[In the following essay, Chester examines colonialism and autobiographical representation in The Lover and The Sea Wall.]

Until now, the main body of critical work on Duras has explored the relationship between her writing and the category of the feminine—defined variously in cultural, linguistic, and psychoanalytic terms.¹ However, the colonial aspect of Duras's work has been largely ignored and is, I argue, crucial to a reading of sexual difference and the construction of a gendered writing subject. Therefore, my essay will focus on Duras's representation of the particular power relations emerging from the confrontation of the female Other with the “exotic” Other in a French colonial situation. In my reading of Un barrage contre le pacifique (The Sea Wall) and L'Amant (The Lover), I will examine the relationship between structures of dominance and strategies of representation, especially as the latter pertain to questions of autobiography.²

Since my analysis of Duras lays special emphasis on the notion of a gendered writing subject, my reading of colonial discourse is to be distinguished from Abdul R. JanMohamed's theory of “colonialist literature.”³ Basing his analysis on Frantz Fanon's account of the Manichean structure of the colonizer/colonized relationship, JanMohamed identifies “colonialist literature”—writing produced by the European colonizer—as a monolithic discourse constructed around the central trope he calls “Manichean allegory.”⁴ He defines this trope as “a field of diverse yet interchangeable oppositions between white and black, good and evil, superiority and inferiority, civilization and savagery, intelligence and emotion, rationality and sensuality, self and Other, subject and object.”⁵

While JanMohamed's approach is important in that it emphasizes the historical, social, and political context of colonial discourse, his argument is ultimately reductive insofar as it suggests that colonial power is possessed entirely by the colonizer. As a result, it cannot account for the conflicting textual strategies occasioned by a split in the colonial writing subject, a split that may occur when this subject is a woman and, as such, already defined as the Other of patriarchal society. Because JanMohamed's analysis relies on an absolute opposition between colonizer and colonized, it cannot engage with what I consider the specificity of writing produced by certain women in a colonial society. I maintain that the factors of gender and class produce a split in the colonial writing subject that challenges the fixed opposition between subject and object and the stable process of othering central to JanMohamed's conception of Manichean allegory.

Another pitfall in JanMohamed's approach to colonialist literature lies in its tendency, as Tzvetan Todorov has observed, “to elicit a similarly Manichean interpretation, with good and evil simply having switched places; on your right the disgusting white colonialists; on your left the innocent black victims.”⁶ My analysis of two texts written by, and dealing with, the female Other in the patriarchal society of French colonial Indochina examines how the intersection of gender and colonialism in Duras's writing avoids the trope of Manichean allegory, thereby generating readings that escape the moralistic tendencies of Manichean interpretation. In The Sea Wall and The Lover, the factors of gender and class problematize the relationship of the colonizer to the colonized, and consequently disrupt the economy of colonial discourse as defined by JanMohamed.

Published in 1950, The Sea Wall is Duras's third novel. As she has made clear in interviews with Michèle Porte and Xavière Gauthier, this novel contains many autobiographical elements dealing with her childhood and adolescence in colonial Indochina.⁷ In 1914, Duras was born into the family of two French schoolteachers attracted to French Indochina by colonial propaganda, tales of exotica, and the promise of making their fortune. When Duras was four years old, her father died, leaving her mother with three young children. After teaching in a French colonial school by day and playing the piano in a cinema by night for twenty years, the mother put all her savings into the purchase of a concession from the colonial administration. Realizing that the administration had deliberately allotted her an unworkable piece of land that was periodically flooded by the salt water of the Pacific, she employed a group of local peasants to help build a series of dams to prevent the sea from invading. After the collapse of the dams, the mother's anger and bitterness at her exploitation by the colonial administration plunged her into depression and near insanity. Duras spent her first seventeen years in French Indochina, now southern Vietnam, and received her education in the Lycée de Saigon. In 1931, the family moved to Paris, where Duras obtained degrees in law and in political science before embarking on her career as a writer.

As a roman à thèse, The Sea Wall is an ironic indictment of the French colonial administration, from its corrupt policy of allocating infertile concessions and its collusion with the colonial banks, speculators, and property holders to its callous refusal to alleviate the abject poverty of the indigenous population. The novel also contains an implicit critique of the status of women in patriarchal, colonial society, structured as it is around the endeavors of Suzanne's mother and brother to secure her marriage to a series of white colonial suitors: Mr. Jo, son of a wealthy planter; John Barner, sales representative for a cotton factory in Calcutta; and Jean Agosti, local pineapple farmer and opium smuggler.

The Lover, published in 1984 and an international best-seller, explores the issues raised in The Sea Wall through an autobiographical account of Duras's childhood in Indochina and her relationship with her family. Centered on the affair Duras had with a Chinese man, The Lover rewrites the cultural and sexual politics of The Sea Wall. This rewriting is exemplified by a shift from the representation of the protagonist as a object of prostitution and of male desire in The Sea Wall to the construction of a female subject with an active relationship to desire in The Lover, Related to this transformation of the status of the female protagonist is the move from the overt anticolonialism of The Sea Wall to the feminization and subordination of the exotic Other in The Lover. An analysis of the representation of the female protagonist in The Sea Wall as an object of prostitution and of male desire provides the backdrop for an understanding of the subversive strategies at work in The Lover. The Sea Wall is a narrative in which the protagonist has no active relationship to desire. As a commodity in a colonial, patriarchal society, Suzanne shares the characteristics of both virgin and prostitute, neither of whom has the right to her own pleasure.⁸ Suzanne's status as a young girl with neither money nor looks emerges from the following exchange concerning plans for a visit to Ram, the capital city of the colony.

“So it's not tonight that we're going to Ram,” said Suzanne.

“We'll go tomorrow,” said Joseph, “and it's not in Ram you'll find what you're looking for. They're all married, except Agosti.”

“I'd never give her to Agosti,” said the mother, “not even if he came and begged for her.”

“He'll not ask you for anything,” said Suzanne, “and it's not here I'll find what I'm looking for.”

“He wouldn't ask better,” said the mother. “I know what I'm saying. But he can go on chasing her.”

“He never even thinks about her,” said Joseph. “It's going to be hard. Some girls manage to marry without money, but they have to be awful pretty and even then it's a rare thing.”⁹

(27)

Occurring early in the novel, this exchange among Suzanne, her brother Joseph, and their mother establishes class as one of the determining factors in the quest to find a husband for Suzanne. It also points to important hierarchies within the dominant group of white colonialists. Since the family's poverty severely limits their choice, the chances of finding Suzanne a suitable husband are slim. What emerges from this conversation is that the mother and Joseph will ultimately decide whom Suzanne will marry. Therefore, although the father is absent from the novel, his traditional function within patriarchal society, as the one who controls the daughter's sexuality, is assumed by the mother and the older brother.

Once Mr. Jo falls in love with Suzanne, her status is radically transformed from that of a liability to that of a highly lucrative asset. As the only son of rich colonial speculator, Mr. Jo represents a potential source of enormous wealth for the family. Consequently, the mother does everything in her power to expedite his marriage to her daughter. Referring to Mr. Jo's daily visits to the house to see Suzanne, the narrator observes: “These visits delighted the mother. The longer they lasted the higher her hopes rose. And if she insisted they leave the bungalow door open, it was in order to give Mr. Jo no alternative but marriage to satisfy his strong desire to sleep with her daughter” (p. 53; translation modified).¹⁰

The mother recognizes the role Mr. Jo's desire plays in the family's quest for a suitable husband. Such desire is the basis upon which a daughter's value is established, as Luce Irigaray argues in her elaboration of the commodified status of women in patriarchal society. Since a woman's value in society lies in her capacity to be exchanged, her value is not intrinsic to her but is a reflection of a man's desire/need for her: “The exchange value of two signs, two commodities, two women, is a representation of the needs/desires of consumer-exchanger subjects: in no way is it the ‘property’ of the signs/articles/women themselves.”¹¹ This dynamic is clearly at work in the bathroom scene in The Sea Wall. As Suzanne prepares to take a shower in the bathroom, the frustrated and pathetic Mr. Jo begs her to open the door and show him her naked body. While her first reaction to Mr. Jo's entreaty is a decisive refusal, Suzanne gradually begins to wonder if her body is not, after all, intended to gratify the male gaze.

He had a great desire to see her. After all, it was the natural desire of a man. And there she was, worth seeing. There was only that door to open. And no man in the world had yet seen this body of hers that was hidden by that door. It was not made to be hidden but, on the contrary, to be seen and to make its way in the world, that world to which belonged, after all, this Mr. Jo.¹²

(57)

Suzanne is on the point of opening the door when Mr. Jo promises to give her a new record player. Realizing that he is trying to prostitute her, she opens the door only to spit in his face.

Although the young girl rebels against this overt prostitution of her body, she does not recognize that the marriage being arranged for her is an institutionalized form of prostitution orchestrated by her mother and Joseph. Thus, despite her initial rebellion, Suzanne comes to appreciate the value of her body when Mr. Jo, his humiliation notwithstanding, presents her with the promised record player. While a glimpse of her body was enough to secure the record player, the sexual favors demanded and the rewards offered begin to increase in direct proportion. Next, Mr. Jo promises her a diamond in exchange for a three-day visit to the city with him. Suzanne's perception of her body as a valuable entity temporarily blinds her to the alienation inherent in her newly commodified status: “And it was thanks to her, Suzanne, that it was now there on the table. She had opened the bathroom door just long enough for Mr. Jo's loathsome and unwholesome gaze to penetrate her body and now the record player lay there, on the table” (p. 59; translation modified).¹³

Similarly, in The Lover, the narrator repeatedly acknowledges the ways in which the white colonial woman becomes the object of the gaze and desire of both the indigenous and the colonial male: “I'm used to people looking at me,” the narrator remarks, and then explains: “People do look at white women in the colonies; at twelve-year-old girls too. For the past three years white men, too, have been looking at me in the streets, and my mother's men friends have been kindly asking me to have tea with them while their wives are out playing tennis at the Sporting Club” (p. 17).¹⁴ Her awareness of the objectification of the white woman by the male gaze of both colonizer and colonized indicates that sexual difference functions in a particular way in a colonial situation.

While the narrator of The Lover alludes to the male gaze that constructs the young girl as an object of desire, The Sea Wall vividly stages the negativity of her self-alienation and indicates that, far from being in the dominant position of the subject, as JanMohamed's argument implies, the lower-class white colonial woman is objectified and prostituted by the male gaze. This self-alienation emerges clearly when Suzanne goes to the colonial capital to sell Mr. Jo's diamond. Carmen, the resident prostitute in the Hotel Central, suggests that, since her marriage prospects are limited by the family's poverty, Suzanne earn her living through prostitution, thereby forcing on the young girl a certain image of her precarious status. Unaware of the class divisions within the colonial capital, Suzanne wanders alone through the fashionable district, attracting the attention of the wealthy white residents and unwittingly making a spectacle of herself: “People looked at her. They turned to look, they smiled. No young white girl of her age ever walked alone in the streets of the fashionable district” (p. 149).¹⁵ Furthermore, as Suzanne walks through the white, upper-class district, her consciousness of herself as an object of another's gaze causes her to see herself as she believes others see her: “The more they looked at her the more she was convinced that she was something scandalous, an object of complete ugliness and stupidity” (p. 150).¹⁶

Finally, the price of being the object of the male gaze results in the fracturing of any residual sense of identity as Suzanne's perception of her body now centers on its fragmentation, each part an object of shame, revulsion, and ridicule:¹⁷ “She herself, from head to foot, was contemptible. Her eyes—where to look? These leaden, obscene arms, this heart, fluttering like an indecent caged beast, these legs that were too weak to bear her along” (p. 151; translation modified).¹⁸

Subjectivity is further denied to the protagonist of The Sea Wall as a result of the omniscient narrator, who, like the proverbial fly on the wall, effaces its own subject position within the text while aligning the reader with its disembodied point of view. Although there is an implicit critique of the objectification of the young girl, the ominiscient narrator also contributes to her objectified status by remaining a hidden observer of this process. Duras's use of a realistic, novelistic convention that depends on an unproblematized narratorial gaze makes both narrator and reader of The Sea Wall complicitous in the voyeurism that objectifies the female protagonist.

JanMohamed's Manichean allegory is further problematized by the class divisions within white colonial society—divisions that reveal the structures of dominance existing within that society. In The Sea Wall, Suzanne's body becomes the site of the class conflict between her family and the colonial powers. When Suzanne's brother Joseph refuses to allow Mr. Jo to have sex with her before marriage, he is not interested in the morality of the issue but in the measure of power such an interdiction affords the family. Helpless in the face of the colonial powers that have thwarted them, namely, the administration and the banks, their only remaining power lies in the control of Suzanne's body. By forbidding her to sleep with this wealthy planter's son, Suzanne's mother, situated at the bottom of the colonial hierarchy, finds a way to avenge herself psychologically on the whole colonial system. Joseph brazenly tells Mr. Jo where they stand on the issue of his sister's sexuality: “She can sleep with whoever she likes. We don't stop her. But in your case, if you want to sleep with her, you've got to marry her. That's our way of saying to hell with you” (p. 75).¹⁹

This censorship of Suzanne's relationship to her body reaches a climax when her mother physically beats her, refusing to believe she has not slept with Mr. Jo in exchange for the diamond he has given her. In fact, it is this diamond that really arouses the mother's wrath, since for her it symbolizes an object that has no use value, only exchange value: “There's nothing more disgusting than a diamond. It has no use, no use at all” (p. 108; translation modified).²⁰ The mother's revulsion at the diamond is related to her ambivalent feelings about her own part in the prostitution of her daughter, feelings that alternate between shame at handing her daughter over to Mr. Jo, who epitomizes the worst aspects of the dominant white colonials, and pride in the economic rewards that result from the relationship. The mother's ambivalence is symptomatic of her own alienated position within this colonial society, since it is the family's impoverishment—a direct result of colonial corruption—that predisposes her to use Suzanne's body as bait to lure Mr. Jo into a marriage with her daughter.²¹

As an object of pure exchange value, the diamond symbolizes the commodification of the daughter by a society in which a woman's value is realized in exchange. The final sale of the diamond at the end of the novel coincides with Suzanne's first experience of sexual pleasure with Agosti, the local pineapple farmer, an experience that is above all a “useful” one in bringing to an end the circuit of exchange, violence, and prostitution in which the young girl has been involved.

The mother knew about it. No doubt she thought it was useful for Suzanne. She was not mistaken, for it was during that week, from the time of the first excursion to the pineapple field to the time of her mother's death, that Suzanne at last unlearned her senseless waiting for the hunters' cars and abandoned her empty dreams.²²

(p. 281; translation modified; emphasis mine)

However, Suzanne's sexual pleasure with Agosti is itself a direct result of the mother's authority in relation to her daughter's sexuality: “Still, they had made love together every afternoon for a week until yesterday and the mother knew, she had left them together, she had given him to her so that she might make love with him” (p. 284; translation modified.)²³ While The Sea Wall ends with the sexual awakening of the protagonist, her life remains circumscribed by the desires and authority of her mother, lover, and brother. After the death of her mother, Suzanne must choose between remaining with Agosti or leaving with Joseph.

“It's not important whether she stays with me or someone else, for the time being,” said Agosti suddenly.

“No, it's not very important,” said Joseph. “It's up to her to decide.”

Agosti had begun to smoke and had turned a little pale.

“I'm leaving,” Suzanne said to him. “I can't do anything else.”²⁴

(p. 288)

Although the protagonist of The Sea Wall achieves some small degree of autonomy, and a real, if circumscribed, relationship to sexual pleasure, the overriding emphasis of the novel, both formally and thematically, is on the young girl's body as the site of domination by both colonizer and colonized, and on the marginalized position of the lower-class, white colonial woman.

More than thirty years later, Duras rewrote the autobiographical material of The Sea Wall, this time availing herself of the possibilities offered by the autobiographical “I” in order to establish her own subjectivity and an active relationship to desire. In 1984, The Lover appeared—an “exotic, erotic autobiographical confession” that, I maintain, radically transforms the subordinate status of the female protagonist of The Sea Wall.²⁵ Given that some critics regard the genre of The Lover as ambiguous, vacillating as it does between a confessional mode in the first person and novelistic narration in the third person, I will first suggest a reading of the text that resolves what Sharon Willis calls “the text's doubleness” and its refusal “to be pinned to the conventional confessional or fictional modes.”²⁶

The narrator of this text both adheres to and transgresses the conventions of confessional autobiography. On the one hand, in typical modernist fashion, she points to the impossibility of transposing her life into a story with a consistent identity at its center, saying: “The story of my life doesn't exist. Does not exist. There's never any center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it's not true, there was no-one” (p. 8).²⁷ The use of the novelistic third person is also evidence of Duras's departure from a traditional autobiographical mode, a point I shall return to later.

On the other hand, the text is presented as a traditional autobiography in that its goal is the seemingly unproblematic reconstruction of personal identity. Alluding to The Sea Wall in her reference to the autobiographical content of her previous work, Duras indicates her intention to fill in the blanks and restore the omissions necessitated by the conditions of her life as a writer at that time.

The story of one small part of my youth I've already written, more or less—I mean, enough to give a glimpse of it. Of this part, I mean, the part about the crossing of the river. What I'm doing now is both different and the same. Before, I spoke of clear periods, those on which the light fell. Now I'm talking about the hidden stretches of that same youth, of certain facts, feelings, events that I buried. I started to write in a milieu that drove me to modesty.²⁸

(p. 8; translation modified)

Despite the narrator's claims of merely elucidating what had previously been concealed, Duras's rewriting of this “one small part” of her youth radically transforms her own subject position within the economy of sexual desire.

By designating herself as the subject of The Lover, Duras avails herself of the autobiographical “I” in order to realize her own subjectivity. As Emile Benveniste has observed, language provides the possibility of subjectivity because it is language that enables the speaker to posit herself as “I,” the subject of discourse.²⁹ Instead of being subjected to the voyeuristic gaze of the ominiscient narrator/reader, Duras claims control over the representation of her body, transforming it into an active display of her life as spectacle. Referring to the image of herself as a young girl, Duras writes: “It could have existed, a photograph could have been taken, just like any other, somewhere else, in other circumstances. But it wasn't. … And it's to this, this failure to have been created, that the image owes its virtue: the virtue of representing, of being the author of, an absolute” (p. 10; translation modified).³⁰

Duras's image of herself is thus likened to a nonexistent photograph. It is this nonexistent photograph that allows Duras to create her own image of herself, an image in which “I” and “me” coincide and subjectivity is realized:³¹ “It's the only image of myself I like, the only one in which I recognize myself, in which I delight” (pp. 3-4).³² Whereas the reader of The Sea Wall is aligned with the disembodied point of view of the omniscient narrator, the reader of The Lover, by contrast, is a spectator whose presence and gaze are actively solicited. “Look at me” (p. 16), commands the narrator, as she constructs a new image that replaces the negative self-alienation of the young girl in The Sea Wall.³³

The narrative vacillation between “I” and “she” that occurs at different points in the text has provided some critics with evidence of the failure of the narrator's search for identity. Sarah Capitanio, for example, argues as follows:

Quant à la focalisée toutefois, sa designation comme ‘elle’ à ce moment marque une séparation définitive entre elle et la narratrice et, par la, la non-résolution de cette recherche si fondamentale.³⁴

I read the question of narrative identity differently: the autobiographical “I” allows Duras to posit an identity between the narrator of The Lover, the young girl in the nonexistent photo, and the protagonist of The Sea Wall, thereby enabling her to reconstitute an identity fragmented by her experience as a white woman in the colonies. By designating herself alternately by the pronouns “I” and “she,” Duras in fact undermines the objectification to which she was subjected. She appropriates the masculine position of the observer and, as we shall see, she rewrites the traditionally femininized position of the observed. In the following description, for instance, the actions of the Chinese man, later to become her lover, take place as though before the eye of a moving camera. Through this discursive strategy, the narrator ultimately appropriates the position of the mastering gaze as she watches the man from Cholon watching the young girl: “The elegant man has got out of the limousine and is smoking an English cigarette. He looks at the girl in the man's fedora and the gold shoes. He slowly approaches her” (p. 32).³⁵

In the narrative shift to the third person, the young girl is also designated by the way white colonial society perceives her—that is, as “the little white slut” (passim). However, through the device of reported speech, Duras subverts the tone and meaning of the original utterance by permeating the reported speech with her own ironic intonation.³⁶

Fifteen and a half. The news spreads fast in Sadec. The clothes are enough to show. The mother has no idea, and none about how to bring up a daughter. Poor child. Don't tell me that hat's innocent, it means something, it's to attract attention, money. The brothers are layabouts. They say it's a Chinese, the son of the millionaire, the villa in Mekong with the blue tiles. And even he, instead of thinking himself honored, doesn't want her for his son. A family of white layabouts. … It goes on in the disreputable quarter of Cholon, every evening. Every morning the little slut goes to have her body caressed by a filthy Chinese millionaire.³⁷

(pp. 88-89)

By drawing attention to the clichéd speech, dogmatic worldview, and racist doxa of colonial society, Duras undercuts its tone of scandalized self-righteousness.

The representation of her lover as the exotic Other constitutes the second discursive strategy that enables Duras to appropriate the position of the subject. This construction of subjectivity is inextricably linked to her position of domination and power as she constructs it in relation to the Chinese man. In The Lover, the narrative strategies that effect the subordination of the cultural Other belong to what Edward Said terms the discourse of “Orientalism.”³⁸ The most significant of these strategies are the eroticization of the exotic, the feminization of the figure of the Other, and the representation of the Orient as an ontological and unchanging essence. The Orient of The Lover figures as a set of topoi that Duras deploys for aesthetic and personal/political reasons. Thus, her exploitation of Orientalist discourse is instrumental in the textual transformation of the subordinate status of the poor white woman in French colonial patriarchal society and the construction of a female subjectivity. Although The Lover exemplifies many aspects of “Orientalism,” the text is not structured by the Manichean allegory that JanMohamed sees at the heart of colonialist literature. Rather, Duras's inscription of many of the themes of Orientalist discourse is in service to the constitution of a subject position for the female protagonist of The Sea Wall, who, although she belongs to the group of French colonizers, is already defined as object/Other.

The eroticization of the exotic—figured by Indochina and the lover's Chinese heritage—is a key element of Duras's text. Said has identified the association of sex with the Orient as a persistent motif in Orientalist discourse.³⁹ The formal structure of the text reflects the binary opposition of intellect and sensuality that informs the representation of Europe and the Orient. While the erotic theme dominates in Indochina, intellectual and political affairs take place in France.

While Mr. Jo in The Sea Wall and the man from Cholon in The Lover represent two different versions of “the rich man in the black limousine,” the transformation of the European Mr. Jo into an Asian is particularly important. By making the lover a Chinese man, Duras takes advantage of the erotic topoi associated with the Orient. Indeed, the exotic and the erotic are so inextricably merged in the text that even Duras's French school friend, Hélène Lagonelle, is imbued with Eastern eroticism. As object of the young girl's homoerotic desire, Hélène is “orientalized” through association with the Chinese lover: “I see her as being of one flesh with the man from Cholon. … Hélène Lagonelle is the mate of the bondsmen who gives me such abstract, such harsh pleasure, the obscure man from Cholon, from China. Hélène Lagonelle is from China” (p. 74).⁴⁰ Here, the geographical referent, China, disappears and is appropriated as a trope for the private sexual fantasy of the narrator. Nor is it insignificant that this orientalized body provokes fantasies of sadistic power: “[Hélène Lagonelle] makes you want to kill her, she conjures up a marvellous dream of putting her to death with your own hands” (p. 73).⁴¹ Similarly, the conflation of the erotic with the exotic and the related dynamic of sexual domination are implicit in the narrator's incestuous desire for her younger brother, whose body she compares to that of an Indian servant: “Even the body of my younger brother, like that of a little coolie, is as nothing beside this splendour” (p. 72).⁴²

A similar configuration of power and desire is suggested by the feminization of the Chinese lover. This feminization results from the description of his body and his role during sex. In the former, the emphasis is on traditional markers of femininity: smooth skin, fragile physique, and hairless body. The only sign of virility, the penis, is undermined by the lover's inability to carry through the initial seduction: “The skin is sumptuously soft. The body. The body is thin, lacking in strength, in muscle, he may have been ill, may be convalescent, he's hairless, nothing masculine about him but his sex, he's weak, probably helpless prey to insult, vulnerable” (p. 38).⁴³ Far from being a passive object of this man's desire, the young girl orchestrates and controls her initiation into sex and pleasure: “She was attracted to him. It depended on her alone. … She tells him she doesn't want him to talk, what she wants is for him to do as he usually does with the women he brings to his flat” (pp. 37-38). And then again, “She tells him to keep still. Let me do it. And she does. Undresses him” (p. 38). The act of penetration, traditionally associated with activity and virility, is reduced to an elliptic “And weeping, he does it” (p. 38), with the emphasis more on his feminine tears than on the act of penetration itself.⁴⁴

The lover's feminization also results from his position in relation to the discourse of love. As Roland Barthes has noted, this discourse has historically been elaborated by woman in the absence of her beloved.⁴⁵ As a result, something feminine is revealed in the man who speaks in the voice of love. In Duras's text, these roles are exchanged: the female protagonist speaks from the place of desire, and the Chinese lover elaborates that of love and passion (passion as suffering): “He's 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. … He says he's lonely, horribly lonely because of this love he feels for her” (p. 37).⁴⁶

Similarly, the fickleness of the traditional male lover is transposed onto the narrator as a young girl as the Chinese man anticipates her future unfaithfulness: “Talks to me, says he knew right away, when we were crossing the river, that I'd be like this after my first lover, that I'd love love, he says he knows now that I'll deceive him and deceive all the men I'm ever with” (p. 42).⁴⁷

Sailing away on the boat to France and leaving behind her lover, the narrator also usurps the position of the man whose seduced and abandoned women grieve in his absence. Years after their affair, the lover telephones the narrator to tell her he is still in love. This reversal of the gendered economy of the discourse of love is echoed in the shift in roles related to the traditional departure.

Departures. They were always the same. Always the first departures over the sea. Men always left the land in the same sorrow and despair, but that never stopped them from going, Jews, philosophers, and pure travellers for the journey's own sake. Nor did it ever stop women from letting them go, the women who never went themselves, who stayed behind to look after the birthplace, the race, the property, the reason for the return.⁴⁸

(p. 109)

The father's authority over his son and his refusal to allow him to marry “the little white slut” place the Chinese man in the feminine position of the woman, entrusted with the care of the domestic hearth and the perpetuation of the race. Reinforcing the young girl's position of dominance as she constructs it in relation to her lover is her explicit identification with the authority of his father: “Then I said I agreed with his father. That I refused to stay with him” (p. 83).⁴⁹ Later, the narrator confirms the finality of the young girl's decision: “The man from Cholon knows his father's decision and the girl's are the same, and both are irrevocable” (p. 97).⁵⁰ In this manner, Duras's text constructs a subordinate position for the Chinese lover through a variety of textual strategies that contribute to his feminization. By making him occupy the traditionally subordinate feminine position, Duras appropriates a position of dominance for herself.

This configuration of power is also related to the racial politics of the text. The transformation of the European Mr. Jo of The Sea Wall into “the man from Cholon” in The Lover is significant in that race is integral to the balance of power in the relationship. Although the young girl prostitutes herself to the Chinese man, and thereby places herself in what is typically a subordinate position, the fact that he does not belong to white colonial society relegates him to the subordinate position in the eyes of her family, who maintain their sense of superiority by believing the girl is sleeping with the “Chinese scum” only for his money. The young girl's failure to disabuse her family of this assumption allows her to continue to enjoy the intense sexual pleasure she experiences in her relations with him.⁵¹

My brothers never will say a word to him, it's as if he were invisible to them, as if for them he weren't solid enough to be perceived, seen or heard. This is because he adores me, but it's taken for granted I don't love him, that I'm with him for the money, that I can't love him, it's impossible that he could take any sort of treatment from me and still go on loving me. This because he's a Chinese, because he's not a white man.⁵²

(p. 51)

Although the narrator exposes and denounces her complicity as a young girl in her brothers' exploitation of the Chinese man, Duras reinscribes this exploitation through the discursive strategies she deploys in her own representation of her Asian lover. Belonging to the discourse of “Orientalism,” these strategies reinforce the subordinate racial status of the “man from Cholon.”

Moreover, the lover's superior economic status—which enables him to “colonize” the young white girl through prostitution—is specifically connected to his Chinese origins. The wealth of “the man from Cholon” is tarnished through his association with the colonial history of the Chinese in Indochina and their continuing financial exploitation of the French colony. By drawing attention to the colonialist activities of the father and his son's complicitous attitude, the narrator transforms the superior economic power of her lover into a position of moral inferiority.

I ask him to tell me about his father's money, how he got rich. He says it bores him to talk about money, but if I insist he'll tell me what he knows about his father's wealth. It all began in Cholon, with the housing estates for natives. He built three hundred of these “compartments,” cheap, semi-detached dwellings let out for rent. Owns several streets. … The people here like living close together, especially the poor, who come from the country and like living out-of-doors too, on the street. And you must try not to destroy the habits of the poor.⁵³

(pp. 47-48)

In The Lover, the significance of the gaze further reinforces the Chinese man's subordinate position, as constructed by the narrator. Duras rewrites the semiotics of the gaze by transforming the negative associations of the gaze, which subordinates and reifies its object in The Sea Wall, into an action that signifies the recognition of the value of the other in The Lover. Referring to the hostile relations within her family, the narrator observes:

It's a family of stone, petrified so deeply it's impenetrable. Every day we try to kill one another, to kill. Not only do we not talk to one another, we don't even look at one another. When you're being looked at, you can't look. To look is to feel curious, to be interested, to lower yourself. No one you look at is worth it. Looking is always demeaning.⁵⁴

(p. 54)

To be looked at, then, is to enjoy the privilege of exciting interest and curiosity. The Chinese lover, however, is denied the recognition of this gaze because his liaison with “la petite blanche” transgresses the racial arrangements of French colonial society. “My brothers never will say a word to him, it's as if he were invisible to them, as if for them he weren't solid enough to be perceived, seen or heard” (p. 51). By contrast, the narrator flaunts the heroine's transgressive behavior in the face of the reader/spectator by actively soliciting the latter's attention with her imperious “regardez-moi,” thereby demanding the recognition implicit in this gaze.

Duras's naturalization of the young girl's French identity further contributes to her position of authority over her lover. The narrator both relates the young girl's mockery of the Chinese man's French pretensions—“I tell him his visit to France was fatal. He agrees. Says he bought everything in Paris, his women, his acquaintances, his ideas” (p. 49)—and undercuts these pretensions through the use of irony—“He talked. Said he missed Paris, the marvellous girls there, the riotous living, the binges, ooh là là, the Coupole, the Rotonde, personally I prefer the Rotonde, the nightclubs, the ‘wonderful’ life he'd led for two years” (p. 34).⁵⁵ This ironizing of the lover's predilection for things French stems from the split between the narrated “I” and the narrating “I.” While the former—the subject of the narration—refers to the white fifteen-year-old born and raised in colonial Indochina, who has never been to France, the latter—the narrating subject—is the narrator whom the text explicitly associates with the authorial identity of Marguerite Duras—the embodiment of a certain Frenchness. It is this split that both authorizes the mockery of the young girl and enables the narrator to undercut the Chinese man's pretensions by infiltrating his reported speech with ironic authorial intonation.

Another textual strategy that effects the subordination of the cultural Other is the representation of the Orient as an unchanging essence of which the lover clearly partakes. That he remains nameless is the first sign of his lack of individuality, a characteristic that is reinforced by the generic nature of the epithets used to designate him—“the lover,” “the man from Cholon,” and “the Chinese man” (passim). Although an individual, the lover functions as a representative type who embodies the atmosphere of the Orient. Years later, when he calls the narrator in France, his fear and his trembling voice are represented as belonging to the very essence of the Orient: “He was nervous, afraid, as before. His voice suddenly trembled. And with the trembling, suddenly, she heard again the voice of China” (p. 116).⁵⁶

The idea of the Orient as timeless and unchanging is conveyed by the absence of a history to which the lover can lay claim since his affair with the young girl. In contrast to the narrator's development as a writer, his life is defined by his love for her, which dissolves the future into an inescapable, eternal present: “He knew she'd begun writing books, he'd heard about it through her mother whom he'd met again in Saigon. … Then he didn't know what to say. And then he told her. Told her that it was as before, that he still loved her, he could never stop loving her, that he'd love her until death” (p. 117).⁵⁷

In this display of her life as spectacle, Duras is also the ultimate spectator. By exploiting the possibilities of autobiographical discourse, Duras appropriates the privileged masculine position of observer and rewrites the feminine position of the observed. By constructing a position of dominance in relation to the “man from Cholon,” the author of The Lover radically transforms her relationship to both desire and prostitution in order to establish a female writing subject.

Because JanMohamed's trope of Manichean allegory posits a stable process of othering in which the colonizer occupies the position of subject and the colonized that of object/Other, it fails to account for the ways in which gender and class affect the economy of colonial discourse. As a lower-class woman in the patriarchal society of French colonial Indochina, Duras was already in the position of Other. Her subordinate status as object of both prostitution and the male gaze is clearly represented in The Sea Wall. In The Lover, Duras establishes a female subjectivity through the appropriation of the masculine position of the observer, through the construction of an active relationship to desire, and by recourse to a variety of Orientalist topoi—the eroticization of the exotic, the feminization of the Asian lover, and the representation of an unchanging Oriental essence. Despite Duras's overt anticolonialism in The Sea Wall and her occasional contestation of the discourse of colonialism in The Lover, in which the narrator both satirizes and explicitly denounces the racist doxa espoused by her family and by French colonial society, she nonetheless also reinscribes a variety of Orientalist/colonialist themes in order to transform her own marginalized position as Other and to achieve a position of power and dominance in relation to her Chinese lover. Through her participation in colonialist politics in service to a “white” female subjectivity, Duras engages in textual strategies that have disturbing implications for the politics of women's autobiography.⁵⁸ This gendered subject position is also constructed through Duras's use of the rhetorical strategies made possible by autobiographical discourse. Just as the nonexistent photograph provides Duras with the means to authorize her favorite image of herself as a young girl, so autobiography affords the possibility to create a self/subject liberated from the oppressive realities of poverty, prostitution, and the patriarchal order of French colonial society.

Notes

1. For a psychoanalytic reading of the feminine in Duras's oeuvre, see Sharon Willis, Marguerite Duras: Writing on the Body (Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1987). Willis uses hysteria as a metaphor for Duras's narrative discourse and analyzes how her texts explore “the limits of narrative representation”—a discursive space coded as feminine within a particular historical moment. See also Michèle Montrelay, “Sur le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein,” L'Ombre et le nom (Paris: Minuit, 1977). Situated within a psychoanalytic framework, Montrelay's article offers a reading of Duras's Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein as an example of a text that gives a place to femininity defined as nonsense, silence, and nonspeech. In Territories du féminin avec Marguerite Duras (Paris: Minuit, 1977), Marcelle Marini reads Duras's disruptive writing style and her creation of silences and gaps as a feminine space that attempts to circumvent women's oppression within patriarchy. Trista Selous, in The Other Woman: Feminism and Femininity in the Work of Marguerite Duras (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), offers a cultural critique of the representations of women in Duras, challenging the claims that Duras's work is truly feminist.

2. All citations will include page numbers in parentheses in the text from the following editions, except where otherwise noted. Marguerite Duras, The Sea Wall, trans. Herma Briffault (New York: Harper & Row, 1986); The Lover, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Pantheon, 1985). I have altered the English translations in places in order to stress nuances of the French text that are important to my analyses. I shall indicate “translation modified” wherever such changes occur. French quotations are provided in the notes and are from the following editions: Marguerite Duras, L'Amant (Paris: Minuit, 1984); Un Barrage contre le pacifique (Paris: Gallimard, 1950).

3. Abdul R. JanMohamed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985): 59-87.

4. Frantz Fanon notes that “the colonial world is a Manichean world.” The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1968), 41. He demonstrates the mechanism of this Manichean world in Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967).

5. JanMohamed, “Economy of Manichean Allegory,” 63.

6. Tzvetan Todorov, “Critical Response III: ‘Race’, Writing Culture,” trans. Loulou Mack, Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985): 178.

7. Marguerite Duras and Michèle Porte, Les Lieux de Marguerite Duras (Paris: Minuit, 1977); Marguerite Duras and Xavière Gauthier, Les Parleuses (Paris: Minuit, 1974).

8. For a more extensive discussion of this issue, see Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977). Irigaray describes women's censored relationship to desire as follows: “Mother, virgin, prostitute: these are the social roles imposed on women. The characteristic of (so-called) feminine sexuality derive from them: the valorization of reproduction and nursing; faithfulness; modesty; ignorance of and even lack of interest in sexual pleasure; a passive acceptance of men's activity; seductiveness, in order to arouse the consumers' desire while offering herself as its material support without getting pleasure herself. … Neither as mother nor as virgin nor as prostitute has woman any right to her own pleasure” (pp. 186-87).

9. “‘Ce n'est pas ce soir qu'on ira à Ram,’ dit Suzanne.

   ‘On ira demain,’ dit Joseph, ‘et c'est pas à Ram que tu trouveras, ils sont tous mariés, il y a qu'Agosti.’

   ‘Jamais je ne la donnerai à Agosti,’ dit la mère, ‘quand même il me suppliérait.’

   ‘Il ne demande pas mieux,’ dit la mère, ‘je sais ce que je dis, mais il peut toujours courir.’

   ‘Il ne pense même pas à elle,’ dit Joseph. ‘Ce sera difficile. Il y en a qui se marient sans argent, mais il faut qu'elles soient très jolies, et encore c'est rare.’”

   (p. 35)

10. “Ces tête-à-tête enchantaient la mère. Plus ils duraient et plus elle espérait. Et si elle exigeait qu'ils laissent la porte du bungalow ouverte, c'était pour ne laisser à M. Jo aucune issue que le mariage à l'envie très forte qu'il avait de coucher avec sa fille.”

    (p. 68)

11. Irigaray, This Sex, 180.

12. “Il avait très envie de la voir. Quand même c'était la l'envie d'un homme. Elle, elle était là aussi, bonne à être vue, il n'y avait que la porte à ouvrir. Et aucun homme au monde n'avait encore vu celle qui se tenait là derrière cette porte. Ce n'était pas fait pour être caché mais au contraire pour être vu et faire son chemin de par le monde, le monde auquel appartenait quand même celui-là, ce M. Jo.”

    (p. 73)

13. “C'était grâce à elle qu'il était maintenant là, sur la table. Elle avait ouvert la porte de la cabine de bains, le temps de laisser le regard malsain et laid de M. Jo pénétrer jusqu'à elle et maintenant le phonograph reposait là, sur la table”

    (p. 76)

14. “J'ai déjà l'habitude qu'on me regarde. On regarde les blanches aux colonies, et les petites filles de douze ans aussi. Depuis trois ans, les blancs aussi me regardent dans le rues et les amis de ma mère me demandent gentiment de venir goûter chez eux à l'heure ou leurs femmes jouent au tennis au Club Sportif.”

    (p. 26)

15. “On la regardait. On se retournait, on souriait. Aucune jeune fille de son âge ne marchait seule dans les rues de haut quartier.”

    (p. 185)

16. “Plus on la remarquait, plus elle se persuadait qu'elle était scandaleuse, un objet de laideur et de bêtise intégrale.”

    (p. 185)

17. For a more extensive discussion of women's relation to their bodies in patriarchal society, see John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972). According to his analysis, a woman is constantly accompanied by her own image of herself because she is the object of the male gaze. Consequently, a woman's sense of self is split into two and “she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman” (p. 46).

18. “C'était elle, elle qui était méprisable des pieds à la tete. A cause de ses yeux, ou les jeter? A cause de ses bras de plomb, ces ordures, à cause de ce coeur, une bête indécente, de ces jambes incapables.”

    (p. 187)

19. “C'est pas qu'on l'empêche de coucher avec qui elle veut, mais vous, si vous voulez coucher avec elle, faut que vous l'épousiez. C'est notre façon à nous de vous dire merde.”

    (p. 96)

20. “Il n'y a rien de plus dégoutant qu'un bijou. Ca sert à rien, à rien. Et ceux qui les portent n'en ont pas besoin, moins besoin que n'importe qui.”

    (p. 135)

21. See Marianne Hirsch, “Feminist Family Romances,” in The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), for an illuminating reading of the mother-daughter relationship in The Lover. Hirsch argues that Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytic reading of Duras in “The Pain of Sorrow in the Modern World: The Work of Marguerite Duras,” PMLA 102 (March 1987): 138-52, ends up “eclipsing the mother's own voice, her own story, allowing her only the status of object, or of ‘Other’” (p. 152). I concur with Hirsch that the figure of the mother in The Sea Wall and The Lover needs to be read in the political and economic context of colonialism in order to avoid “conflating [the political dimensions of women's lives] with the psychological” (p. 152).

22. “La mère le savait. Sans doute pensait-elle que c'était utile à Suzanne. Elle n'avait pas tort. Ce fut pendant ces huit jours-là, entre la promenade au champs d'ananas et la mort de la mère que Suzanne désapprit enfin l'attente imbécile des autos des chasseurs, les rêves vides.”

    (p. 357)

23. “Pourtant ils avaient fait l'amour ensemble tous les après-midi depuis huit jours jusqu'à hier encore. Et la mère le savait, elle les avait laissés, le lui avait donné pour qu'elle fasse l'amour avec lui.”

    (p. 360)

24. “‘Ca n'a pas d'importance qu'elle soit avec moi ou un autre, pour le moment,’ dit brusquement Agosti.

    ‘Je crois que ça n'a pas tellement d'importance,’ dit Joseph, ‘elle n'a qu'à décider.’

    Agosti s'était mis à fumer, il avait un peu pâli.

    ‘Je pars,’ lui dit Suzanne, ‘je ne peux pas faire autrement.’”

    (p. 365)

25. The 9 June 1985 issue of the New York Times Book Review carried an advertisement for The Lover that included a Saturday Review comment that “this exotic, erotic autobiographical confession will deservedly become one of the summer's hottest books.”

26. Willis, Marguerite Duras, 5.

27. “L'histoire de ma vie n'existe pas. Ca n'existe pas. Il n'y a jamais de centre. Pas de chemin, pas de ligne. Il y a de vastes endroits où l'on fait croire qu'il y avait quelqu'un, ce n'est pas vrai, il n'y avait personne.”

    (p. 14)

28. “L'histoire d'une toute petite partie de ma jeunesse, je l'ai plus ou moins écrite déjà, enfin je veux dire, de quoi l'apercevoir, je parle de celle-ci justement, de celle de la traversée du fleuve. Ce que je fais ici est différent, et pareil. Avant j'ai parlé des périodes claires, de celles qui étaient éclairées. Ici je parle des périodes cachées de cette même jeunesse, de certains enfouissements que j'aurais opérés sur certains faits, sur certains sentiments, sur certains événements. J'ai commencé à ecrire dans un milieu qui me portait très fort à la pudeur.”

    (p. 14)

29. See Emile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 258-65.

30. “Elle aurait pu exister, une photographie aurait pu être prise, comme une autre, ailleurs, dans d'autres circonstances. Mais elle ne l'a pas été. … C'est à ce manque d'avoir été faite qu'elle doit sa vertu, celle de représenter un absolu, d'en être justement l'auteur.”

    (p. 17)

31. Susan Cohen notes that “the story [of The Lover] is essentially one of creativity, in particular the self-making of a woman and of a writer whom we watch in the process of creating out of that very initial non-presence.” “Fiction and the Photographic Image in Duras' The Lover,” L'Esprit Créateur 30 (Spring 1990): 59. Cohen's article explores the relationship of absence to seeing and creativity.

32. “C'est entre toutes celle qui me plâìt de moi-même, celle où je me reconnais, où je m'enchante” (p. 9).

33. Although I consider The Lover a feminist autobiography, it needs to be distinguished from the definition of “feminist confession” offered by Rita Felski in Beyond Feminist Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). Whereas Felski's examples of feminist confession belong to the realist convention and continually refer to the question of truth as their ultimate legitimation, Duras is clearly less concerned with producing an image of herself faithful to a preexisting reality and more interested in the rhetorical and creative possibilities offered by the autobiographical genre. Felski makes the interesting observation that feminist confession is a rare phenomenon within the Catholic and rhetorically conscious French tradition on account of the strong Protestant element in the feminist preoccupation with subjectivity as the discovery of an authentic self (p. 114).

    Clearly, Duras's writing of the “subject” differs from the pervasive quest for truth and self-understanding that Felski finds in the Protestant tradition of feminist confession. As Sharon Willis remarks, “Part of the appeal of The Lover lies in its duplicity, its pretense to confession coupled with its refusal to swear to truthfulness,” Marguerite Duras, 5. In The Lover, the autobiographical “I” uses a variety of formal and rhetorical strategies in order to create a subject position for the female Other within a specific sexual and cultural economy. Rather than seeking validation through an appeal to authenticity, Duras's construction of a female subject relies on the colonialist politics of The Lover and a specific use of the autobiographical mode, both of which rework the sexual and cultural economy of The Sea Wall.

34. Sarah J. Capitanio, “Perspectives sur l'écriture durassienne: L'Amant,” Symposium 41 (Spring 1987): 18. The English translation of the cited passage is as follows: “The designation of the focalized as ‘she’ at this point, however, indicates a permanent split between her and the female narrator and, consequently, the nonresolution of this fundamental search [for personal identity].”

35. “L'homme élégant est descendu de la limousine, il fume une cigarette anglaise. Il regarde la jeune fille au feutre d'homme et aux chaussures d'or. Il vient vers elle lentement.”

    (p. 42)

36. See V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 115-23, for an analysis of the infiltration of reported speech with authorial intonation.

37. “Quinze ans et demi. La chose se sait très vite dans le poste de Sadec. Rien que cette tenue dirait le déshonneur. La mère n'a aucun sens de rien, ni celui de la façon d'élever une petite fille. La pauvre enfant. Ne croyez pas, ce chapeau n'est pas innocent, ça veut dire, c'est pour attirer les regards, l'argent. Les frères, des voyous. On dit que c'est un Chinois, le fils du milliardaire, la ville du Mékong, en céramiques bleues. Même lui, au lieu d'en être honoré, il n'en veut pas pour son fils. Famille de voyous blancs. … Cela se passe dans le quartier mal famé de Cholen. Chaque soir cette petite vicieuse va se faire caresser le corps par un sale Chinois millionaire.”

    (pp. 108-10)

38. As Edward Said demonstrates, the Orient represents “one of Europe's deepest and most recurring images of the Other.” Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1979), 1. For political and economic reasons, the relationship between the West and the Orient has been one of power and domination. Said defines “Orientalism” as the discourse produced by the West about the Orient, a discourse in which the Orient is less a place than “an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery and vocabulary, that have given it presence and reality for the West” (p. 5).

39. Ibid., 188.

40. “Je la vois comme étant de la même chair que cet homme de Cholen. … Hélène Lagonelle, elle est la femme de cet homme de peine qui me fait la jouissance si abstraite, si dure, cet homme obscur de Cholen, de la Chine. Hélène Lagonelle est de la Chine.”

    (p. 92)

41. “Hélène Lagonelle donne envie de la tuer, elle fait se lever le songe merveilleux de la mettre à mort de ses propres mains.”

    (p. 91)

42. “Même le petit corps de petit coolie de mon petit frère disparaît face à cette spelendur.”

    (p. 89)

43. “La peau est d'une somptueuse douceur. Le corps. Le corps est maigre, sans force, sans muscles. Il pourrait avoir été malade, être en convalescence, il est imberbe, sans virilité autre que celle du sexe, il est très faible, il paraît être à la merci d'une insulte, souffrant.”

    (p. 49)

44. “Il lui plaît, la chose ne dépendait que d'elle seule” (p. 48); “Elle lui dit qu'elle ne veut pas qu'il lui parle, que ce qu'elle veut c'est qu'il fasse comme d'habitude il fait avec les femmes qu'il emmène dans sa garconnière” (p. 49); “Elle lui demande de ne pas bouger. Laisse-moi. Elle dit qu'elle veut le faire elle. Elle le fait. Elle le déshabille” (p. 49); “Et pleurant il le fait” (p. 50).

45. Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978).

46. “Il a commencé à souffrir là, dans la chambre, pour la première fois, il ne ment plus sur ce point. Il lui dit que déjà il sait qu'elle ne l'aimera jamais. … Il dit qu'il est seul, atrocement seul avec cet amour qu'il a pour elle.”

    (p. 48)

47. “Il dit qu'il a su tout de suite, dès la traversée du fleuve, que je serai ainsi, après mon premier amant, que j'aimerais l'amour, il dit qu'il sait déjà que lui je le tromperai et aussi que je tromperai tous les hommes avec qui je serai.”

    (p. 54)

48. “Les départs. C'était toujours les mêmes départs. C'était toujours les premiers départs sur les mers. La séparation d'avec la terre s'était toujours faite dans la douleur et le même désespoir, mais ça n'avait jamais empêché les hommes de partir, les juifs, les hommes de la pensée et les purs voyageurs du seul voyage sur la mer, et ça n'avait jamais empêché non plus les femmes de les laisser aller, elles qui ne partaient jamais, qui restaient garder le lieu natal, la race, les biens, la raison d'être du retour.”

    (p. 132)

49. “Alors je lui ai dit que j'étais de l'avis de son père. Que je refusais de rester avec lui.”

    (p. 103)

50. “L'homme de Cholen sait que la décision de son père et celle de l'enfant sont les mêmes et qu'elles sont sans appel.”

    (p. 119)

51. Although the relationship between the young girl and her lover is a form of prostitution in that it involves monetary exchange, it needs to be distinguished from Suzanne's prostitution in The Sea Wall and the notion of prostitution elaborated by Irigaray in This Sex, 187-88. In The Lover, it is the exchange of money that makes the young girl's relationship with the Chinese man tolerable in the eyes of her family. Consequently, it serves as a screen for the sexual pleasure the young girl derives from the affair, and thereby enables her to continue the relationship.

52. “Mes frères ne lui adresseront jamais la parole. C'est comme s'il n'était pas visible pour eux, comme s'il n'était pas assez dense pour être perçu, vu, entendu par eux. Cela parce qu'il est à mes pieds, qu'il est posé en principe que je ne l'aime pas, que je suis avec lui pour l'argent, que je ne peux pas l'aimer, que c'est impossible, qu'il pourrait tout supporter de moi sans être jamais au bout de cet amour. Cela, parce que c'est un Chinois, que ce n'est pas un blanc.”

    (p. 65)

53. “Je lui demande de me dire comment son père est riche, de quelle façon. Il dit que parler d'argent l'ennuie, mais que si j'y tiens il veut bien me dire ce qu'il sait de la fortune de son père. Tout a commencé à Cholen, avec les compartiments pour indigènes. Il en a fait construire trois cents. Plusieurs rues lui appartiennent. … La population ici aime bien être ensemble, surtout cette population pauvre, elle vient de la campagne et elle aime bien vivre aussi dehors, dans la rue. Et il ne faut pas détruire les habitudes des pauvres.”

    (pp. 60-61)

54. “C'est une famille en pierre, pétrifiée dans une épaisseur sans accès aucun. Chaque jour nous essayons de nous tuer, de tuer. Non seulement on ne se parle pas mais on ne se regarde pas. Du moment qu'on est vu, on ne peut pas regarder. Regarder c'est avoir un mouvement de curiosité vers, envers, c'est déchoir. Aucune personne regardée ne vaut le regard sur elle. Il est toujours déshonorant.”

    (p. 69)

55. “Je lui dis que son séjour en France lui a été fatal. Il en convient. Il dit qu'il a tout acheté à Paris, ses femmes, ses connaissances, ses idées” (p. 62). “Il parlait. Il disait qu'il s'ennuyait de Paris, des adorables Parisiennes, des noces, des bombes, ah là là, de la Coupole, de la Rotonde je préfère, des boîtes de nuit, de cette existence ‘épatante’ qu'il avait menée pendant deux ans.”

    (p. 45)

56. “Il etait intimidé, il avait peur comme avant. Sa voix tremblait tout à coup. Et avec le tremblement, tout à coup, elle avait retrouvé l'accent de la Chine.”

    (p. 142)

57. “Il savait qu'elle avait commencé à écrire des livres, il l'avait su par la mère qu'il avait revue à Saigon. … Et puis il n'avait plus su quoi lui dire. Et puis il le lui avait dit. Il lui avait dit que c'était comme avant, qu'il l'aimait encore, qu'il ne pourrait jamais cesser de l'aimer, qu'il l'aimerait jusqu'à sa mort.”

    (p. 142)

58. Gayatri Spivak argues that a certain body of liberal feminist criticism “reproduces the axioms of imperialism” through “a basically isolationist admiration for the literature of the female subject.” “Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985): 243. I concur with this argument and have emphasized the colonialist politics involved in Duras's constitution of a female subject position.