Lover French Novelist and Filmmaker

¶ … Lover

French novelist and filmmaker Marguerite Duras is a representative of what is known as the nouveau roman or new novel. Her real name is Marguerite Donnadieu, and she was born in 1914 and died in 1996. She was actually born in Indochina, what is now called Vietnam, and she spent most of her childhood in that region. She moved top France when she was seventeen years old and studied law and political science at the Sorbonne ("Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) para. 1).

Her novel The Lover mirrors part of her own life. In the novel, the main character is a young French girl living in Saigon in the last days of the French colonial empire, and she has an affair with a Chinese man, much as did Duras herself. She certainly knew the landscape of Indochina and brings that out in the book. She also knew the people, the mode of life, and the tensions of that part of the world during this era.

Her prose is spare and to the point. The nouveau roman writers rejected many of the traditions of the novel, such as the emphasis on plot, character, and narrative. This produced a novel that was often more impressionistic than anything else, with some of Alain Robbe-Grillet's novels appearing to be sketches for a film depiction without any external comment on the activities taking place. To a great extent, though, The Lover is a more traditional novel told internally by the protagonist. This is not the depersonalized novel of the nouveau roman but a personal account by the individual most involved, shaped by the experience of the writer.

From the fist, the reaer is in her consciousness as she considers how she grew up and aged rather abruptly when she was seventeen and how she found the whole process somewhat mysterioua: "My ageing was very sudden. I saw it spread over my features one by one, changing the relationship between them, making the eyes larger, the expression sadder, the mouth more final, leaving great creases in the forehead" (Duras 4). She sees this as a natural process and simply accepts it.

Much of the novel is expressed in the present tense, one of the characteristics of the impressionistic nouveau roman style, again as if desc5ibing for a film: "I'm at a state boarding school in Saigon. I eat and sleep there, but I go to classes at the French high school" (Duras 5). This gives the novel a certain immediacy but also gives it the quality of a remembered dream.

This girl meets the Chines man and lives out an inverted series of stereotypes because she is poor while he is wealthy, she is only playing with him while he really loves her, and she controls the relationship and not he. The normal course of a love affair between an older man and a young girl is thus changed, and similarly, Duras changes styles in order to look back on this series of events and yet see them as if they are happening now. She switches from first to third person when it suits her, taking an objective view suddenly of what ha been presented as a subjective experience.

To a great extent, the girl herself is seen as someone who yearns to escape from the confines of her life and who uses this affair as one way of doing so. He family is what she wants to escape the most. Her mother seems not to care one way or the other about her children, while her brother has assumed the role of parent and tries to dominate the girl in every way possible. She weeps with her mother at times, and much of her family life is dramatic and overdone:

They both have the same talent for anger, those black, murderous fits of anger you see only in brothers, sisters, mothers (Duras 59-60)

Her poverty is also something she would like to escape, and the wealth of her lover is a major attraction for her as she toys with his feelings not in a malicious way but simply because she can. She has no such power in her own family, but she can exercise this power when with this man.

The two meet on a ferryboat, one of the democratizing and leveling institutions where virtually everyone might be at some time or another. She begins to make her way to the Chinese section of the city to his bachelor quarters for trysts, usually at her instigation and on the basis of what she wants from him. The two go first to "one of those Chinese restaurants on several floors, they occupy whole buildings, they're as big as department stores" (Duras 47), and part of her interest in him is evident: "I ask him to tell me about his father's money, how he got rich" (Duras 47). What he tells her about providing housing for the poor and others and how he views the poor both fascinates and hurts her:

Suddenly I have a pain. Very slight, almost imperceptible. It's my heartbeat, shifted into the fresh, keen wound he's made in me... (Duras 48)

The contrasts between their living conditions are raised again and again, as are various other images that show the contrasts and that also link different time periods and attitudes. The girl may ask the man about how his fatehr's money, but her own situation is not something discussed in this manner: "one of the first things we'd learned was to keep quiet about the ruling principle of our life, poverty" (Duras 60).

Images of water about in the novel, with water representing a sort of timelessness as the river keeps flowing no matter what the human beings alongside it or on it do. The ocean as well is an eternal element that crate a soothing sameness when balanced with the turmoil of human life:

Everything flows toward the Pacific, no time for anything to sink, all is swept along by the deep and headlong sotrm of the inner current, suspended on the surface of the river's strength. (Duras 22)

The river is both a dividing line and a unifying element at the same time:

The same distance separates the lady and the girl in the low-crowned hat from the other people in the town. Just as they both look at the log avenues beside the river, so they are alike in themselves. Both isolated. (Duras 90)

Just as the story of the two loves begins on the river, so does it end there: