I’ve also been told it was because being poor made us brood. I’ve often been told it was because of spending all one’s childhood in too strong a sun. The sentences through their repetitions and pauses, and their little refinements, retain the knowledge that this is memory memory fades as we touch it, and is lost and altered as we lay claim to it: The text is made up of fragments, of moments recorded with all the detail their emotionally vital content demands. Images echo at beginning and end: the boat on the Mekong where she meets the Chinese businessman who becomes her lover and the ship with the sudden flurry of Chopin. Instead, it is like picking up two ends of cloth, one on each side, raising them together in the same moment, drawing them to each other, to fold and fold. The structure of The Lover is not linear. But while it was happening, no one even knew of its existence. Who would have thought of such a thing? The photograph could only have been taken if someone could have known in advance how important it was to be in my life, that event, that crossing the river. It might have existed, a photograph might have been taken, just like any other, somewhere else, in other circumstances. The way Duras writes the image of the girl on the deck, of the crystalline moment that went unrecorded in any photograph but is nonetheless the image the entirety of The Lover hinges on, and it itself is a lesson in memory and loss on the level of every sentence: The most potent image, and the one Duras admits she treasures most, is the moment she stands, fifteen-and-a-half, in gold lamé shoes and a man’s fedora on the ferry to Saigon. The book is written in fragments, searing images of her childhood, her affair at fifteen with a Chinese businessman, and the devastating violence of her family life. It does not run smoothly but emerges, moment by moment, crystalline and glittering. It is in flux, as it is in life in all of us, as we remember. Reading Duras’ memories of the boat to Saigon, her fifteen-and-a-half year-old self standing on the deck, about to meet the man who would utterly alter the fabric of her life and experience, memory is not something to be merely recounted as this happened, then this, and then this. The memory is held up in the very moment of its reclamation and loss, all at once. Even the future is already present and decided. On the very first page of her most famous and autobiographical novel, The Lover, Marguerite Duras seems to capture in one line the most powerful aspect of the book: “Very early in my life, it was too late.” In this line, recollection, loss, the time that causes it, and the past and present, all exist simultaneously.
0 kommentar(er)
