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Living Section of the San Bernardino SUN February 16, 2003 Issue 
"The Lover" & "The War" by Marguerite Duras  
Two Short Alternative Love PiecesIn the inexplicable ways in which things in life seem to fall, this weekend's coincidence of Valentine's Day with heightened threat of terrorist attacks and possibility of war made me wonder again about love in time of war, in particular in Europe during World War II. How does love survive and even thrive under the most adverse conditions? I have often wondered how the scores of people like my parents whose youth was spent in dodging bombs and Gestapo searches for Resistance members, and in scavenging for food and medicine, how did they manage to fall in love, sustain that love and even have children. While realizing that future wars (terrorist attacks being also a form of warfare) would be unlike any prior wars, the subliminal associations of love and war put me in mind of two favorite books that I reread occasionally. They are both by Marguerite Duras. To the generation of the 1960s who discovered film as an art form and flocked to the film study courses offered at universities, Marguerite Duras would be well-known, now as a novelist however, but as the screenplay writer of the classic film that everyone studied and loved then, "Hiroshima mon amour." Duras is a prolific writer in many areas, but above all she is a novelist with a most iconoclastic novelistic technique. Minimalist is how her style could best be described - minimal plot, minimal character development, brief sentences, poetic structure and an expanse of theme. The writing is elegant, beautiful and poetic even in translation. She does not have a wide readership in this country. But those who have "discovered" her feel as if they are members of some exclusive club for literature connoisseurs. Marguerite Duras was born in 1914 in Indochina to French colonists but went to Paris at seventeen to study at the Sorbonne. She died in 1996. Many of her works are biographical and are based on her Indochina experience. "The Lover", a decadent and sensuous novel, considered her most biographical work, was also made into an exquisite film some 15 years ago. It is about a French schoolgirl, who remains nameless throughout the book, in Colonial Indochina in the 1930s. The landscape is languid and steamy and the vegetation is luscious. At fifteen-and-a-half she begins an affair with an older man, the son of a rich and noble Chinese family. But their love is doomed. Racial prejudice does not permit either of them to marry. It might be just as well, because in spite of her love and desire for him she knows she will leave him. And she does. She returns to Paris. At fifteen-and-a-half the book's heroine has already discovered the elusive something that makes up desire. "I know it's not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams," she tells us. "I know the problem lies elsewhere and I only know it isn't where women think. I look at the women in the streets of Saigon. Some of them are very beautiful, very white...they just save themselves up, save themselves up for Europe, for lovers, holidays in Italy... They wait, these women. They dress just for the sake of dressing. They look at themselves. In the shade of their villas, they look at themselves for later on, they dream of romance." Duras leaves it as a matter of speculation whether or not decades later, perhaps after all the wars and the disintegration of Indochina, the nameless heroine, now a woman of maturity, and the Chinese lover are reunited in Paris. But all this is only marginally important. What really counts is the way in which the theme of love, tender and truculent at the same time, is wrought. "The War", a memoir in the form of vignettes, may or may not be the story of the same French schoolgirl from "The Lover". It is written in the same style and evokes similar nuances. But here the theme of love is an undercurrent. War and its effect on people's psyches dominate this compact book. Each vignette is about life in German-occupied Paris, and more precisely, about some aspect of the French Resistance in which Marguerite Duras participated actively. The first piece may also be the most poignant. The end of the war is near. Paris is liberated and the author is waiting for her husband to return from a camp - perhaps in Germany where he may have been sent after his arrest as a member of the Resistance. But there are no certainties. He may be dead already; he may never have been sent to a camp in Germany. At last he is home, sick and near death. With anguish and love she nurses him and brings him back to life. When he is strong enough, she tells him that she is in love with a comrade from the Resistance and she leaves him. The rest of the vignettes deal with what John Updike called somewhere in one of his stories, "the little movements of the heart". In one vignette she flirts dangerously with a French Gestapo informer - the very same man who had arrested her husband - so that she could obtain information in order to help the Resistance kill him. What Marguerite Duras does for love in "The Lover", here she does for war and love in time of war - the same poetic language, the same feelings - but with the understanding of the universal horror of war added to all that. Ophelia Georgiev Roop Library Director San Bernardino Public Library |
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