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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").
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--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.