“The story of my life doesn't exist,” asserts the (again) nameless narrator of The Lover. “Does not exist. There's never any center to it. No path, no line” (p. 8). The text begins with a long self-portrait, a reflection of the narrator's aged face, first as it is described to her by a young man she encounters in a public space, then as she herself sees it evolve from the age of eighteen to the present moment of utter devastation. The entire text revolves around an earlier recollection, the moment just preceding that laying to waste: the crossing of the Mekong River on a ferry at the age of fifteen and the visual image (a photograph never taken) of the young girl dressed in a low-cut silk dress, evening shoes, and a man's fedora. This tension between narrative and image, movement and stasis, controls the text, as does the tension between the external objective perception of the narrator by others and her self-perception, between the third and the first person, and between speech and silence.

The Lover is already a revision of a fabula which has appeared, in different guises, in several of Duras's works. Both the 1958 novel, Un Barrage contre le Pacifique (The Sea Wall) and the 1977 play L'Eden Cinéma deal with aspects of the same plot: the young girl's adolescence in colonial Indochina, the broken dreams of her disturbed and impoverished mother, the hated and adored brother(s), and the rich older lover who promises the entire family an escape from hopelessness. But, as Duras explains in The Lover, “Before, I spoke of the 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” (p. 8). The darkness and silence, the difficulty of telling and the need to retell, again and again, the narrator explains, is connected to the figure of her mother, the figure around whom these texts revolve. “In the books I've written about my childhood I can't remember, suddenly, what I left out, what I said. I think I wrote about our love for our mother, but I don't know if I wrote about how we hated her too. … It's the area on whose brink silence begins. What happens there is silence, the slow travail of my whole life. I'm still there, watching those possessed children, as far away from the mystery now as I was then. I've never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door” (p. 25). In this remarkable passage, the narrator is both mother and child, mother as she stands watching “those possessed children,” and child as she enacts the unspeakable primal scene “outside the closed door.”

The Lover, then, is but one of several repeated attempts to open that door, to illuminate the area of supreme darkness “hidden in the very depths of my flesh, blind as a newborn child” (p. 25). To tell the story of passionate mother-child attachment and identification, Duras uses images similar to Colette's—mystery, darkness, something hidden beyond view, unavailable to narrative. And, like Colette, Duras identifies this search for the “darkest plots” with the process of what she elsewhere calls “feminine literature,” defined as “an organic, translated writing … translated from blackness, from darkness.” But Duras identifies her “feminine writing” in specific contrast to Colette who, she says, wrote “‘feminine literature’ as men wanted it.” Whereas, in Duras's view, Colette writes for the enjoyment of men, the feminine literature she herself envisions and practices, is “a violent, direct literature” which aims to “make women the point of departure in judging, make darkness the point of departure in judging what men call light, make obscurity the point of departure in judging what men call clarity” (p. 426).

Interestingly, Duras's judgment of Colette resembles Rich's reading of Woolf—too much attention paid to men, too much compromise and not enough anger and violence. Whereas, unlike Colette's texts, Duras's do indeed present a past full of anger and violence, pain and suffering, her search through “the darkest plots” of mother-daughter attachment is, like Colette's, mediated by a heterosexual love narrative which is also ultimately and radically rejected. If the figure of the mother appears as both the point of departure and the destination of the narrative, the narrative places her in a multiple network of mediations with the male brothers and the lover whom she ultimately displaces in her daughter's passionate and disturbed attachment. Although these male figures function as pre-texts leading to the mother, their presence complicates and confuses the narrative of daughterly desire.

In a post-script to L'Eden Cinéma, Duras's adaptation of The Sea Wall for the stage, the author apologizes for one particularly disturbing passage of her play, giving license to directors to remove it. The passage is a letter written by the mother to the cadastral agents who had leased her a plot of land which, since it turned out to be totally infertile, robbed her of all her savings and of any possible future livelihood. Providing (like Sido's letters included in Break of Day) a glimpse into the mother's own discourse and imagination, this letter is a long and uncontrolled outpouring of rage and complaints, culminating in detailed threats on the agents' lives, with concrete plans for their violent murder. It is this violence, written in the mother's voice, that Duras feared might be unacceptable to the audiences of her play: “I hesitated to keep—in 1977—the murderous threats that the mother's last letter to the cadastral agents contained. … Then I decided to leave it in. As inadmissible as this violence may appear, it seemed to me more serious to silence it then to disfigure with it the figure of the mother. This violence existed for us, it cradled our childhood.” Continuing in detail to describe the pain, sadness, and despair contained in the letter, Duras concludes: “If the violence of this woman, the mother, is, however, apt to shock or not to be heard at the very point of its greatest legitimacy, then that passage of the letter can be deleted” (p. 150, my translation). The letter in L'Eden Cinéma is reprinted from The Sea Wall, where Joseph and Suzanne discuss it at length. Joseph also silences the mother's rage—he decides not to mail the letter since he feels it would be more useful to him and his sister than to the insensitive agents. It would teach him to keep alive his own anger, and, for his sister, it would function as a negative example: “You must remember these stories about the Eden cinema [the theater where the mother played piano to accompany silent movies] and you must always do just the opposite of what she did” (p. 224). Maternal identification threatens and unsettles disturbingly the daughter's process of subject-formation; yet the reasons for this threat transcend the patterns of psychology.

In The Lover, where no such letter appears, the act of silencing the mother is more comprehensive. Yet the mother does express similar rage in her dialogue and is reported to have done so throughout the narrator's childhood and adolescence. In this last text Duras's narrator focuses on her own relation to the mother's rage and violence, especially on how maternal anger and maternal madness affect and inform her own imagination and her own writing. It is as though the mother's own discourse could be better rewritten, revised, by the daughter if it were excised from the text: “I tell him that when I was a child my mother's unhappiness took the place of dreams. My dreams were of my mother, never of Christmas trees, always just her, a mother either flayed by poverty or distraught and muttering in the wilderness, either searching for food or endlessly telling what's happened to her, Marie Legrand from Roubaix, telling of her innocence, her savings, her hopes” (p. 46). When the mother is present, she only causes fear and anger in the daughter: “There was no longer anything there to inhabit her image. I went mad in full possession of my senses.” Faced with the mother's mad alterity, the terrified daughter comes to inhabit the mother's body, herself taking the place the mother has left empty during the attack.

This account and experience of the mother's pain and her madness, her hysterical outbursts, her absences, her radical otherness, terrifying for her children, dominates the pages of The Lover, although the mother's own words are absent. Not only does the mother not write, she also discourages, even forbids, the narrator to write. The daughter's text, emerging from that prohibition, can no longer contain the voice of the enraged mother, even though it takes shape around that missing voice in the effort to give it life, to keep it alive, to open the door that might allow her to understand it. This pattern of maternal presence/absence very much resembles that of Break of Day, even though the quality of the mother's elided and sought-after subjectivity is radically different. Whereas the memory of “Sido” represents the idealized garden of the narrator's childhood, a paradisiacal realm of which “Colette” is no longer worthy, which she needs to recapture and may never be able to, the memory of Marie Roubaix reflects the hardships of widowhood and single motherhood, the colonial existence of a teacher and her family in Indochina, war, hunger, poverty, and the resulting madness. Nevertheless, the outlook of both protagonists is shaped by their mothers', and Duras's narrator needs the access to and the distance from the mother's madness as much as “Colette” needs access to her mother's plenitude. “Because of what's been done to our mother, so amiable, so trusting, we hate life, we hate ourselves” (p. 55). Here, however, the pre-oedipal world of mother-child union is no Eden to recapture. Not only does it fail to offer an alternative to the violence of civilization, it is very much a product of that violence.

The relationship between the narrator of The Lover and her mother is filtered through a complex structure of mediating relationships which include the two brothers, the older Chinese lover, and even a female friend, Hélène Lagonelle. Through each of these figures, the narrator gains access to the others and ultimately seeks to gain access to the mother, the figure behind the closed door. Some significant changes have taken place since The Sea Wall, however. The single adored brother Joseph, clearly a “man-who-would-understand,” has been replaced by two brothers—a revered younger brother who has all of Joseph's positive and none of his negative qualities, and a despised older brother, the image of an authoritative patriarch who, although powerless in the world, destructively dominates the lives of his family members. The lover has also shifted both in character and plot. No longer French, he is Chinese; although he is rich, he occupies a lower social status than the narrator and her family. It is this shift in power and status, perhaps, that makes it possible for the narrator to desire him sexually, whereas in the earlier text she could barely tolerate his presence. The older brother, revered and preferred by the mother, serves as a repressive object of jealousy and rage, later contempt, throughout the narrative. The younger brother is the narrator's adored twin whose early death nearly causes her own destruction. Vastly different from each other, the three siblings are united only through the passionate love they share for their mother, and through their sorrow for her ruined life. In this family, the primal psychic triangle defining the narrator's individuation does not consist of mother/father/daughter but of mother/son/daughter, with the brother split into two, one good, one bad. Whereas the father is totally absent from the narrative, an object of memory and longing only for the mother, the brothers remain important psychic forces throughout the space of the text. Yet in the course of the plot they also come to be displaced—the younger brother dies and the older brother eventually loses his authority, becoming a traitor, even a thief, before his demise.

It is not the lover, however, who displaces the brothers from the narrator's affection or from the center of the narrative. During her affair with the lover, all three male figures coexist in her forever shifting affections—between her love for the younger brother, the physical passion for the lover, and the murderous hatred for the older brother. The affair does not represent a rupture in her affections, then, but merely another element in the structure of mediation that defines them. From the beginning of their affair, the lover's presence is entangled with the very material being of the mother, the brothers, and Hélène Lagonelle. When they meet and go out to dinner together, the lover and the brothers do not speak. But during the narrator's moments of extreme bodily intimacy and togetherness with the Chinese lover, the brothers are there, approving or disapproving, similar to him or different: “The shadow of another man must have passed through the room, the shadow of a young murderer, but I didn't know that then. … The shadow of a young hunter must have passed through the room too, but that one, yes, I knew about, sometimes he was present in the pleasure and I'd tell the lover from Cholon, talk to him of the other's body and member, of his indescribable sweetness” (p. 100). Rather than a simple break from childhood and familial attachments, the lover offers, through mediation, a way to remain embedded in those attachments, even while finding enough distance from them to be capable of describing their intensity. In fact, I would argue that he offers a privileged form of access to her mother: during their passionate scenes of lovemaking, the lover becomes her mother, as she becomes his child. The passion she feels gives her access to the mother's body: “So I became his child. And he became something else for me too. I began to recognize the inexpressible softness of his skin, of his member, apart from himself” (p. 100). As the narration moves from first to third person during the moments of passion, the protagonist gains distance from herself and access to the mother's mad self-abandonment by way of the sexual passion she shares with the lover.

The Lover is the story of the narrator's coming to writing. Even at the moments of greatest childhood and adolescent despair, she knows that she will write and that to do so she must leave behind her family and the lover. It is only when she has left Saigon and is traveling on the boat to France that the narrator understands the depth of her love for the Chinese man from Cholon; it is only after the younger brother dies that she accepts the “unfathomable mystery” of her love for him which also makes her want to die. Even as she separates from the figures of her adolescence, they establish themselves as permanent fixtures in her imagination, to be examined again and again in their complex relations to each other, providing the obsessive themes and images of Duras's oeuvre. The novel ends as, years later, the lover calls her in Paris to tell her that he will always love her, that nothing has changed. It is his declaration. For her, for the older woman novelist, love and the lover need to recede into the background of the fiction. Like the brothers, the lover is not the object of nostalgia or longed-for recovery, but an important marker in the shifting structure of mediation which creates not only the space for writing in Duras's work, but also its obsessive preoccupation.

The mother, however, functions as more than such a pre-text; one could argue that she is the ground on which all the other relationships rest and to which they lead. But she is, in many respects, an absent ground. Although she is featured in many of Duras's texts, she often remains silent. The most dramatic staging of her silent presence is in L'Eden Cinéma, where the stage directions read as follows:

The mother sits on a low seat and the others gather around her. … Then they speak about the mother. About her past. About her life. About the love she elicited. The mother will remain immobile on her seat, expressionless, like a statue, distant, separated—like the stage—from her own story. The others touch her, caress her arms, kiss her hands. She allows it: what she represents in this play surpasses what she is and she is not responsible for it … the mother—object of the narrative—will never speak for herself.

(p. 12; my translation)

The Lover, as do the other texts which tell the same story, presents a version of the feminist family romance that differs from the ones we encountered earlier. If mother-daughter entanglement serves as a narrative focus here, it does so as the privileged relationship in a nexus of shifting attachments, each mediating a series of others. If Duras's text seeks to open a closed door, she can do so only to find that it leads to other doors, each connected to all the others, but none providing an ultimate point of origin. Does the desire for the lover allow her to seek the mother, or is it the reverse? Does the love for her younger brother enable her to recognize her love for the lover or vice versa? How is power distributed in these relationships: does the lover hold the power because he is older, richer, and male, or does the narrator because she is white? Duras overturns and complicates such dichotomies and divisions. No relationship and no point in the process of subject-formation is immune from the struggles of power and from the degradations of a civilization engaged in war and imperial expansion. No alternative can be offered, none can even be envisioned. The process of repeated revisions and shifting mediations allows Duras and her narrators to go over the same ground again and again, making discoveries but reaching no ultimate illumination. As the narrator says: “Sometimes I realize that if writing isn't, all things, all contraries confounded, a quest for vanity and void, it's nothing. That if it's not, each time, all things confounded into one through some inexpressible essence, then writing is nothing but advertisement” (p. 8).

Yet The Lover suggests that the figure of the mother is this “inexpressible essence” which confounds all other things into one, thereby making writing possible. She does so not by offering a destination to which to return, but by functioning precisely as “vanity and void”; she may be a privileged point in the nexus of relationships defining the structures of desire, but she is not the “center” which would make the story of the narrator's life “exist” or cohere. She does so not by providing an alternative realm to cultural complicity, but through her very entanglement in the culture and the relationships which define it.

Such a reading lies outside of the confines of a feminist family romance based in psychoanalysis alone. Julia Kristeva's recent article on Duras illustrates the limitations of a psychoanalytic perspective. Interestingly, her reading of Duras's writing is preceded by a reflection on the literature that might best approximate the politics of our age, the psychic pain inflicted by the gas chambers, the bomb, and the gulag. Duras, she feels, possesses the discourse of “blunted pain,” the art of “non-catharsis” which brings the reader to the edge of silence and not beyond. After this haunting and suggestive beginning, two related aspects of her reading are particularly striking: her insistence that “political events … are internalized and measured only by the human pain they induce,” that “public life becomes profoundly unreal, whereas private life is intensified to the point that it invades the real and invalidates all other preoccupation,” and in contrast, her identification of maternal abandonment as the traumatic structure which lies at the basis of all of Duras's writing, of all the internal pain. In her narrative of this pervasive structure of maternal abandonment, Kristeva represents the mother as other, as the “archaic, uncontrollable” object, the icon of madness whose function it is to disrupt all efforts at identity and sameness. Kristeva's internalization of the political, and her location of its force in the figure of the abandoning, mad, and unfaithful mother, is symptomatic of the moves of psychoanalytic feminism (especially insofar as it is allied with French deconstructive theory, but also in its American object-relations incarnation). In eclipsing the mother's own voice, her own story, and allowing her only the status of object, or of “Other,” Kristeva, and to an extent Duras also, eclipse the political dimensions of women's lives, conflating them with the psychological. Here, I believe, lies a major limit of psychoanalytic feminism.

What Kristeva sees as the structure of maternal violence and abandonment, leading to “reduplication” and ultimately stasis and “nothingness,” can be read through a lens different from the lens of subjectivity and identity. Another obsessive figure in Duras's work illustrates the need for such a shift in perspective—the beggar woman from Vinlongh or Savannakhet who returns in many of the novels and films from The Sea-Wall to The Vice Consul to India Song, Love, and The Lover. Poor, at times pregnant, at other times trying to sell her child to another mother (the somewhat less poor white woman), this figure of lament, whose delirious song and cry punctuate Duras's novels, serves, in Madeleine Borgomano's terms, as the “generative cell” for Duras's entire narrative project and, in Kristeva's terms, as the double of her other characters. In a taped interview, cited by Borgomano, Duras relates the autobiographical incident which constituted the generative cell of this generative cell: “My mother once came back from the market having bought a child … a six-month old little girl … that she only kept for several days and who died. … I still see my mother crossing the garden with this woman who followed her. … My mother cried … she was always enraged by such misery. … I remember this stubbornness, this fantastic will to give away her child. … I have tried to transform this monstrous and adorable act into literature but I have not succeeded.” The obsessive and unnarratable nature of this memory emerges quite clearly in this oral account, as it does in the many scenes of her work Duras has devoted to it; what emerges with equal force, however, is Duras's interest in sustaining the irrevocable strangeness and opacity (these are her terms) of the beggar woman's shocking maternal act. In so doing, Duras can perhaps minimize its monumental threat, a threat so great that in The Lover she describes it as the fear of a state worse than death, of entering the beggar woman's madness, or perhaps of becoming the child who is killed by it. The dangers of maternal identification are here.

Yet, the scene Duras describes in that taped interview has obvious significances beyond the psychological, significances which, interestingly, emerge more clearly in the early texts in which the mother screams and speaks than in the later ones in which she remains silent so as to be spoken about. The Indian beggar mother, ostracized by her own mother and reduced to dire poverty, sells her child to the white woman while the white daughter looks on; the white second mother, although she dresses the child in a lace gown, is incapable of keeping her alive; in The Sea Wall the white brother buries the child, and the white mother swears she will never care for children again. The white mother herself is too poor to care for her own children. She watches her own children's failure to thrive and all around her she watches many other children die of hunger and disease. She is the colonizer, yet, as a woman, she is also the colonized. Certainly she is the victim of colonialism. She is more and more angry, more and more depressed. A doctor (the text's image of a “psychiatrist”) warns that her fits of angry screaming may be fatal. But the third person narrator's voice argues with the doctor's diagnosis: “The doctor traced these attacks of hers to the crumbling of the sea wall. Maybe he was mistaken. So much resentment could only have accumulated very slowly, year by year, day by day. There was more than one single cause: there were thousands, counting the collapse of the sea walls, the world's injustice, the sight of her children splashing in the river …” (p. 17). While the doctor sees only one cause, the narrative voice understands the complexity and vastness of the problems faced by the mother. Whereas in a psychoanalytic reading the crumbling of the sea wall represents a psychic disintegration pervasive in Duras's texts, the text itself, I would argue, demands a more multifaceted reading which goes beyond the psychological to the economic and the political and which places the mother's madness in that context. Similarly, the white eight-year-old, terrified of the beggar woman's touch in The Lover, is afraid of the touch of poverty as well as of the touch of the madness of mother-child fusion. The fear and the power of “all things confounded into one” need to be traced back not only to their roots in the psyche and their connection to writing, but also to the connections between that psyche and the biological and social body it inhabits. Such contextualization might perhaps make it possible to take the maternal out of the realm of silence and unrepresentability and to include, in the feminist family romance and on the stage of feminist self-presentation, the perspective and the voice of mothers as well as of daughters.