Tag Archives: desire

03/11/24

An Illicit Affair of Adolescence – The Lover

   “Everything flows towards the Pacific, no time for anything to sink, all is swept along by the deep and head-long storm of the inner current, suspended on the surface of the river’s strength” (Duras 22)

 

To fully understand what is happening in this novel, one must observe the disturbing content embedded.

The Lover is a story about an illicit affair between a young girl and an older man who just so happens to be Chinese. While on paper, many readers can assume that this entanglement is the worst of the novel. The young girl’s mother is incredibly abusive as well as her older brother is extremely violent and filled with rage.

With that out of the way, The Lover is a good book. I am not justifying these actions, but they serve as somewhat of an autobiographical retelling of this hidden love. The two titular lovers have not just age but race against them. This is what portrays such a complex narrative. The lovers are sharing an interracial relationship, thereby fighting against the prejudices stacked against them. When meeting for the first time at a dinner, there is an underlying tension as her “brother gorge themselves without saying a word to him” (Duras 51). While it is not said the two are in a relationship, the white brothers are still hesitant to this ‘outsider’. The book’s themes are so nuanced that readers can find themselves connecting with taboo characters like the older lover. He is an example of the wealth of narratives in this novel–Duras is so precise to flesh out everyone’s stories, because this is her authentic life.

Hence, the novel begins as Marguerite’s leap into a sexual awakening. It is another coming-of-age story except with a focus on love and desire. In the end, her and her lover don’t end up together–the latter’s father forbidding the son from marrying a white girl. It becomes a fleeting memory that has ached in Duras’s chest for a long time.

Between her sexual revelation, Duras becomes aged to the world–not in the sense of no longer being a virgin but in finally witnessing the true world. She is not afraid to release her true experiences, no matter how risqué. This novel serves as a woman trying to recollect her life–the sudden jumps between times indicate an authentic portrayal of memory.

My review comes up short because the book was so…complex.

Good books can have you writing long passages, carefully analyzing every detail, or it can have you sitting on the floor, trying to understand the emotional turmoil the book carried you along for.

I would say this book broke me, but that is a very dramatic statement.

 

“I see the war as I see my childhood. I see wartime in the reign of my elder brother as one. Partly, no doubt, because it was during the war that my younger brother died: his heart, as I’ve said, had given out, given up. As for my elder brother, I don’t think I ever saw him during the war. By that time it didn’t matter to me whether he was alive or dead. I see the war as like him, spreading everywhere, breaking in everywhere, stealing, imprisoning, always there, merged and mingled with everything, present in the body, in the mind, awake and asleep, all the time, a prey to the intoxicating passion of occupying that delightful territory, a child’s body, the body of those less strong, of conquered peoples. Because evil is there, at the gates, against the skin” (Duras 62-63)

 

Discussion Question

By titling the book The Lover, what is Duras really trying to convey? (Hint, it’s not about love)

How is the archetype of a “Lover” used to redefine Duras’s experiences? Can we argue that she is acting in opposition to this role? Or is she perhaps commenting on those loves that are not romantic per say?

 

Bonus

This book is severely uncomfortable in its themes, so please enjoy my message to society (the following is a joke)

Why must we, as a distinguished society, cast a shadow on fedoras? I prominently wore fedoras as a child and looked adorable. Case in point, here is proof from my father’s facebook – Gabby

 

03/5/24

The Hour of the Star, starring Macabéa, the Typist, Virgin, and Coca-Cola Fan. Et tu brute?!

“But who am I to rebuke the guilty? The worst part is that I have to forgive them. We must reach such a nothing that we indifferently love or don’t love the criminal who kills us. But I’m not so sure of myself:  I have to ask, though I don’t know who can answer, if I really have to love the one who slays me and ask who amongst you slays me. And my life stronger than myself, replies that it wants revenge at all cost and replies that I must struggle like someone drowning, even if I die in the end. If that’s the way it is, so be it” (Lispector 72)

 

How do I even try to comprehend this novel?

 

Macabéa, the titular character who is not named until at least halfway into the novel, is strange. Frequently described as dumb, Macabéa is someone who “doesn’t know herself except from living aimlessly” (Lispector 7). If she were to contemplate her existence wondering, “Who am I?’ She would fall flat on her face” (Lispector 7). Within these opening remarks from the narrator, we can infer his self-righteous nature. He cannot fathom the very being of Macabéa, or at least he cannot understand her.

“It’s a fear that those whose sense of self is rooted in knowing often have about those perceived to be unknowing” (Minor)

The entire creation of Macabéa in the narrator’s eyes reminded me of Nadja; Breton also created a woman to redirect his insecurities. Thus, the narrator portrays his own self-isolation onto Macabéa. He claims that he “ha[s] to seek a truth that is beyond [him]” (Lispector 12). It is a desire to understand the girl who exists as nothing. But nothing is something; the very nature of there being nothing implies its very existence.

“All roads are blocked to a philosophy which reduces everything to the word ‘no.’ To ‘no’, there is only one answer, and that is ‘yes.’ Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing. Man lives more by affirmation than by bread” (Sorenson, From Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables)

Leaving the academic philosophical lecture aside, the book is a more extensive commentary on humanity; what does it mean to be human? Who am I?

Previously, I touched upon the narrator’s desire to understand Macabéa. This one theme is central to the short novel because everyone around her seems to be trying to make sense of her. We see the explosive attitude of Olímpico, the somewhat helpful Glória, or even the mystical fortune teller. Everyone exists around her to eliminate her individuality or, rather, her lack of it; the narrator describes her as “a dispensable cog” (Lispector 21). But she is nothing of the sort. Macabéa’s very own identity contrasts with society’s. We can see her “possess[ing] a keen ability to see beyond the structures that everyone else lives by” (Berry). She existed “ in [an] impersonal limbo, without reaching the worst or the best.” (Lispector 15). To be frank, she just was. 

Macabéa is a being that just exists. She watches the little things, narrowing her view onto a small speck in the entire universe. Living a quaint life can never changed for the girl; “Just as you could be sentenced to death, the fortune teller sentenced her to life” (Lispector 70), and it is when she truly started living that she died. 

This novel may be one of the strangest things I’ve ever read. A closer look envelops all these heavy philosophical topics tucked under 80 pages.

Quick quote about Greta Garbo: “There was a reason, beyond the exertions of the Hollywood publicity machine, that a single line she uttered in one movie—“I want to be alone”—became so fused with her image.”

 

Discussion Question

What truly makes a life ‘meaningful’?

 

Works Cited

Gerry, Rachel. “Writing the Void: A Review of Clarice Lispector’s “The Hour of the Star” Prism Online, 2021, https://prismmagazine.ca/2021/05/27/writing-the-void-a-review-of-clarice-lispectors-the-hour-of-the-star/

Minor, Abby. “That Full Void’: Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star.” AGNI, 2021 https://agnionline.bu.edu/review/that-full-void-clarice-lispectors-the-hour-of-the-star/

Sorensen, Roy, “Nothingness”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2023/entries/nothingness/

Talbot, Margaret. “What Was So Special About Greta Garbo?” The New Yorker, 2021 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/13/what-was-so-special-about-greta-garbo

 

01/29/24

A State of Temporary Limbo – The Shrouded Woman

“And now she desires nothing more than to remain there crucified to the earth, suffering and enjoying in her flesh the ebb and flow of distant, far distant tides; feeling the grass grow, new islands emerge, and on some other continent, the unknown flower bursting open that blooms only on a day of eclipse. And she even feels huge suns boiling and exploding and gigantic mountains of sand tumbling down, no one knows where” (259)

No matter how much you try, one cannot escape the cold grasp of death. It is a fate that Ana Maria so desperately tries to challenge. The “Shrouded Woman” is an unescapable march to the afterlife. The section of the novel presents itself as the tragic retelling of Ana Maria’s tragic life. The all around emotion of this book is despair. There are many instances of “what could have been” – the general structure of this book seeming like a final goodbye, which it is. At the beginning some may call Ana Maria whiny; exhibiting a general distain for life. However, reading deeper, Ana Maria’s life is that of a Shakespearean Tragedy.

Despair fills her entire view: her daughter-in-law dying by suicide; her husband “tolerating” her; the summer romance shared and never again fulfilled. “Isn’t it strange a love that can humiliate, can do nothing but humiliate” (205). Her hopeful wishes are torn down every chance; Ana Maria symbolically is hiding herself (shrouding) in gloom. 

Following the end of the story, we are shown a glimpse into Ana Maria’s relationship with god. This quote is a summary of her pain: “The Garden of Eden! Poor Ana Maria! Your whole life was nothing but a passionate search for that Garden of Eden, lost irretrievably, however, by man!” (254). She is cursed with the journey to find Eden; to find lust, desire, perhaps love. But, at every turn, she is tricked. She cannot find the garden because it has been overtaken by the selfish nature of man. Ricardo will never love her as she loved him; Antonio will always be resentful, barely tolerating his wife; and Fernando, the yearning of a true friend. 

 

Limbo: in an uncertain or undecided state or condition (Merriam-Webster)

This is where Ana Maria is, until the end of the novel. She teeters dead; on the edge of remembrance and disappearance. It is the fate of the Shrouded woman: to recount the live moments of her deadly life. She can rest, knowing that her second death is here.

“I swear it. The woman in the shroud did not feel the slightest desire to rise again. Alone, she would at last be able to rest, to die. For she had suffered the death of living. And now she longed for total immersion, for the second death, the death of the dead” (259)

 

Discussion Question:

The Shrouded Woman is a play on two meanings: one being literally shrouding herself (wrapping the woman up for death) and additionally shrouding the self (hiding from the world). Why do you think Bombal emphasizes this point so hard? It is a further commentary on death and life and the similarities between the two?

 

This painting I have here is one by Claude Monet entitled: “Camille Monet on her Deathbed”. It is a painting of his late wife who tragically died at 32. This painting represents the reality of death: corpses decay as death is inevitable. It is a painting of true despair