BARBARA PROBST SOLOMON
It must have been a long time before [the Chinese man] was able
. .. to give [his Chinese wife] the heir to their fortunes. The
memory of the little white girl must have been there . . . . For a
long time she must have remained the queen of his desire , his
personal link with . . . the immensity of tenderness .. ..
421
Here, with skillful incantation, Duras magnificently fuses the
Chinese man, her son (the child is born shortly before the novel
ends), her adored dead brother, France, and its lost colonial empire:
And with the trembling, suddenly, she heard again the voice of
China. He knew she'd begun writing books , he'd heard about it
through her mother whom he'd met again in Saigon . And about
her younger brother, and he'd been grieved for her. Then he
didn't know what to say . And then he told her. Told her that it
was as before , that he still loved her, he could never stop loving
her, that he'd love her until death .
Because Marguerite Duras uses her political interpolations to
heighten or displace her narrations of incest and miscegenation, and
injects them into her work , they need to be looked at in their own
terms, and because they are political and have to do with real
history, they have to be taken at face value .
In
sharp contrast to the
lyrical poetics of her narration, her political asides frequently are
blunt and explicit. Thus , in
The War: A Memoir
her description of the
Spanish resistance during the liberation of Paris (the FAI, etc .) is the
specific point of view of an experienced Communist pro . Her
apologies for French fascists like Brasillach no doubt reflect her fury
at having been expelled from the French Communist Party in the
late 1940s-thus, fascists suddenly seem to her no worse than mem–
bers of the resistance who had been Communists. The destruction in
Hiroshima
is highly effective and anti-American propaganda (she
equates our efforts to liberate France with our atomic destruction of
Japan), and her descriptions oflife in Saigon are filled with standard
French colonial racist prejudices. Duras has got into the habit of us–
ing her political asides almost like a blank pause meant to obscure
her real passion - her tragic tale of incest - and she has also
managed to get her readers and movie audiences to collude with her
in treating these political
adagios
as though not there. No, not even a
symbolic meaning . The politics are treated as a mere dust jacket
