Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (21 page)

Linear plot does not behave this way—Shakespeare, Prévost, and the Brontë sisters graph with great care the unfurling and developing of young love as linear event—but perhaps the psyche operates according to different rules and directionalities, perhaps it returns to its seminal data to make ever more sense of it, to unpack it, to make it yield its secret. Duras’s story is
remembered;
is that not, at some level, the right, the only, “tense” for approaching young love? In this light, growing up is not simply the early-stage journey we’ve studied but also the later processes of recollection and interpretation, the crucial labor required to possess one’s own story, to grasp one’s own formation. Unlike the other texts under discussion,
The Lover
is built of this ceaseless two-way traffic, the narrating and remembering a liminal event of sexual initiation, and it makes one wonder if threshold experiences are ever truly over. Do we ever stop growing up?

The frozen, pirouetted, ever-entrancing scene of the girl on the ferryboat leads, as it must, to the sexual initiation that is, in many respects, the novel’s heart. Juliet asks for the darkness of night to receive her lover, but Shakespeare does not go to their bed; Prévost snatches his lovers out of bed when the forces of order appear, but he does not focus on what was going on in the bedroom. Both Brontës, writing in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, are predictably close-lipped about such intimate matters. We are now in modern territory, and Duras writes young love—young lovemaking—with candor, tact, and beauty. The girl repeatedly asks the man to do to her what he does to other women he brings to his flat. But soon enough it is she who takes the lead, undresses him, guides him. Her education has begun:

Here is her entry into pleasure, and it is written with a modicum of details—certainly nothing pornographic, even if deeply sensual—that limn the particulars of the Chinese lover (thin, hairless, weak, vulnerable) but are insistently generic in their notations of touch, body, and pleasure. Personality, intimacy, emotion, sentiment—the constituents of what we think of as “love”—seem banished here, so that the dance of the body may receive the attention it deserves. Orgasm takes the metaphor often ascribed to it, “the sea,” but in this text, with its rains, rivers, and ocean, with its insistence on a powerful current that drives all human affairs, sweeping up belongings and animals and persons, such a notation seems right and in its place. There is no moralizing, no verbiage, no tender words between lovers.

At about this point most readers of the novel begin to understand why Duras has titled her book so impersonally:
The Lover
. Sexual desire, copulation, pleasure, orgasm: these are anonymous forces that have no proper names attached to them; they are the mating rituals of the species, possessed of a force and magic on the far side of all notions, including the one we call love. The man tells her he knew she’d love love, that she is made for it; she concentrates entirely on his expert hands, on what he does to her body, on what it then feels. He curses her, is violent, she asks him to do it again and again, he does. Her body, she says, is seeking and finding and taking what it likes. All is right.

Despite the sharply focused particulars of this love affair, it comes across as profoundly impersonal, even anonymous. What they do together has a riveting intensity, but our familiar “domesticating” labels have no purchase. At one point she actually wonders if she ever loved him, and the reader wonders too; they talk very little, and when they do, what they say is immaterial. Yet there is something truly undying about this liaison, for it is still hypnotic and beckoning all these years later, still asking to be interpreted, still promising to contain, coiled inside it, her whole life to come. Young love comes across as the core riddle of our lives, the central event to which all refers, the origin that must be sought and wooed through memory and language.

There is nothing technical about Duras’s novel; it is no primer on ways of making love or awakening the body to pleasure. Even in its erotic professionalism—the girl is being initiated, is initiating herself, into the mysteries and science of
jouissance
—it gestures to larger patterns. “Love” would seem to be the name we give to the opening of self that lovemaking engenders.
Growing up:
love grows us. There is nothing reassuring about this model, no heightening of our moral sensibilities, but nonetheless a broadening of our forces and strengths, an extending of our reach. Experiencing orgasm, the girl now realizes that her mother—the woman whose misery parses so much of this book and this child’s psyche—has never known pleasure. Love teaches. Still more astounding, more unsettling, is the way in which love coheres us, brings the disparate elements of our far-flung lives into relation, into fusion. Hence the girl comes to understand that her deep and occulted feelings for her two brothers—her hatred of the older one, the bully, the night hunter, the one loved by the mother, the one who amounted to nothing while eating up the resources of the family, and her twisted desire for the younger one, the weaker, more beautiful, more sensitive one who died in his forties, who shared something primitive and perhaps sexual with her in the past, whose death sealed off her family affections altogether—somehow course together into the relation with the Chinese lover, as if this sexual liaison incorporated all the libidinal pulsions of her existence into one sweeping current.

And it does not stop here. Arguably the most mesmerizing pages of this novel depict the girl’s violent erotic attachment to her school friend Hélène Lagonelle, the friend with the luscious, unbearably enticing breasts, the friend unaware of her own ripe body, which obsesses the girl and possesses a kind of sexual potency far beyond that of the male lover. Again, it all comes together, as if the love affair with the Chinese man were not only inseparable from her lust for Hélène but these passions feed each other, enable each other, substitute for each other, require each other:

A new map of the human subject is coming into view here. The initiation into sexual pleasure is the entry into a territory, a libidinal cartography that links all its key players via desired and imagined couplings. Substitution is the order of the day, for desire works along these pulsing lines, and there is something at once delirious and grand in this yearned-for sexual triangle, in which what is done to you is what most inflames me, charting a kind of exponential libidinal playground, a field picture of “love.”
The Lover
seems to me most astounding along just these lines, for it dares to reimagine the company we keep, the invisible currents that link and arouse and gratify us, the broader erotic topography in which single lives are placed and play out. And it can move beyond the erotic altogether. The most hallucinatory passages in the novel graph something like an epidemic of outpouring feelings and “secret sharing,” yielding a universe charged with “sisters” who are crazed versions of the protagonist, such as the madwoman of Vinh Long who pursues the girl in her fantasy, or the beggar woman who moves through the Mekong en route to Calcutta, “tending her foot eaten up with maggots and covered with flies,” carrying the dead little girl with her, or the Lady whose lover commits suicide, Lady as the girl’s alter ego, described as “alone, queenlike,” each possessed of bodies made for love, “consigned to the infamy of a pleasure unto death.” These are all versions of the protagonist, reflected images of whom she desires, what she is or might become: a pluralist view of the self.

All this is contained in the scene of the fifteen-and-a-half-year-old girl on the ferryboat, poised to step into her future, fecund with life and love and sorrow to come. Young love is the embryo of all this. We are meant to take it seriously when Duras writes that the Chinese lover loves her as a child: “He plays with his child’s body, turns it over, covers his face with it, his lips, his eyes.” Yes, we know that these notations evoke incest and abuse. Yet that is not how they come across in this novel, as if Duras wanted to explode all our registers for understanding sexuality and desire, as if she wanted to make us understand that “young love” is the incandescent crystallization of all the desire we’ll ever have, that it inflames both lover and loved one, that it haunts forever the minds of those on time’s treadmill. To somehow possess this magic moment would be tantamount to possessing all the promise of one’s life. Thus the novel closes perfectly with the phone call from the (married) Chinese lover, now in Paris many many decades later, telling the protagonist that “it was as before, that he still loved her, he could never stop loving her, that he’d love her until death.” A supreme fantasy on the part of the old, ravaged woman whose story this is? Or a supreme feat of self-appropriation through writing, across time, enlisting young love as the focal point of existence?

Young love thrusts us into our larger selves as well as into the world. Even though injury and sometimes death press closely in our five love texts, we remember them most for the birth of self they seem to inaugurate. Even the problems and obstacles they highlight serve as grist for their mill, incite love to live on and go further, feed the fire. Romeo and Juliet die, but they have flowered. Des Grieux is fated to lose Manon, but one feels that the substance of this man’s life (what he was capable of) is cargoed in his tumultous affair with Manon. Catherine and Heathcliff experience from earliest childhood an absolute link, on the order of an umbilical cord, that can never be severed, and this is their energy source, even if it leads to early death for one and implacable revenge for the other. Jane’s entire growth saga revolves around evaluating different forms of love: Helen Burns, Edward Rochester, St. John Rivers; each of these figures contributes vitally to her education as well as to her feelings. Duras’s old woman’s project of retrieval seems especially geared to self-birthing, to taking the measure of the unique moment when it all began, to decoding her own formative riddle. All these texts contain heartache, but they present it ultimately as growth, as development, as the stuff of maturation. This, we think, is nature’s plan. The same photosynthesis that transforms the energy of the sun into the life of plants seems also to rule over human affairs. Our stories of young love perhaps dazzle most via the sheer vibrancy, strength, and intensity of feeling that they celebrate, that love catalyzes, then actualizes. This would be our dance.

Young love, as we have seen, must often do battle with culture. Romeo and Juliet die, but no reader would go on to fault their love as inherently flawed. Des Grieux’s passion for Manon brings him great pain, but the novel stands as an early testament to the power of romantic passion, even when it is blind. Things become more ambiguous once we get to
Wuthering Heights
, for we begin to see the disturbing kinship among love, vulnerability, injury, and violence. Jane Eyre and Duras’s narrator seem to me to be ultimately victorious in love as maturation, as they acquire ever more self-knowledge, yet their stories echo in ways that get our attention: we see the punishment meted out to Jane, even by those who “love” her, and Duras’s girl figure inhabits an affective familial world of great discord and misery, no matter how intense and transformative her sexual education is.

But none of these narratives directly indicts love itself, even if each measures its dangers. Yet what happens when love fails? When it turns to hatred, when it freezes into indifference, when it becomes something monstrous by reveling in its power? Or simply when its hunger for possession turns vicious and crippling? I am the first to admit that the literary fare presented up to now has not been shy about pain and injury. But there is a real distinction between the hard knocks of education—the things experienced by Lazarillo, Pablos, Rastignac, and the Invisible Man, as they slammed into a world so alien to their needs, as they sought to develop the vision or skills needed to negotiate that world—and what I want to call
abuse
, love gone wrong. As my title suggests, abuse is indeed a story. The damage it causes all too often has a tenacious life of its own, for it operates much like trauma, as violent injury that not only shocks our system but also releases its venom in us over time. It seems fair to ask: is it even possible to grow up without being exposed to injuries of this stripe? We need not be of a psychoanalytical bent to accept the notion that we are, all of us, working through the forces and conditions of our childhood, some of our making, others inflicted on us without our knowing.

I want to borrow the wonderful phrase used by Borges—“a forking path”—to characterize the trajectory of abuse. Borges himself wrote elegant parables in which the human subject goes through its strange permutations, but I believe that full-scale novels are still more illustrative when it comes to tracking our trajectory through time. Novels are singularly eloquent in “speaking” abuse; i.e., in displaying its long, forking, sinuous life. We the readers, who have absorbed stimuli and perhaps injury during each and every one of our days and years, cannot easily espy such a form, such a coming into focus of what was sown in us and that we only later reap. Mind you, we doubtless “enact” our injuries incessantly, but whereas the somatic ones are visible—a limp, a stiffness, a stutter—the psychic ones remain beyond our scrutiny, even if they script our moves.