The Lover by Marguerite Duras

First published:L’Amant, 1984 (English translation, 1985)

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: New Novel

Time of plot: Late 1920’s through 1940’s

Locale: Indochina and France

Principal characters

• The Narrator, the novel’s protagonist and author
• Her Mother,
• Her Older Brother,
• Her Younger Brother,
• Her Lover, a wealthy young Chinese man

The Story:

A man tells the narrator that she is more beautiful now that she is old and her face is ruined than she had been as a young woman. While thinking about this unusual comment, the narrator begins to remember her unhappy family and her scandalous first love affair. Abruptly she changes in age. No longer an old woman, she is once again fifteen and a half, riding a ferry across the Mekong River in what was then French Indochina.

As a girl, she attends both the state boarding school in Saigon and a French high school because her mother is ambitious for her future. All of the family’s hopes and chances for success depend on her; she has two brothers, but, unfortunately, both are unreliable. The older brother is a drug addict who steals from his own family and has such a negative effect on his two siblings that his parents eventually send him back to France. The younger brother has a different problem: He is simply too sensitive and weak to achieve worldly success.

Telling her story, the narrator shifts fluidly between the present and the past, referring to old photographs and memories as though she is thumbing through a family album. In one photo of her, taken when she was still a fifteen-year-old virgin, she has the face of a sexually experienced woman. In another memory, she recalls a favorite outfit that also makes her appear prematurely worldly; she is wearing it on the day she meets the young Chinese man who becomes her first lover.

When she was very young, she knew that she wanted to be a writer, but her mother discouraged her. A math degree would be much more practical for a girl who was going to have to support her family. She earns an income, however, in a way that her mother had not foreseen. She becomes essentially a prostitute, accepting money from her lover in return for sleeping with him.

Although her lover is older and wealthier, and has had many sexual experiences, her power over him is far greater than his over her. She feels intense sexual desire for him, but no love. He, on the other hand, genuinely loves her, and he is acutely aware that his feelings are not matched by hers. She revels in her ability to give less to him than she receives in return, and also in the knowledge that she could have this same power over other men. Their first sexual encounter takes place in Cholon, the Chinese district of Saigon. Their lovemaking is characterized by his tears and her joyous discovery of physical pleasure.

Once her family members become aware of the affair, they treat him rudely, as he expected they would. He buys them expensive dinners in restaurants, and they refuse to speak to him. Her rudeness to the contrary, the narrator’s mother, in general, approves of the affair. Although it has ruined her daughter’s chances of marrying within the local white community, it has resulted in money for the family. One day, however, the mother’s fragile mental stability collapses; she locks her daughter in her room and, in a frenzy, proceeds to beat her.

The narrator begins spending nights with her lover instead of sleeping at her boarding school. When she is caught she is not punished, but instead is allowed to come and go as she pleases. She is European, so she is granted special privileges that the native-born Indochinese students cannot have. Official sanction of her behavior does not stop the nasty things that are said about her by the teachers and other students, but the sight of a large diamond ring on her left hand does, even though everyone knows she is not actually engaged.

Her romance unravels after her lover’s father suffers an illness. When the father recovers, he makes plans to send the narrator away to France so that his son can forget her and begin the search for a suitable Chinese bride. In her usual contrary fashion, she sides with the father rather than with her lover, who is by then desperately in love with her. Eventually, however, her lover realizes that it is best that she leave Indochina. Even if they were somehow miraculously to be married, she would still inevitably abandon him.

The way her lover touches her body changes. She begins to seem more like his child than his lover, and so he becomes more tender and less ravenously passionate. The change intensifies once the date for her voyage to France is set, and he becomes physically unable to make love to her. Despairing, they try to stop seeing each other, but they cannot.

In a scene much like their first meeting, her lover comes to see her sail away, watching her from inside his long, black car. Later, she hears that he obeyed his father and married a rich Chinese woman. She wonders how long it was before her lover could bear to make love to his new wife, and if he did so thinking of her. After many years, her questions receive a kind of answer. Near the end of his life, the lover visits Paris, the city in which she lives. Over the telephone he tells her that he has always loved her and will always love her, even unto death.

Bibliography

Angelini, Eileen M. “Marguerite Duras’ L’Amant and Other ’Autofictional Narratives.’” In Strategies of “Writing the Self” in the French Modern Novel: C’est moi, je crois. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001. Analysis of The Lover focuses on the autobiographical elements in the novel.

Callahan, Anne. “Vagabondage: Duras.” In Remains to Be Seen: Essays on Marguerite Duras, compiled by Sanford Scribner Ames. New York: Peter Lang, 1988. Readable scholarly essay celebrates The Lover as a groundbreaking work of feminist erotica. Part of a section that includes three other essays on The Lover.

Crowley, Martin. Duras, Writing, and the Ethical: Making the Broken Whole. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Closely examines all of Duras’s written works, focusing on the ethical questions that arise out of experiences of both passion and excess.

Duras, Marguerite, and Xaviere Gauthier. Woman to Woman. Translated by Katharine A. Jensen. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. Collection reprints five interviews that were begun as an assignment for the French newspaper Le Monde in 1974. Duras and Gauthier discuss writing and feminism, among many other related topics. Duras’s discussion of syntax is of particular interest to readers of her novels. An afterword addresses the cultural context within which Duras wrote.

Glassman, Deborah N. Marguerite Duras: Fascinating Vision and Narrative Cure. London: Associated University Presses, 1991. Contains an interesting discussion of The Lover that relates the novel’s visual imagery to Duras’s filmmaking style. Quotes Duras extensively in French, with English translations.

Schuster, Marilyn R. Marguerite Duras Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1993. Provides an outstanding overview of Duras scholarship and Duras’s work. Explains why Duras is an important figure in French culture and how her written works are related to one another.

Solomon, Barbara Probst. “Indochina Mon Amour.” The New Republic, September 9, 1985. Offers strong, opinionated political analysis of The Lover. Memorably describes Duras’s political views, their impact on her work, and her involvement in the French Resistance during World War II.

Willging, Jennifer. Telling Anxiety: Anxious Narration in the Work of Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, Nathalie Sarraute, and Anne Hébert. Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Analyzes the representation of anxiety in the works of the four women writers, explaining how their depictions reflect postwar skepticism about the ability of language to express the death and destruction of World War II.

Winston, Jane Bradley. Postcolonial Duras: Cultural Memory in Postwar France. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Examines Duras’s role as an intellectual force in a colonizing power, particularly valuable in the light of her early life in French Indochina and her continued use of the region as a setting. Includes discussion of The Lover.