The Lover - Blog Prompt:

I am posting these as a blog prompt, but they are all suggested topics for you research paper. You may choose to answer any of them in the blog as a way of beginning to think about your papers. Please post AT LEAST 4-5 paragraphs.



1. What is the relationship between memory and forgeting in Duras’ The Lover? What role does photography play in the remembrance of the past? What is the significance of the various images—both photographic ones and ones indelibly etched in the mind?
Consider the following quotation by Carol Hoffman from Forgetting and Marguerite Duras (University of Colorado Press, 1991):
"The repetition of situations, events, memories, and words abounds in Duras’s texts. This repetition seems to emphasize the changing, unstable aspect of memory and language and move the reader to question his or her own memory and examine the dynamics of forgetting. . . . memory is seen as volatile and impossible. It is a movement toward the ever-elusive and often painful ‘impossible,’ the ‘vide’ [‘void’/‘emptiness’], the ‘manque’ [‘lack’], what Jacques Lacan called ‘le réel’ [the real]. It is a remembering that destroys memory and leads to a new memory, which can replace the last only fleetingly and without substance . . . a refusal of convention or disguise, as a unity of thought and will, life and appearance" (35-6).


2. How does Duras incorporate the body into her writing? Is the body the ‘site’ of the written text? or is it the ‘space’ or ‘site’ from which the text arises?
Consider the following quotation by Leslie Hill in Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires (London & New York: Routledge, 1993):
"For Duras as for Barthes, the body is not a mode of self-identity: the body is a figure of madness, not self-possession. It is not an essence or nature, but a reverse of an essence or nature; it is a name for that which provokes crisis in the realm of representation by producing irreducible difference. And what it denotes most of all, in Duras as in Barthes, is desire" (30).


3. Marguerite Duras's The Lover is narrated from the points of view of age and youth. Although the "older" voice gives perspective and shapes the representation of the youthful self, this is not simply a dialogue or contrast between youth and age. They are intertwined in ways that suggest equally that as the artist recreates the teenage speaker, the latter has given birth to the voice of the artist. The novel chronicles loss (of family, innocence, a great love), mourning, and discovery. The speaker’s re-creation of what she has lost, with frequent references to death, suggest a process of remembering and mourning in her writing. Psychoanalyst Henry Krystal describes adolescence as a transition into adulthood and a time when an individual develops the ability to grieve (63). In this portrait of her development as an adolescent, Duras chronicles her growing capacity to grieve as she tells of individuating herself from her anguished family. Her increased independence coincides with discovering she wants to be a writer, a vocation which provides her the means to frequently revisit this period of trauma and loss the in the book (1) While The Lover tracks a time of transition and a time of loss, it is also during this time that the speaker develops her creative imagination, her ability to relate to others outside of her family, and experiences alienation and sexuality, which all help her transition towards an adult identity. In your essay, explore the ways in which the process of growth and mourning are inextricably bound together and mutually generating in her text.


4. One major theme in the novel is that of transgression - of going beyond or overstepping some boundary. The speaker transgresses, in the sense of "going over" or "going across," when she crosses the Mekong. She transgresses, in the sense of "violating some moral law," by commencing and continuing her affair with her Chinese lover. The family transgresses societal expectations just by virtue of their poverty, and then because of that poverty, by silently condoning the speaker's relationship with her lover. The family transgresses familiar/family ideals: they are not the archetypal loving and supportive family. The style of the novel transgresses traditional temporal/chronological plot structures - i.e. the narrative weaves between the past and the present, using the present tense and past tense to describe the same moments in time. Pastness is collapsed into present, but at the same time, without the past being the past, the speaker would have no subject on which to reflect. What do you think is the importance of transgression? How, as a theme, does it characterize the novel's subject, its style, and its purpose?



Some Useful Places to Look:

1. Marguerite Duras: Apocaliypic Desire, by Leslie Hill
http://books.google.com/books?id=9UYOAAAAQAAJ&dq=Marguerite+Duras+Lover+essay+questions&printsec=frontcover&source=in&hl=en&ei=FF3aSeO6KaTNlQe4tOXFDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=12#PPP1,M1

2. Marguerite Duras, by Renate Gunther
http://books.google.com/books?id=_MZhsT4W7KcC&dq=Marguerite+Duras+Lover+essay+questions&printsec=frontcover&source=in&hl=en&ei=cGTaScv9I9vtlQfro_HCDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=11#PPP1,M1

3. "Image" and Absence in Marguerite Duras' "L'Amant"
by Nina S. Hellerstein
Modern Language Studies, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Spring, 1991), pp. 45-56, Published by: Modern Language Studies (You can find it on JSTOR)