The push and pull: Dichotomies in the lover
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Marguerite Duras' book The Lover
- The word 'dichotomy'
- The silence and unresolved tension
- Duras and her siblings
- A significant aspect of the family's tortured love-hate relationship: The mother's love for her malicious eldest son
- The dichotomous relationship between the brother and the lover
- Conclusion
- Works cited
SummaryReading The Lover, you have the experience of sitting down with Marguerite Duras, perhaps in a dim room on a day in late summer, sipping cold tea in tall glasses, intent on hearing the story of her Chinese lover, the man she lost her innocence to many years ago as a young French girl in Indochina. It is a story she has never told before, and even before she begins to tell it you both realize that there are other stories inextricably tangled around it, stories of her mother, her brothers, of Hélène Lagonelle and Betty Fernadez and Marie-Claude Carpenter, which must also be told, which must also be heard. She cannot tell you the story of the lover without telling you about her mother's madness, her elder brother's cruelty, her younger brother's death, and her own life in Paris many years after that meeting on the ferry when the story began, when she was fifteen years old. She says she wishes she had a picture of herself on that day, incongruously dignified in a man's fedora and gold lamé shoes as she crossed the Mekong, because, she says, it is "the only [image] in which I recognize myself" (Duras, 4). You wonder why she longs for this lost photograph when her words alone are more vivid and evocative than any photograph could ever be.She takes out an old album of pictures, black and white portraits of children and people standing in bright sunlight, and hands it to you. You turn the pages as she talks, passing a picture of a dowdy woman in a courtyard with three children, a portrait of the same woman in her old age, and a snapshot of a grinning young man which she informs you, in an offhand way, is her son. "It's this photograph," she says "which comes closest to the one never taken of the girl on the ferry," and it takes you a moment to realize that "the girl" she is talking about is herself at fifteen (13). You wonder if that day on the ferry suddenly felt very far away to her, as if it had happened to a different person.
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