It is also a story that begins with a memory, as the narrator recalls her past from her old age.
It reminds me of the narrative in The Shrouded Woman, and both of them are like recollections of the past, where the story unfolds through memories rather than through a linear plot (Also, at the beginning, they both emphasize the change in their appearance!). But I think the narrator in The Lover is more like an aging woman stands in the present, repeatedly looking back at her past, interrupting it, revising it, and reconstructing it.
(I like the line: “…I think you’re more beautiful now than then.
Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your
face as it is now. Ravaged.”(pp.3)!!!)
In the text, it is not like a story that is well organized in chronological order; rather, she recalls different moments of her past through fragments of memory, constantly jumping back and forth in time. In the line, “The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any center to it. No path, no line” (p. 20), it suggests that life is not like a novel that has a clear central line that everything follows. Instead, it is composed of scattered memories and experiences that do not necessarily form a continuous narrative. Through this fragmented structure, the narrator reconstructs her past not as a fixed story, but as a series of memories that emerge at different moments, so this story is not simply telling a story, but rather repeatedly retelling and revising things that have not been told before (It is not like saving and loading a fixed memory, but more like reconstructing the past each time it is narrated).
Later on, she talks about the photograph, which does not exist. I think just because of its absence, it precisely gives the image its significance. And this implies that the meaning of the moment was not visible at the time it happened, but was constructed afterward through reflection and memory. As a result, the image becomes more than a simple record of the past: it is a reconstructed memory that gains meaning over time.
Hence, I think it does not make us think this book is not simply retelling a past that has been stored somewhere like a fixed record, but is constantly returning to the past to rethink, reinterpret, and rename what happened(?). This implies that the memory is like the untaken photograph, because the moment was never fixed as a concrete record, it remains alive in memory that can be revisited and revised again and again.
(btw, I DONT LIKE THE LOVE IN THIS BOOK AT ALL!!! It is insane… I thought this was going to be a warm and romantic love story, but it turned out to be completely different from what I expected. )
2 replies on “The Lover: memory”
This Romance Studies course is full of surprises! 🙂 Thanks for your blog post. Don’t forget to leave us a question for discussion.
“It reminds me of the narrative in The Shrouded Woman.”
What’s more, I don’t know if you noticed but on page 105 the narrator even says “I am dead”!!
Now, she may not have meant that literally, but this book of love is very definitely overshadowed (or undermined?) but the constant presence of death, both literal (e.g. the little brother’s death at 27) and figural (the relationship at the center of the book is repeatedly described as “unto death”). “Death” is indeed the book’s final word.
But it’s perhaps sensing the proximity of death (and her own old age) that the narrator–indeed, somewhat like Ana María in Bombal’s book–thinks back over her life, and the choices and accidents that have marked it, among which is this significant (if maybe also traumatic) relationship with the lover.