Tag Archives: memory

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

 

01/14/24

A Reflection of Hazy Memories: “Combray” by Proust

“And in the same way, also, the thoughts of the dying are quite often turned toward the aspect of death that is real, painful, dark, visceral, toward the underside of death, which is in fact the side it presents to them and so harshly makes them feel, and which more closely resembles a crushing burden, a difficulty breathing, a need to drink, than what we call the idea of death” (84)

It is within the rouse of a dream that creates feelings of uncertainty. Your mind is foggy while your body is still adjusting to rest. In the first volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time comes Swann’s Way– a novel that encapsulates fleeting childhood memories in a reflective future. Readers are first introduced to the narrator through a hazy fit of reminiscence. This first section– “Combray”– feels like we are entering a dream. The time is non-linear and seems to jump around based on the memory proposed. The memories themselves feel as though they are locked up in his mind. He must swim through these scattered thoughts to recount his life or his own state of being. 

Structurally, the book seems complicated. There are passages of long sentences that are seemingly endless. But, it is within their continuous length that I found very profound. The wealth of these sentences was coupled with elaborate metaphors to dictate the fragmented memory of dreaming. Having an overarching series about searching for lost time is what introduces us to the narrator and his long-winded mind. The very essence of memories is entrapped by the curse of time; no one can live forever. It further seems that the narrator does not wish to live forever, or at least not in the sense we would think. The narrator wishes to reframe his life as it no longer follows a straight path in his mind.

The explorations of physical space, time, and subsequently of being, find themselves in “Combray.” The narrator endures this foggy moment of waking up that reflects his concerns about his identity. We can see this in a quote from the very beginning:

“A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the thread of the hours, the order of years and of worlds. He consults them instinctively upon awaking and in one second reads in them the point of the earth that he occupies, the time past until his arousal; but their ranks can be mingled or broken” (5)

In a sleepy daze, the narrator cannot fathom his identity and grasps his childhood. He cannot make sense of himself in his present life, but within the retellings of his childhood, he can at least fixate on those around him. In the fictional dreams in his head, he yearns to distinguish those ‘real’ in his past. In his childhood, his family was on a strict clock; for example, his mother came in to kiss him goodnight. But the shuffling of such routines had caused the boy to be filled with anxiety–he no longer could predict the predictable. It is with this final quote that I believe sums up the narrator’s mixed feelings:

“And once the novelist has put us in this state, in which his book will disturb us as might a dream but a dream more lucid than those we have while sleeping and whose memory will last longer, then see how he provokes in us within one hour all possible happinesses and all possible unhappinesses just a few of which we would spend years of our lives coming to know and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slowness with which they occur prevents us from perceiving them (thus our heart changes, in life, and it is the worst pain; but we know it only through reading, through our imagination: in reality it changes, as certain phenomena of nature occur, slowly enough so that, even if we are able to observe successively each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change)” (87)

 

A Question for Discussion:

In “Combray” by Proust the linear structure of time is removed and replaced with an intricate premise of the narrator’s childhood. While it may be confusing, it does provide an interesting perspective on memories. Why do you think Proust decided to begin this novel with a hazy start to a dream? Is there a narrative point on the role of dreams in fleeting memories?

 

For fun, I attached a French painting “The Rocky Path in the Morvan” painted by Henri-Joesph Harpignies.