Marguerite Duras’novel The Lover, was set in the pre-war Indochina. It is a haunting tale of a relationship between two outcasts, the young French girl and her lover, the wealthy Chinese man during the French colonial period.
Many believed that the novel was based on the life of Duras who like the narrator of the story was born and raised in the French Indochina and returned to France in their late teens.
The story is told as a remembrance of the past where events that happened and memories that were deeply embedded in her mind are often seen intertwined in her work. The reader at some point may question whether these events really transpired or just a mere product of the author’s imagination, thus, making it more appealing and engaging.
There is a repetition of words and phrases in the novel that highlights the variations of mood, memory and language that makes the reader analyze the relationship between memory and forgetting; since memory is seen here as transitory. It is in remembering that changes the dynamics of memory by building a new set of memory that sometimes leave details that constitute truth and reality.
The setting was considered significant since Indochina was referred to a large part of Southeast Asia which is now known as Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. During the French Colonial Period these areas was ruled and governed by France.Like most colononialists, the French administrators and their families established the colonial empire. Likewise in the situation of the other Asian colonies where there were cases of intermarriages which produced half-breeds or mixed ethnic cultures often resulted to an obscured identity. They were born and bred in Indochina but they still keep their French identity because they belong to the ruling class and by maintaining their French identity they exert power over the natives of the land.
The narrator of the story social class and race delineates her perception of being different from the native people whom she lived with and that the gap (that she, being French and white) that separates her from the rest is removed because of her family’s poverty.
With regards to the nature of the narrator’s relationship to her lover, he is also an outcast just like her. The Chinese in Southeast Asia started as merchants and then became landowners and later on successful bankers and financiers. One has to consider the Chinese man has a different ethnic background with the natives of Indochina just like the narrator but the difference is that the Chinese man is rich and an heir to a wealthy fortune; he is also expected to follow the family’s customs and tradition of marrying a suitable bride and unlike her, she was dirt poor. She had nothing to depend on but her own self. But somehow their affair that began that day at the ferry crossing the Mekong river- two people reaching out having different solitudes and different cultures, they share a commonality: both are strangers in a foreign land. Over a period of time the two became intimately acquainted. Throughout the novel, the China man acknowledges his love for the young French girl, “He started to suffer here in this room, for the first time, he’s no longer lying about it. He says he knows already she’ll never love him. She lets him say it. At first she says she doesn’t know. Then lets him say it. He says he’s lonely, horribly lonely because of this love he feels for her” (Duras, 37).
It may seem that the young French girl didn’t love her Chinese lover because she often refuses to deal with her emotions when she is with her lover partly because of pride. That in their time it was considered that a white girl should not fall in love with someone different in this case with someone who is Chinese. But all these differences disappears when they go to the China man’s “Bachelor Room” , a street level apartment in a busy Chinese district in Cholon where they often meet up for a tryst. “The Chinese lover moans and weeps. In dreadful love…And weeping he makes love. At first, pain. And then the pain is possessed in its turn, changed slowly drawn away, borne toward pleasure, clasped to it” (Duras, 38). Having each other in the four corners of the room, nothing else matters, it is an escape from their troubled world and the reality that both lovers are doomed (The China man was arranged to marry a rich Chinese woman and the French girl was poor and had to rely solely on herself to ascend from the dictates of society). They could just hang unto the idea that they have each other even if for fleeting moments of desire, love and lust.
There was a high point in the novel where it showed that both lovers found happiness in a strange, foreign land. The French girl’s unmistakably happiness when she is with her China man when they go out fashionably at nights to expensive restaurants where he showers her with lavish gifts, food and attention. The Chinese man having an impeccable breeding and outstanding generosity takes out the French girl’s family to dinner. Although treated rudely by the girl’s elder brother, the China man maintains his calm demeanor.
The China man was looked down upon by the girl’s family for being Chinese. They never greeted him or spoke to him as a first person. They don’t talk about the affair, consider it as pride, racism but for many identity can only be maintained as taboo (Russell, 4).
Towards the end of the affair, there was an instance where both “lovers bathe together in the cool water of the jars, they kissed and wept…and then she told him not to have regrets…that she refused to stay with him and she did not give any reasons” (Duras, 83).
They still went to the flat in Cholon after the China man’s wedding and it was the time that it was agreed that the French girl should go back to France and continue her studies there. They behave as usual, him giving her a shower with the water from the jars and carrying her to bed (Duras, 113) but this time he can no longer make love to her because he knows deep in his mind that he will soon lose her- she who was his lover, his woman, his child as he often referred to her.
Like any doomed love affair, it leaves a bitter sweet memory where one must move on and learn from such experience of pain, fraught and love. The experience of a young girl who undeniably had fallen in love with the China man, she who was too proud to accept the truth that she lost perhaps the love of her life and all the bottled up emotions she kept to herself was wasted. Nevertheless, one must draw strength from one’s weakness to build a new life and that what she did, she became a stronger and better person.
I would like it to end it in a passage from the novel which said:
“One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said, “I’ve known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you were beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.” (Duras, 1)
The novel is in itself a lyrical poetry, where human emotions were presented by a woman-child with such eloquence and power that leaves the readers breathless.
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