BARBARA PROBST SOLOMON
419
sweet period while the hated older brother is away in France, Duras
abruptly switches to an odd political defense of the French fascists,
Robert Brasillach and Drieu la Rochelle, who worked with the Ger–
man Gestapo. (The French executed Brasillach after the liberation
of France, and Drieu killed himself before the French found him.)
Then, directly after that amazing political digression, she resumes
her story of the young narrator's love affair, but now, with a deft
sleight of hand , the brother is replaced by her wealthy Chinese lover,
who drives his black limousine through Saigon. What I am sug–
gesting is that the key scene, which was probably the seduction
by
the
sister
of the brother, Duras never finishes but displaces, frequently by
a political subplot.
If
my theory is correct, it may have been that this time se–
quence is literally what happened to Duras. If one reads the Duras
novel as autobiography, from her written sequence of events one
could make the following supposition: directly after her troubled
adolescence in Indochina, in her next phase in Paris, she may have
tried to bury her early shameful incestuous seduction of her weak,
pliable brother by attaching herself to an equally powerful but very
different type of magnet - political men and political concerns, that
is, the Communist Party. Her shameful incestuous affair with her
brother then gets hidden and becomes obsessively and repetitively
displaced by political images throughout her work, not as a device–
but because it actually happened in that sequence. It is only recently
that Duras has made explicit statements about the role of incest in
her work.
When I reread
The Lover
a second time, substituting the brother
for the Chinese man, the love affair and passions made more sense.
In
The New Republic
I pointed out that"... the sexual exotic, really
is the French girl, not the man. In the important first seduction
scene she is in control. The fifteen year-old narrator commands the
horrified man to seduce her: 'Treat me like you treat the other
woman.' But would a Chinese millionaire's son, who had lived in
Paris and known many French women, be weeping and what I call
mewling like a stuck pig at the thought of making love to a sexy
French girl he had picked up?" And why would an adolescent affair
with an adoring Chinese man who promises to - and apparently
does -love the girl forever permanently ravage and ruin the young
girl's face?
What
is the tragedy?
