... that he knew right away ... that I'd be like this after my first love, that I'd love love ... I'm pleased with all he's foretold and say so" (42). The relationship is significant in many ways; he is her first lover and her first escape from the grasp of her family's emotional oppression. Further, Duras is affected by what the relationship is not. Adolescence is a time for trying on relationships, learning what is needed and what is not. The cultural and racial implications of their love, combined with their age difference, makes a lasting union impossible. The acknowledgement from the beginning of their affair of its inevitable conclusion lends a certain urgency and futility to their love. Perhaps this certain "death" extends the possibilities within their affair--they love without abandon while they can. Their love is almost incestuous, "He takes her as he would his own child" (101) and is tainted with images of pain and death. She speaks of her lover toward the end of the affair, "It was as if he loved the pain, loved it as he'd loved me, intensely, unto death perhaps ..." (110). The intensity and ambivalence of her feelings is an authentic expression of her adolescence. Her voice captures the immediacy and urgency of adolescent experience, the pulse of sexual awakening. Her descritions are vibrant and beautiful, "He breates her in, the child, his eyes shut he breathes in her breath ..." (99). Her body is more than a physical expression of sexuality, "Stretching beyond sight, toward risk, toward death, it's nimble, it launches itself wholly into pleasure as it were grown up, adult, it's without guile, and it's frighteningly intelligent" (99). Her love, doomed from the start, is created by pain and pleasure both. Duras's lover, and her blossoming sexual identity, are the focal point on which the novel revolves. This experience defines Duras's adolescent image and becomes a focus of her art throughout her life.
Duras's relationship with Helene Lagonelle, and the desire it brings, provides further exploration of sexual identity. She is "worn out with desire for Helene Lagonelle" (74) and begins to transpose the position of Helene and her lover. She is fascinated with Helene's beauty, desires Helene's body and her innocence. Duras imagines herself taking Helene "... with me to where every evening my eyes shut, I have imparted to me the pleasure that makes you cry out" (74). Duras wants to share her pleasure, her lover, with her friend. She sees Helene "... as being of one flesh with the man from Cholon, but in a shining, solar, innocent present, in a continual self-flowering which springs out of each action ..." (74). The lover and friend overlap and fuse identities, and finally, "Helene Lagonelle is from China" (74). This blurring of sexual and gender boundaries is predominant in adolescence as young adults begin to crystallize definitions of friendship and romantic relationship within their peer groups. The consideration of homosexual experimentation is significant (and typical) in adolescent development. The desire for experimentation outside of preconceived cultural and societal boundaries is a natural urge facing many young adults. Although no evidence exists of an actual physical relationship between the two young women, her friend Helene takes a place, alongside of the lover, as the two figures Duras remembers. "I haven't forgotten Helene Lagonelle. I haven't forgotten the bondsman" (75). This peer relationship, along with the desires and choices it brings, is a critical component in the development of Duras's identity, the character of Helen presents Duras with a contrast of her own. Through a study of (and desire for) Helene, Duras is able to more clearly identify herself. Her relationships with a young woman and the Chinese lover challenge the expectations of her culture. Just as her body is still forming, full of possibility and without boundaries, so are her desires. Further, the characters of Helen and the lover are both feminized in the novel; each are overpowered by the masculine image of Duras (wearing the hat). The lover is described as, "The body is thin, lacking in strength, in muscle ..." (38). Perhaps her choice to pursue writing is a further expression of masculine power. Traditionally a male profession, writing offers Duras the freedom and control to extend beyond her circumstances limited both by her gender and her culture.
Duras demonstrates how her artist's voice emerged from the powerful shifts in her youthful identity, prompted by the dynamism of adolescence, sexual discovery and her will to break with her family. Resisting the sullen silence of those who have emotionally abandoned her, she asserts power over her appearance, seeks comfort and sex with a lover and uses her own voice in articulating her situation to another outside her family. The lover is her first "reader" in a sense. He offers her the safety of love and shared marginalization within which to speak her concerns. He arouses and satifies her primal instincts, seeing her as a child lover who needs comfort. In this safe space she can grow but also begin the process of mourning. Although the young Duras does not speak to him when she is with her family, her feelings emerge when alone with him: "kisses on the body bring tears. Almost like a consolation. At home I don't cry ..." (46); "our first confidants are our lovers" (60). He becomes her witness, as she is for her mother, embracing her passion and her agony: "His face against hers he receives her tears, crushes her to him, mad with desire for her tears, for her anger" (101); "He lays his head on me and weeps to see me weep" (46). As her troubled family life in Indochina provides the contexts for much of her fiction, the possibilities for the adult self aroused in adolescence with the lover's presence create the several roles of the artist that are evoked by The Lover : that of transcendent survivor, witness, lyrical writer, and framer of possibilities.
NOTES
1) Duras revisits the Indochina setting and her family members in her novels The Sea Wall (1952), The Vice Consul (1966), The Lover, The North China Lover (1991), and in her dramas Whole Days in the Trees (1968) and L'Eden Cinema(1977)
2) See Hanna Segal's Art and the Depressive Position," and Marion Milner's "The Role of Illusion in Symbol Formation."
3) See chapter four of Laurie Vickroy's Trauma and Survival.
4) The mother's posed photos are illusionary depictions of a family increasingly doomed to chaos and insanity. The daughter's "images," however, are not fixed but fleeting recovered moments. Her narrative images differ from the mother's in that she tries to reveal rather than conceal the family's madness (Vickroy "Pilling the Void").
WORKS CITED
Adler, Laure. Marguerite Duras: A Life. Trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Armel, Aliette. Marguerite Duras et l'autobiographie. Paris: Le Castor Astral. 1990.
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.
Duras, Marguerite. The Lover. Trans. Barbara Bray. New York: Pantheon, 1985.
--.The North China Lover. Trans. Leigh Hafrey. New York: The New Press, 1992.
--.The Sea Wall. Trans. Herma Briffault. New York: Harper and Row, 1986.
Brown, Lyn Mikel. Raising Their Voices: The Politics of Girls' Anger. Cambridge: Harvard Uricersity Press, 1998.
Brown, Lyn and Carol Gilligan. Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Hinshelwood, R.D. & Dictionary of Kleinian Thought. London: Free Association Books, 1989.
Johnson, Norine G., Roberts, Michael C.,and Judith Worrell. eds. Beyond Appearance: A New Look at Adolescent Girls. American Psychological Association. Washington, D.C., 1999,
Klein, Melanie. "The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego." The Selected Melanie Klein. Ed. Juliette Mitchell. New York: The Free Press, 1986 95-111.
Konopka, Gisela, D.S.W. "Requirements for Healthy Development of Adolescent Youth. "Adolescence 8.31 (Fall 1973): 8:31, pp. 1-26.
Krystal, Henry. Integration and Self-Healing. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1988.
Lifton, Robert Jay. Interview with Cathy Caruth. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 128-47.
Milner, Marion. "The role of illusion in symbol formation." Int. J. Psycho-Anal (1953) 34:181-95.
Morgan, Janice. "Fiction and Autobiography/Language and Silence: L'Amant by Duras. "The French Review. 63,2, December 1989: 63,2, 271-278.
Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born. Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986.
Segal, Hanna. "Art and the depressive position." Dream, Phantasy and Art. London: Routledge, 1991, 85-100.
Vickroy, Laurie. "Filling the Void: Transference, Love, Being and Writing in Duras's L'Amant." Marguerite Duras Lives On. Ed. Janine Ricouart. New York: University Press of America, 1988, 123-36.
--Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2002. Laurie Vickroy, Ph.D.
and Steohanie Reichwein
Dept. of English
College of Liberal Arts
and Sciences
Bradley University
Vickroy, Laurie
Source Citation
Vickroy, Laurie. "'Coming into being': mourning, adolescence and creativity in Duras's The Lover." Journal of Evolutionary Psychology (2003): 92+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 22 June 2010.
The Important Sentences in My Presentation
Novels are sometimes more realistic than reality.
By Marguerite Donnadieu
The youth is the beauty of the teen, the senile is the beauty of old.
By Jean Cocteau
La Difficulte d’etre
“.....老夫妻两人手握着手在花棚下面打盹.....彼此手拉着手，渐渐熄灭下去的肉体中还有一阵暖气互相交流.....这便是所谓白头偕老的景象。丈夫在太太身上连岁月的磨蚀都爱到家了。他们彼此说着：‘你眼睛旁边的，鼻子下面的那些小皱纹，我是认得的，看着它们一条条的刻下来的，我知道它们是什么时候来的。这些可怜的灰发一天天褪色了，和我的一起褪色了，并且一部分也是为了我！我的灵魂，因为你和我一起痛苦，一起衰老，所以我更爱你了！你的每一条皱纹，在我都是过去的一阙音乐。’”
By Romain Rolland（罗曼罗兰）
《约翰克利斯朵夫》
Highly Recommend
By Paul Auster
By Jostein Gaarder
I am also Highly Recommend this book!!!The Lover!!
This book is also one of the Top 50 Recommend Book by the University of Hongkong..
Please!!!!!If you have time, you should read this book.....
By Marguerite Donnadieu
The youth is the beauty of the teen, the senile is the beauty of old.
By Jean Cocteau
La Difficulte d’etre
“.....老夫妻两人手握着手在花棚下面打盹.....彼此手拉着手，渐渐熄灭下去的肉体中还有一阵暖气互相交流.....这便是所谓白头偕老的景象。丈夫在太太身上连岁月的磨蚀都爱到家了。他们彼此说着：‘你眼睛旁边的，鼻子下面的那些小皱纹，我是认得的，看着它们一条条的刻下来的，我知道它们是什么时候来的。这些可怜的灰发一天天褪色了，和我的一起褪色了，并且一部分也是为了我！我的灵魂，因为你和我一起痛苦，一起衰老，所以我更爱你了！你的每一条皱纹，在我都是过去的一阙音乐。’”
By Romain Rolland（罗曼罗兰）
《约翰克利斯朵夫》
Highly Recommend
By Paul Auster
By Jostein Gaarder
I am also Highly Recommend this book!!!The Lover!!
This book is also one of the Top 50 Recommend Book by the University of Hongkong..
Please!!!!!If you have time, you should read this book.....
6/20/2010
When I Read The Lover I Will remember This Poem
When you are old
By William Butler Yeats
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
"Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged"(Donnadieu 3).
"It has been my face. It's got older still, of course, but less, co,paratively, than it would otherwise have done. It's scored with deep, dry weinkles, the skin is cracked. But my face hasn't collapsed, as some with fine features have done. It's kept the same contours, but its substance has been laid waste. I have a face laid waste"( Donnadieu 4).
It is true that if some one love your soul, love your face laid waste, love your old wrinkle and that man is the only one you should believe and be with him whatever living or death.
When I read this novel, I always think a question about that does the girl loved the man, even once. I do not think he loved her, because he always have a sex with her and let her such as only a prostitude. He love her body not her soul, but l think I'm worry. He love her and I think this love is the forever love, even until he dead. The reason is that after many years ago, he " came up to" her and said that "Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged"(Donnadieu 3). That is the true love.
By William Butler Yeats
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
"Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged"(Donnadieu 3).
"It has been my face. It's got older still, of course, but less, co,paratively, than it would otherwise have done. It's scored with deep, dry weinkles, the skin is cracked. But my face hasn't collapsed, as some with fine features have done. It's kept the same contours, but its substance has been laid waste. I have a face laid waste"( Donnadieu 4).
It is true that if some one love your soul, love your face laid waste, love your old wrinkle and that man is the only one you should believe and be with him whatever living or death.
When I read this novel, I always think a question about that does the girl loved the man, even once. I do not think he loved her, because he always have a sex with her and let her such as only a prostitude. He love her body not her soul, but l think I'm worry. He love her and I think this love is the forever love, even until he dead. The reason is that after many years ago, he " came up to" her and said that "Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged"(Donnadieu 3). That is the true love.
No Chapter in the Story
The book does not have any chapter or section. At the beginning, I do not know why and at least I do not think about why it does not have chapter or section. After I read the half part of the book, I know why there are no chapters in the book. In my opinion, there are two reasons for me to support my opinion which is you can not use part to definite life and this is Marguerite Donnadieu’s writing style.
First of all, Marguerite Donnadieu does not want to use “part” to describe her life. In many people’s life there are some important part, such as childhood, adulthood and old hood. However, in Donnadieu’s life every time are all very important. She has no childhood. At the beginning of the novel, she said “One day, I am a ready old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me”( Donnadieu 3). She is too young to get old. “ Very early in my life it was too late. I was already too late when I was eighteen. Between eighteen and twenty-five my face took off in a new direction. I grew old at eight”(Donnadieu 4). She has no teenager; even she is not young in her whole life. That is why she does not use chapter to write her life, because there is no chapter in her life. Her life is a story.
Secondly, does not use chapter to write story is the style in her writing life. Donnadieu like writing no time story. It is means in her story all the things are not only limit in one time. She does not like writing story in time order. At the beginning of the story, she writes the story at present and next page she will write narration interspersed with flashbacks. Maybe after that she flashback, she uses inverted order the story. Therefore, we can not simply to use chapter to limit her novel.
This is an amazing book. When I read some second resource, it always said that her novel is very difficult for readers to read. She is a “nature writer”( I named to her). She is just wants to talk about a story and does not think about what the order should be, so when you read her book, you will be very confusing. Therefore, if you want to make some section in her story, that is a difficult things. Now I understand why there are no section in her story.
First of all, Marguerite Donnadieu does not want to use “part” to describe her life. In many people’s life there are some important part, such as childhood, adulthood and old hood. However, in Donnadieu’s life every time are all very important. She has no childhood. At the beginning of the novel, she said “One day, I am a ready old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me”( Donnadieu 3). She is too young to get old. “ Very early in my life it was too late. I was already too late when I was eighteen. Between eighteen and twenty-five my face took off in a new direction. I grew old at eight”(Donnadieu 4). She has no teenager; even she is not young in her whole life. That is why she does not use chapter to write her life, because there is no chapter in her life. Her life is a story.
Secondly, does not use chapter to write story is the style in her writing life. Donnadieu like writing no time story. It is means in her story all the things are not only limit in one time. She does not like writing story in time order. At the beginning of the story, she writes the story at present and next page she will write narration interspersed with flashbacks. Maybe after that she flashback, she uses inverted order the story. Therefore, we can not simply to use chapter to limit her novel.
This is an amazing book. When I read some second resource, it always said that her novel is very difficult for readers to read. She is a “nature writer”( I named to her). She is just wants to talk about a story and does not think about what the order should be, so when you read her book, you will be very confusing. Therefore, if you want to make some section in her story, that is a difficult things. Now I understand why there are no section in her story.
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