Located in colonial Vietnam, it is set against the relationship between colonial whiteness - struggling against economic misfortune to avoid becoming white trash - and cosmopolitan Chinese-ness, Paris-educated, immensely wealthy. It is also a book about class relationships, but nothing that European class theory can explain. The book’s sex scenes are not explicit, in the sense that there is almost no genital detail, but they are torrid, and the author constantly reminds the reader that the protagonist is a skinny “little white girl.” But it is she who is as much the debaucher of the Chinese man as the other way around.
The question constantly asked was, “How old was Jane March when she made the film?” In fact, she was 18, but she looks every inch the 15-year-old girl who has an affair with an older man - in the film played by the great Chinese actor, Tony Leung. If the book was a scandal because of its sexual core and obsessiveness, the 1992 film of the book directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, despite the prizes it won, was coolly received in the US. She is not a victim but the determiner of all around her, and her older lover is a kind of exotic cipher.
It is also a book about underage sex, in which it is the Lolita figure who speaks and takes charge. But I think the book is much more than that, and much more than the citations that accompanied its winning of the 1984 Prix Goncourt, France’s greatest literary honor. A lot of the chapter on Duras is in fact an account of Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic reading of The Lover, Duras’ perhaps most scandalous work - in which Duras, as the autobiographical narrator, emerges as the possessor of a Jocasta complex not a son in love with the mother, but a daughter loving and intensely hating the mother in competition with the oldest son. She is here presented not as a philosopher, as all 49 others are, but as the novelist of “emotional disequilibrium,” somehow drawing on her own life of gendered madness to paint a picture of trauma as a modern condition. Russell has him as a philosopher of freedom - of romantic revolt - as the first great champion of what we now call “Orientalism,” but trying all the same to penetrate the exotic and give the East its due.īy the same token, John Lechte, in his 1994 book, Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers - meaning largely European thinkers from Sigmund Freud to Jürgen Habermas - suddenly has a chapter on Marguerite Duras. But there, amidst chapter after chapter devoted to individual philosophers, is the sudden inclusion of the scandalous poet Lord Byron. It was published in 1945 and is magisterial. Revisiting Marguerite Duras’ novel today reminds us how poignant it remains.īertrand Russell wrote his History of Western Philosophy from memory, to earn some money while in the US.