“The Lover” @40: A Roundtable

This year I read, again, Marguerite Duras’s cult 1984 novel The Lover, first published in France 40 years ago this autumn, on a train from Paris to the South of France. The winter break, or vacances d’hiver, had just started and my carriage overflowed with surly adolescents eating pungent snacks and broadcasting loud content from their phones. This environment threw me a sharp prompt: what, age 35, was I doing still returning to a work I first read as a teenager? What, almost 15 years after it was a set text on an undergraduate French literature syllabus, still drew me to The Lover, when its premise of a scandalous affair between a 15-year-old white girl and an older wealthy Chinese man in 1920s colonized Saigon might today appear insensitive or even outright crude?

When I put this question to a group of other writers whom I knew were also subject to the novel’s rapture, both the magnetism of its sentences and its singular approach to aging, writing, and the risks of self-creation, I received many rich replies, if no definitive answers. The Lover is a text which fires a spectrum of responses: like a moonstone gem warming individually to different temperatures of touch. Initially conceived as a book of photographs commissioned by the author’s son, Jean Mascolo, who wanted his mother, infamous in France on the back of works like Moderato Cantabile (1958) and The Ravishing of Lol Stein (1964), to write captions annotating a selection of key portraits from the family album, the text was intended as a side project; a glossy supplement to an already accomplished artistic career. In its composition (between detox cures for alcoholism in Neauphle–le–Château and a 1980s Paris hospital) it exceeded, nonetheless, this brief. From its inception, The Lover was envisioned as a panorama of a life, well beyond one snapshot of it, and a consideration of the unrelenting “torrent” of desire itself, rather than a narrow ode to just one lover. Its incisive aphorisms—I have a destroyed face; I see the war in the same colors as my childhood; The sea, formless, simply incomparable—have the burnished quality of mantras. The Lover doesn’t only touch its readers. It inscribes them with an intimacy both organic and indecent, like the oversize man’s hat the young girl puts on for the ferry crossing where she catches the first glimpse of her “Chinese millionaire.”

The novel begins “in the entrance of a public place” in France, where a former male acquaintance of the now-mature narrator approaches her and tells her that he finds her “more beautiful” than when she was younger. His assessment prompts the woman to reflect on her teenage years spent in colonial Vietnam, dominated by a sexual relationship with an older man of Chinese origins (the eponymous lover) and miserable relations with her mother and two brothers. The Lover mainly charts the territory of the former bond, from the rapture of the first encounter to its souring into seedy physicality and more exploitative transactions. Yet unlike in most period accounts of exoticized, interracial love, it is the young girl who abandons her male partner. The text concludes with her taking a boat back to her native France and only hearing from the “man from Cholen” decades later via a phone call placed to her in Paris.

This winter, as my train wound through the rust-toned cliff fronts of Marseille, the landscape a stony counterpoint to The Lover’s vaporous humidity, its saturated Vietnam of rain and floods demolishing the young girl’s mother’s cultivated plot of rice fields every year, I had the brief and gloomy thought that maybe, amid global wars and widespread ecocide, it was now “too late” to read The Lover. The dialogue that I had with other readers of the text reminded me how this belatedness, or this admission of failure that the book opens itself on with such incantatory melancholy—“Very early in my life it was too late,” indeed—is perhaps exactly why, almost a half century into its existence, it still exerts the hold it does. Though I often reach for it as a kind of roadmap, one of those source texts which I imagine taught me how to read in French; and want to write; and maybe even to desire beyond the stranglehold of origins; the book, among its many other qualities, shows that we can never fully grasp the outline of a life’s unfolding. We’re always in the middle of it. Our perspective is, by definition, piecemeal and fragmented. “The story of my life … has no center … no line,” as its narrator, now a 70-year-old successful writer looking back on the untethered, questing girl she was, observes. The below responses to The Lover are one tribute to its many-pathed and never-ending maze.

—Alice Blackhurst, guest editor

Emily Wells

I first read The Lover at the same age as the protagonist. The book haunted me. Duras was attuned to precisely what disturbed me about the world: the violence embedded in the family unit and empire, ignored suffering, and the foreboding sense that we are simultaneously subject and object, our stories in both first and third person. I found naive reassurance that in the Durassian universe, the looked-at person held the power, while the person doing the looking denigrates themselves. (As her biographer Laure Adler wrote, “Often Duras speaks secretly in us—but on occasion for us.”) Rereading The Lover, now positioned between the child lover and the old woman with the ravaged face, what continues to stir me is not the love affair, but Duras’s creation born from absence: of an image, memory, and gaze.

While The Lover was originally to be titled The Absolute Image, the text is arranged around the lack of one. In describing the book’s first image, in which the now-aged protagonist imagines how she appeared to her lover as he first saw her arriving on a ferry boat in Indochina, wearing a threadbare silk dress, men’s hat, and gold lamé heels, Duras employs the terminology of photography, but is quick to reveal that the image was never captured. The constructed image is built upon shifting sand: The protagonist claims not to remember the shoes she wore during this time in her life, then clarifies that she wore canvas sandals most of the time, then specifies that in this instance she must have been wearing the gold heels. Memory is a reconstructive, creative act: The “true” memory might be irretrievable, but the factitious image she creates in place of the “authentic” one is striking—and therein lies the distance between the voice and the author’s autobiography. “The story of my life doesn’t exist”; nor does “the only image of myself I like, the only one in which I recognize myself, in which I delight.” As I grappled with writing around images which do exist, namely, the sensuous medical photographs of the late 19^th-century hysteria patients at the Salpêtrière hospital in my memoir A Matter of Appearance, Duras’s writing around the absence of an absolute image became even more important to me. In both cases, the writer and reader-voyeur collaborate on a produced image which suggests the depicted woman possessed agency which likely did not exist—and reckon with the consequences of this lack.

In this vein, Duras’s notebooks (Cahiers de la guerre, published in 2006) reveal a less seductive story than that told in The Lover: her mother essentially offered her to a wealthy Chinese man called Léo, whom Duras found physically repulsive. He spoke in clichés, made jealous, arbitrary demands, and threatened to kill her if she betrayed him. The moments they spent alone were “formal interrogations”; their first kiss made her feel “violated to my very soul.” Duras did not desire him directly, but because he desired her: “I felt [desire] as a kind of solution to all sorts of things.” The “accurate” memory, again, does not exist: “I no longer really know what I used to say to Léo. It’s so frightening, and at the same time, it isn’t very important.” In the version of the story told in The Lover, Duras eludes the violation of the relationship in the “true” story by accepting and relishing in what has been brought upon her. Still, women who succumb to the violence and rapture of passion are resigned to a grim fate: “Alone, queen-like. Their disgrace is a matter of course.” Duras writes concurrently to remember and to create something worthy of remembrance; to lose access to the truth is terrifying, and at the same time, it isn’t very important. In her notebooks, she writes of her fear of forgetting: “If I am not faithful to myself, to whom will I be?” I have come to think of Duras’s forceful propensity to self-mythologize as faithfulness to herself. The qualities of The Lover which might dishearten some readers—its fragmentary narrative, unstable point of view, and placement of absolute declarations alongside the breakdown of certitude—are attributes for those of us who count it among Duras’s works which perpetually speak in us and for us.

Emma Ramadan

Marguerite Duras’s The Lover is many things: The story of a girl and her first, much older lover. The story of a teenager embracing the latent power of her sexuality. A story of mothers and madness, desire and writing. But most of all, it is the story of the elder, 70-year-old Marguerite Duras, looking back 55 years to a pivotal moment in her life, and reckoning with its connection to everything happening to her then and everything that was to happen to her afterward. It is a sprawling explosion of life spiraling out from this one event. Duras was not limited by the conventional rules of writing, but bound to tell the truest story: Sometimes the present must veer back into the past or leap forward into the future; often narration finds itself flitting between first, second, third person; and isn’t the most interesting way to describe oneself by describing others? The Lover would not have been the masterpiece it is had it been written just after, in the heat of the moment, without the perspective and generosity that comes from many years of distance, or without the blurring of faded memories that allows for fictionalization, for crystallization. After all, sometimes the only way we can arrive at truth is through fiction.

Because this is a story of Duras through time, whenever I read the book, I relate to it in a different way. As a high schooler, I was fascinated by the idea that “you didn’t have to attract desire. Either it was in the woman who aroused it or it didn’t exist,” that I might hold this power within me, that this book was showing me how to love and to stop “waiting before the closed door.” When I read The Lover ten years later, I was more interested in the way these moments that feel like power may in fact be nothing more than an escape, a burrowing in rather than an opening out. And when I read it today, I imagine how 20, 30, 40 years from now I will still be in conversation with my own pastiche of wounds, the creases in the brow and the cracks in the skin I earned very early in life, when it was already too late.

Marouane Bakhti

Duras made much of the sea. Its waves; its blue horizons glimpsed through windows; the delta of the magistral Mekong and its surrounding swamps. Water, everywhere, appears on every page of almost all her books. It creates expanses which create landscapes which create scenes for her characters. When I read The Lover, I see sunlight on the ocean, wind and the currents of a river. These elements enshrine the girl, the Chinese man, and the mother. From them painted canvases and settings emerge.

I was also in the water when I wrote my novel How to Leave the World. I went out walking through the waterlogged woods of my childhood, through the tree trunks to sink my feet into the spongy earth full of memories. When Duras says that the young girl and her brother belong with wild beasts, that they are most at home in the forest, I feel the same. The secret life of children and of writing which springs up with the overflowing of a lake, like a river which detaches from the shore. Water which advances and withdraws is a wellspring of memories.

In The Lover, sex happens very quickly. The child gives herself over to the Chinese man. She offers herself up and doesn’t ask for money; her lover gives her it. “Full of lust,” in the fields and on the highways, the protagonist of How to Leave the World is seeking too. He is also hungry. He would give himself over to adults too, and he does so. They take a lot from him. It isn’t put exactly like this in the book but he goes about it like the young girl in The Lover. Sex and the exoticism within sex. To be a Chinese man in the eyes of the child Duras or even a young Arab boy in the eyes of the men who arrive in cars to meet the minor in How to Leave the World.

Then there is the family. The mother and the brothers in that mythic house and on that cursed plot of land. Marguerite Duras’s son, in a clip from a film he made in 1981 (Duras Shoots) that I rewatch often, asks the author why she has never written on motherly love. She replies, “I’ve spoken a lot about maternal love. It’s a calamity. It’s the greatest calamity in the whole world. … You could do anything, you could kill ten people, you could be a half-man and half-goat. I would still love you forever.” It is rare to see Duras being so tender, I find.

All this effort that we put toward loving one another, this obligation that we feel to be together, to endure time, to engender other generations, to persist. To write the family is inexhaustible. It is an infinite creative source. Why write about anything other than families?

Lauren Elkin

Something I find endlessly interesting about Marguerite Duras’s work—as a writer but also as a critic—is the fact that she revisits the same stories again and again, sometimes across different media (novels, stories, plays, films) and sometimes in the same medium. I find it absolutely astonishing that she essentially wrote the same novel three times, three different ways. She’s utterly unafraid of being accused of having a limited range, or not much to say; she just digs in again and again to what is clearly, in some form, the primal scene, the urtext of her life: a young girl on a ferry across the Mekong, meeting the eye of a wealthy man in a limousine. But what makes L’Amant stand out for me, as opposed to other tellings of this story, in Un barrage contre le Pacifique for instance, or L’Amant de la Chine du Nord, is that it’s written in the first person. It roots the narrative in something recognizable, livable, lived.

I always prefer the first person. The third always seems to announce: Look at me! I am writing fiction. The first person is more immediate. Even when completely invented, it rings more true; it is a solid, irrefutable place from which to begin. And useful in the work of a writer who so often leaves not only events open to interpretation, but the idea of interpretation itself. In Duras’s work, the image, the phrase, so often declines to land, but floats in midair, unresolvable without more information, which is usually withheld. The je of L’Amant is grounding. And I think this tension, rather than the fact that it won the Goncourt or was adapted into a commercial film, is the reason L’Amant is the Duras book everyone comes to first, and holds onto the longest.

Xiaolu Guo

Indochina Does Not Exist

At what stage in life do we begin to reflect on our sexual love? One might have sexual relations in one’s early teens but only write about it in one’s 70s, as is the case with Duras in relation to The Lover. Philip Larkin wrote humorously that his experience of sexual intercourse began in 1963, right after the ban on Lady Chatterley ended and the Beatles brought out their first album. In my case, sexual love began when China joined the WTO and after reading Duras’s work around 2001. Before that, my adolescent years were filled with a succession of violent events and loveless entanglements, fuelled by an ongoing and desperate search for intimacy.

To read a Western novel on love and sex in a communist household in China was a dramatic experience. To know there was a frank love and desire between a Chinese man and a white girl was powerful. Here gender and nationality become a crucial backdrop; race is a depressing subject when you come from the land of the “yellow peril” or any nonwhite culture.

The language Duras delivers about sex and love was important for me as a writer. It furnished a stylistic model for my early novels. Equally important is her perspective on colonialism—the power dynamic between the colonist and colonized, quite different from the didactic male or the standard historical critiques of colonization. I find it fascinating that all of her characters in the Indochina landscape were defeated, whether they were white women or yellow men. There is no winner in her narrative.

The term Indochina too was strange and curious to my ear—it’s a concept we never used for ourselves, nor to refer to other South Asian countries. It simply did not exist in Chinese. It is an invention born from a Westerner’s point of view. The term is attributed to the Danish-French geographer Conrad Malte-Brun and the Scottish linguist John Leyden in the early 1800s. The Chinese translation of “Indochina” is a transliteration—印度支那, pronounced yin-du-zhi-na, which for us is a nonsense geographical concept that neither includes China nor excludes China. It might as well be “Asia”—the largest continent, and the most populated on the planet. But none of this confused my reading experience. As a reader I felt deeply connected to the two main characters. I was at once the French girl and, even more so, the Chinese man. This mixed identification across gender and race was already a harbinger of my future mode as a novelist. The experience of reading this novel provides the possibility of multiple identifications, a quality not every novel can claim. It proved to me that as a writer and a reader I could have multiple identities, and therefore multiple lives.

Joanna Biggs

We return to The Lover again and again—for me at 18, at 34, and now at 42—because, I think, it is a book about returning to a memory we were young enough to live but not yet old enough to understand. (This is the paradox that gives rise to Simone de Beauvoir’s six volumes of memoir, and of Annie Ernaux’s slim searching ones.) Duras would keep returning to the subject because her experience of love, not just the affair she had as a lycéenne with an older, richer Chinese man in Saigon but in particular a “violent, highly erotic love affair” she had in the late 1950s, had shattered something in her: “It made me want to kill myself and that changed the way I produced literature—it was now about discovering the gaps, the blanks I had within me, and finding the courage to express them.” Her simple stories of love found and love lost, or vice versa, allowed for experimentation: paragraphs floating in white space, blacked-out film screens, memories that tessellate rather than succeed each other. Memories shift in tone and weight as you keep living, stretched to gossamer or patched over, and L’Amant knows this with such elegance, with such smoky wisdom.

Claire Foster

A dream once offered me the title of a lecture called “The Durational Pasts of Marguerite Duras.” The lecture did not exist, but it named itself durational. Now, considering L’Amant forty years after its publication in French in 1984, I dream another: “The Durational Image in The Lover.” It’s a book I remember in the same way its narrator remembers the dress she was wearing in a photograph that does not exist: “It’s a dress I remember.” Duras colors the scene pink: “I often think of the image only I can see now, and of which I’ve never spoken. It’s always there, in the same silence, amazing. It’s the only image of myself I like.”

I remember The Lover by the word “image.” The word “image” is what this book has most importantly demonstrated for me: the luxurious possibility of a sentence to imagine, or image, a memory—to fabricate silk with language and snag it with description. Even this phrase, “the word image,” has the oxymoronic texture of the line that the narrator repeats at various points, “the photograph never taken.” The girl on the ferry is the narrator, is Duras, is the word girl.

I first read The Lover as a teenager ignorant of sex and world history. It shouldn’t matter that I read this book before I had sex, but this fact haunted my first reading, so completely was I humiliated by being older than its narrator but less acquainted with desire. It’s a readerly humiliation I remember. It matters, too, that I knew nothing about French colonization in Vietnam because it illuminates my status as a white American born in the Midwest; and it also matters that like the narrator, my mother was poor, but I never went hungry, and I sometimes wore “bargains, final reductions bought for me by my mother.”

I learned French as an undergraduate. And despite having gone on to translate books from French—despite having once drafted the theatrical proposition that the French language came to me as an image of gold lamé heels—I have only ever read The Lover in Barbara Bray’s English. I note, too, that blooming across the cover of nearly every English edition of this book I’ve encountered is a photograph of Marguerite Duras as a young person, not yet “already old,” soft cheeks pressed against the famous opening passage about the narrator’s now-ravaged face.

The narrator remembers the dress that she was wearing in the photograph that was never taken of the girl on the ferry and I remember every word that describes the dress. I also remember the leather belt, the gold lamé high heels, and the man’s hat upon which “the crucial ambiguity of the image” is hinged. The Lover is nearly always foregrounded as being “about” a scandalous affair. But I never remember much of anything about the lover in The Lover, nor do I remember any of the language used to describe the affair between the narrator, a white French girl, and the older Chinese millionaire. This feels like a failure of reading and remembering until I turn pages and realize that the description of the affair does not begin until a third of the way into the novel. The first third of the novel is an inventory of an outfit, a declaration of a mother, and the invention of a photograph.

I am the daughter of a poor mother and a desirer of dresses, and this informs what I remember. Duras teaches me not to resist duration, to sink into origin: “The image lasts all the way across.” The girl in the photograph that was never taken will always be on the ferry, and I will always be reading, and thinking of wearing, her afterimage.

Olivia Baes

Who has not straddled time? Who has not felt the pull of those limbs that once were the glowing promise of a bright future body? We forever straddle the image of what we once were and of what we become. And those bodies—whether real or imagined—echo to one another in a correspondence only few have dared to record. Marguerite Duras is one of those straddlers. And The Lover, of all her books, is the most poignant record of such correspondence.

I believe there is a 15-year-old girl in each and every woman. In the last two decades, mine has been so pervasive that my friends and I named her Shadow. Shadow throws occasional paper planes at my head. In my worst moments, which are hers, I tell lovers she has taken the reins. And so, when I re-read The Lover nearly 20 years later, I could not help but think: It was not quite Duras who had written it, it was her very own Shadow, an inner-girl who took the reins to craft a paper plane so powerful it became one of the 20th-century’s most audacious novels. Later, stumbling upon an interview with Duras I had not previously read, I saw she directly alluded to this past self when speaking about the book. She referred to writing The Lover as some kind of possession. For her, it was clear, the text had been written by “someone I thought I no longer knew and who I had allowed to run free.” (Nouvel Observateur)

In The Lover, 15-year-old Duras has flickers of her future self. A future self who would escape the suffocating structure of her family through writing. It’s as if 15-year-old Duras is already writing The Lover, as if her limbs are not only of flesh but of paper. She feels the coming of those hybrid limbs, of their power. She already knows: To craft herself through writing will be her only way out of the desert of her current existence. She, Duras, will make it to more fertile and powerful lands. She, Duras, is already learning: That this power—the fertility of artistic creation—is not readily accessible to her gender. She, Duras, will have to wrangle it for herself. And this wrangling will prove to be difficult. For Duras, already, this power is not only the power of words. It is the power of rhythm. And it’s that rhythm—the many different pangs of her body as it moves through the world—the 15-year-old Duras begins to store up for the writing to come. It feels significant that her realizations on the power of writing come at a moment when young Duras first understands the power of the image. How the image you craft as a woman can attract the danger of desire and judgment. How a color—in the case of Duras, a cherry red on her lips—can set off an obsession.

What moved me the most on my last re-reading was to realize that the young body’s prophecy had come true: that writing, in fact, had transpired. That it had allowed the young body to escape the harsh reality it had endured. That writing had kept Duras alive, and through everything: deaths, divorces, and the destruction of war. Because the prophecy of writing was my own life vest at 15, The Lover touched me more as the woman who now carried that 15-year-old girl, than the 15-year-old girl who read it the first time around. Forty years later, Duras’s book is still an ode to the power of writing. The power of writing over everything: over time, over society’s boxes—one of which, of course, is the all-powerful image. It is proof that if you write your forgotten body into existence, you regain some power over its former entrapment. A realization which, today, in a world bursting with Instagram boxes, seems important. No matter how silent our images may seem, they all brim with the promise of a voice and its rhythm.

Rebecca Liu

Knowing a little about the furor that followed its publication, I had started reading The Lover expecting a bold story of unapologetic self-affirmation (reflecting, perhaps, our modish contemporary values about women artists, who tend to be celebrated as superhuman and stereotype-busting: “Here is the superlatively courageous woman boss, pushing past the historic sexism of her era!”) What I found instead was a seemingly unassuming and ambivalent voice keenly attuned to type, to expectation, and how the passage from girlhood to womanhood is often a matter of moving from the idyll seer to the knowingly seen, featuring some sort of interpolation by a man. The Lover knows about the power of the image; how it can tyrannize, how it can affirm. It begins with an image of the narrator at 15, on a boat crossing the Mekong river. The girl has already begun to understand the imperative of self-curation. The brownish-pink fedora that she is wearing showed her the way. When she tries it on for the first time, “Suddenly I see myself as another, as another would be seen, outside myself, available to all.” When her lover first brings her back to his flat, she asks “him to do as he usually does with the women he brings to his flat.” The suggestion is that child (and that is how the narrator frequently describes herself—as a child) is on the cusp of something immense, something that will transform her beyond anything she’s known. But of course, such passages take place in the shadow of everything that’s gone before; the other children asking to be treated as women, to be done what has been done to all the others.

It would be simplistic, and really not the point, to evaluate the novel against the rubric of empowered/not empowered, stereotype/individual, et cetera, and so determine its value. The truth is more interesting. Life is a series of capitulations and rebellions. We fail each other; we fail ourselves. It’s remarkable how love, in The Lover, turns on a knife’s edge to hate. Violence is everywhere, no more so in the narrator’s own family. Her mother’s madness lingers over the family; her brother’s spiteful need for dominance poisons the well. “It’s a family of stone, petrified so deeply it’s impenetrable,” the narrator says. There is no catharsis, no resolution for the family—just deaths, and lingering questions passing into the ether. I don’t know why it came as a shock to realize that Duras had written the novel at 70. What does a life look like, on the other side? Mothers who remain impenetrable mysteries; childhood friends lost to time; lovers weaving into view, with affairs that were rousing, reckless, marked indelibly on the mind. Everything happened; it’s all over. Everything remains still.

“The Lover” @40: A Roundtable

Being reviewed: