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PARTISAN REVIEW
If read as incest, many passages in the novel suddenly become
more understandable; it begins to make emotional sense: "She says,
I'd rather you didn't love me. But if you do, I'd like you to do as you
usually do with women. He looks at her in horror, asks, is that what
you want? She says it is. He's started to suffer here in this room, for
the first time, he's no longer lying about it. ... He says he's lonely,
horribly lonely because of this love he feels for her. She says she's
lonely too ." (Then it is the girl who undresses the man, who is por–
trayed as vacillating, weak, afraid and resistant to what is going to
take place .) "He moans, he weeps , in dreadful love ... . The sea,
formless, in advance." (There is an almost identical love-making
scene near the sea in her film about incest,
Agatha. )
Then the nar–
rator switches to their mother: "The image of the woman in darned
stockings has crossed the room, and at last she emerges as a child.
The sons knew it already. But not the daughter yet. They'd never
talk about their mother among themselves, about the knowledge of
her which they both shared and which separated them from her: the
final, decisive knowledge that their mother was a child . Their
mother never knew pleasure.... " (Then after several more pages
we get to the final line. ) "Do it to me, and he did, did it in the unc–
tuousness of blood. And it really was unto death.
It
has been unto
death."
If
the sister seduces the brother, and this leaves them both
traumatized, it then makes sense that after the girl leaves Indochina
for Paris, she receives only one short letter in ten years from her
adored brother: an oblique message that he is "all right." And also
why, in the family scenes in Indochina, when the Chinese takes the
girl and her brothers out dancing, he seems to her suddenly so
powerless and nonexistent. During the Japanese occupation of In–
dochina, in 1942, the brother dies of pneumonia. Though there is
much talk of loss through death, it is the brother, not the lover, who
actually does die.
I have pointed out that" . . . at the end of the book Duras
describes the Chinese man - or whomever he might symbolize–
visiting the narrator many years later in Paris. But it is a common
wish, that one's first love will return, pledging undying
amour.
More
subliminally perhaps, Duras may be mixing a passionate private
fantas y with a public political fantasy . The return of the lover to
Duras may stand for France's dream that its lost Indochina will be
restored, and will eschew its marriage to "the other Chinese woman":
