Jana Evans Braziel, Assistant Professor
229B Mc Micken Hall
Department of English and Comparative Literature
University of Cincinnati
ML 210069
Cincinnati, OH 45221-0069
Office # (513) 556-0834
Fax # (513) 556-5960
jana.braziel@uc.edu
evans_braziel@hotmail.com

Questions on Durasí The Lover

•  What is the relationship between memory and forgetfulness in Durasí 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 -- in Duras' autobiography?
• Consider the following quote 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).
• The sea (mer) is an important symbol in the novel, as is the Mekong river. What is the importance of images of water in the autobiographical text? What other images of water are important in the novel -- consider the house-cleaning episode where buckets of water are tossed onto the floor (60-2). Compare the images of fluidity to the converse images of aridity in the novel -- the mother as "desert" (45, cf. 57); her own face as "ravaged" at the end of her life?
• Why is the ferry significant? symbolic? The traversal across water, reiterated again at the end of the novel in the boat trip back to France, suggests a traversal across border, boundaries. What borders are crossed by Duras in the novel? Which borders are crossed only to be re-traversed again and again? Which borders are permanently crossed? How is the novel a rite of passage.
• How does Duras incorporate the body into her writing? Is the body the ësiteí of the written text? or is it the "space" or "site" from which the text arises?
• Consider the following quote 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).