Lover by Marguerite Duras Though

Lover by Marguerite Duras

Though it won France's prestigious Prix Goncourt in the same year it was published, Duras re-wrote and re-published The Lover under different names no less than twice throughout her career. The subject matter, which is largely auto-biographical, was clearly difficult for her, and -- like Jacob with god -- she wrestled with the story, with how to present it, with what to present. She wrestled with the story, but perhaps mostly she wrestled with its main character: herself. It seems that, forty years later and half a world away, Duras was still attempting to define herself as an author, just as the girl in the fedora and gold lame shoes was attempting to define herself as a human being when she crossed the Mekong. For The Lover is a coming-of-age story not just for a main character, but also for an author; as the girl in the fedora thrashes against her limits, so does Duras, upending gender and literary paradigms of then and now. Carried on the muddy torrent of the slow Mekong, steeped in tea brought from foreign colonies, bogged in the flood plains and stung by mosquitoes, The Lover is a French minimalist dream set amidst the moody languor of Vietnam.

Colonial Vietnam was a thick, brooding place. "There are no seasons in that part of the world, we have just one season, hot, monotonous, we're in the long hot girdle of the earth, with no spring, no renewal." (Duras, p.5). And certainly The Lover itself is characterized only by a hot, monotonous tone, and a hot, monotonous passion. No spring and no renewal are found in these dark pages, where a girl grows old by the age of eighteen. The territory is as sleepy, dark and choleric as the story. The Mekong too is a symbol of the girl's journey into womanhood as it itself journeys to maturity: "the Mekong and its tributaries going down to the sea, the great regions of water soon to disappear into the caves of ocean," (Duras, p.10). And the girl fears the river; it's "current is so strong it could carry everything away -- rocks, a cathedral, a city," (Duras, p.11), as she fears the work and the passion that now sweep her on to maturity.

The girl begins the story with only a vague sense of herself, and sets to usurp that vagueness by usurping the family-power structure she was born to; so does Duras, perhaps with only a vague sense of herself as a writer, set to usurp the masculine dominated literature-power structure she was born to. Already, boarding the ferry across the Mekong, we see the girl's halting attempts to re-define herself separately from her family. The brownish-pink fedora -- a man's hat -- is the first symbol of this re-definition: "beneath the man's hat, the thin awkward shape, the inadequacy of childhood, has turned into something else… Suddenly it's deliberate," (Duras, p.12-13). The hat is the girl's first attempt to master her own body, and, so doing, master her family-power structure, "the hat contradicts the puny body," (Duras, p.13).

That it is a man's hat is also an expression. Throughout the story, the girl defines herself in the role of a man -- as the land-owner and wage-winner of her self and her pleasure. She makes a grab for a masculine power-role within the family, the position of the father rather than of the mother; her complex is Oedipal, not of Electra. And Duras, meanwhile, makes a grab for the masculine power of literature, asserting herself as proprietor -- land owner -- of its devices and rights.

It is important, then, to define the family-power structure the girl lives in, beginning with her mother. The mother may best be described as a manic depressive:

At a given moment everyday the despair would make its appearance. And then would follow an inability to go on, or sleep, or nothing… Or sometimes she'd be like a queen, give anything she was asked for, take anything she was offered & #8230; (Duras, p.15)

The mother's relation to the girl is couched in this erratic psychology that is ultimately ineffectual with regards to the family's livelihood. They are poor at the story's outset and remain poor but for the girl's work. The girl decides, ultimately, that as the "man" of the family the mother is hers to care for and rule. The girl has "the final, decisive knowledge that their mother was a child. Their mother never knew pleasure," (Duras, p.39). A child, certainly, but a coward also, unequal to the family's needs: "The girl knows what she's doing is what the mother would have chosen for her, if she'd dared, if she'd had the strength…" (Duras, p.25). Yet, at the story's outset, the mother is the child-tyrant of the family-power structure, afraid to take the steps necessary, and needful of a strong will to step in and take those steps. The girl's coming-of-age is largely a product of her willingness to take those steps and become the family's primary bread-winner.

At the opposite pole of the parent hierarchy lies the girl's eldest brother, mainly by virtue of his mother's disproportionate love for him above her two other offspring. If the mother is ineffectual as a bread-winner, the brother is an outright destructive force; he is a gambler and an opium addict and the mother spends the family fortune digging him out of more and more debt. And it is not enough, for the brother is compelled yet to steal; even at his mother's bedside he steals, still when he is 50 years old he steals, to support his habits. The girl's vision of her brother is most telling: "He was the sort of person who rummaged in closets, who had a gift for it, knew where to look, could find the right piles of sheets, the hiding places," (Duras, p.76). And her emotions:

I wanted to kill him, to get the better of him for once… I wanted to do it to remove from my mother's sight the object of her love… to punish her for loving him so much, so badly, and above all. (Duras, p.7)

For while he steals, while he rummages in closets, while he tries to sell his sister into prostitution, the mother upholds an untarnished, irrational love for him, and so elevates him into the father role vacated by her deceased husband.

The final element of this family structure is the younger brother, for whom the girl and her brother both feel a parental protectiveness. The older brother is cruel to the younger, and the girl blames the younger brother's death -- late in his life -- on the cruelty of her older brother.

Into the face of this dysfunction, the girl steams when she boards the ferry to Saigon from Vinh Long, and it is at this crucial moment -- on the cusp of her womanhood and first beginning to understand the needfulness of an assertion in her family-power structure -- that she meets the Chinese financier. Her relationship to the Chinese is characterized by inversions. When they first meet, she is wearing a man's hat, and he is the nervous supplicant stepping into the presence. Later, reflecting on the meeting, "she suddenly knows: she was attracted to him already on the ferry. She was attracted to him. It depended on her alone," (Duras p.37). The girl asserts that in the meeting she held the reins of power, and she holds these reins throughout their relationship, dictating its coming and going and customs. The inversion of the relationship is a gender-role reversal. In their intercourse, the girl does not receive pleasure but takes it -- she has her pleasure of him -- and inverts the male sexual role. She does this when she orders the Chinese to allow her to undress him; she does it when she becomes aware of Helene Lagonelle's body, and wishes to become the proprietor of pleasure imparted to Helene through the Chinese. Even her choice of partners asserts this inversion, the girl seeks an effeminate man: "[The Chinese's] body is thin, lacking in strength, in muscle & #8230; nothing masculine about him but his sex… he's weak, probably a helpless prey to insult, vulnerable," (Duras, p.38). And certainly one of the Chinese's chief characteristics is his cowardliness, his need for the strong hand of a "man" in his life, as evidenced by his relation to his father.

For both her family and the Chinese financier, the girl steps into this role -- becomes the "man's" strong hand and the bread-winner -- the road, however, is never smooth. Her elder brother -- who at times seems more the devil sitting on the mother's shoulder, the personification of the violent, depressive side of her personality rather than an autonomous character himself -- does not step out of his father role willingly, and not fully until after the mother is dead. By then his destructiveness has petered into an impotency, a sadness, so much so that in the book's waning passages, as the family makes their passage back to France, the elder brother is never once mentioned.