“The Lover” by Marguerite Duras (post 2): It “doesn’t make a lot of sense,” because nameless multiple narrators and protagonists are confusing.

1991 Interview

“During my interview I was disconcerted by her habit of jumping disconnectedly from subject to subject…In New York I spoke to Tom Bishop, chairman of the French department at New York University, a Beckett scholar and a friend of Duras's for 25 years…‘She was always like this,’ he declared. ‘I don't think she was ever any different…I think she's a fabulous writer who should just write and not talk about what she's thinking,’ Bishop said. Like her talk, her work doesn't make ‘a lot of sense,’ but it does ‘something else. It allows me to have an insight into the human psyche that I have found unique. I have learned things about humanity through her that others don't teach me.’ ”

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/20/magazine/the-life-and-loves-of-marguerite-duras.html?pagewanted=all

The Lover

“The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist…There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one” (1, p. 8). [The first-person narrator-protagonist has memory gaps. Search “memory gaps” for past posts on this cardinal symptom of multiple personality.]

“This particular day I must be wearing the famous pair of gold lamé high heels…

“It’s not the shoes, though, that make the girl look so strangely, so weirdly dressed. No, it’s the fact that she’s wearing a man’s flat-brimmed hat…The crucial ambiguity of the image lies in the hat…

“Suddenly I see myself as another, as another would be seen, outside myself…the shoes…contradict the hat…so they’re right for me…” (1, pp. 10-11). [This sequence starts with the first-person narrator, switches to the third-person narrator, then switches back to the first-person narrator, who has the added perspective of some third personality who is observing the first-person narrator.]

“I can become anything anyone wants me to be. And believe it” (1, p. 15). [By itself, this could describe acting ability only. In the context of multiple narrative personalities, this could refer to her ability to form new personalities. It is an interesting question as to whether actors and actresses have a high prevalence of multiple personality.]

“…my mother…I can see she’s watching me, she suspects something. She knows her daughter…there’s been an air of strangeness…The girl speaks even more slowly than usual, she’s absent-minded, she who’s usually so interested in everything, her expression has changed…” (1, p. 42). [This highlights different personalities of the protagonist. There is probably multiple personality of both narration and protagonist.] [Also, search “absent-minded.”]

“The two smaller children, the girl and the younger brother…

“I remember…I forget everything, and I forgot to say this, that we were children who laughed, my younger brother and I…” (1, pp. 45-46).

“I used to watch what he did with me…

“And there’s the headache, too, which often makes her lie limp, motionless, ghastly pale, with a wet bandage over her eyes” (1, p. 72). [Some people with multiple personality get headaches when they switch personalities.]

Finally, why is the protagonist nameless? Why couldn’t the protagonist be named? One possibility is that the protagonist has more then one personality, and not all of them have the same name. [Search “nameless” and “namelessness” for past posts.] 

1. Marguerite Duras. The Lover [1984-5]. Translated by Barbara Bray. Pages 1-84 in Marguerite Duras. The Lover, Wartime Notebooks, Practicalities. New York, Everyman’s Library, 2018.