For example, the narrator of Amant notifies the reader for no apparent reason that ‘he’ has been misled, that it was not, after all, at the cantine in Réam that she met the Chinese but two or three years later, after the concession had been abandoned. What this means in practice is that ‘he’ is often ‘put right’ even when not ‘in error’. The same is equally true, of course, of Amant, whose ideal male readers are portrayed by Duras as having a centuries-old desire for incest and rape. This happens only after the text has energetically tapped the libidinal basis of our Wisstrieb daring us, like elle’s slender body ‘crying out’ to be strangled and raped, to assume the aggressive and penetrative role of interpreter.
By exposing first its projective identification with, then introjection and final reprojection of, the ‘bad’ intertext now made magically ‘good’, it brings us to a stunning recognition of our own critical ‘fading’. Maladie’s use of its ‘lacking’ intertext also confronts us directly with the reality of our own position as reader. Let us therefore look briefly at the key elements of The River. While the case for an intertextual link with The River cannot be proved, the autobiographically charged nature of Amant and its emphasis on foreknowledge invites the viewer to speculate that at each mention of the Mekong crossing it is actually ‘crossing over’ to Renoir’s classic. Could it be, in fact, that Hélène is somehow linked to Indian cinema, or at least films about India? One such film is Jean Renoir’s The River (1950), a colour film shot in English on location near Calcutta and acknowledged by Duras as one of her favourite films precisely because it recalls her childhood spent in the bush.
If we bear in mind the chiastic nature of this process-’I had never seen a film with those Indian women | plaits coming down in front of their body | two long plaits coming down over the front of my body | those women in the films whom I have never seen’-we see that it actually prepares for the narrator’s later eclipsing of Hélène’s breasts.
This reorientation of sexual desire restages and reinvests all the other crossings in the novel made by je, in particular her crossing of the Mekong river, an event of mainly metonymical displacement since her male fedora hat was only ‘displaced’ like the vehicles doubled up against each other on the ferry, and because the ensuing sexual ‘experiment’ with the Chinese led simply to a repetition of her family’s violence, pain, despair and dishonour. In the process, Hélène’s ‘sublime’ and amorphous body, ‘incomparable’ like the ‘sea without form’ of sexual jouissance, finds itself rechannelled into the rediscovered, protective, ‘lagoon’ waters of formal, heterosexual desire (Lagon-elle), there to function as no more than a mirror reflecting in the clearest of light the jouissance experienced between je and lui. pdflogo.Inspired, as it were, by this chiastic ordering of forces, the girl-narrator’s controlled circuit of imaginary desire, where she positions herself both masochistically (she is excluded from the sexual act) and sadistically (she is in total control), allows her to desire Hélène narcissistically as a projection of her own desire for sexual ravishment. Duras, Bildungsroman, Growing up, Literature. By doing so, they simultaneously prove that the theme of “growing up in literature,” though approached from a new perspective, has not lost its appeal and deserves attention. While unsettling the Bildungsroman traditional model, Salinger’s and Duras’ works challenge the socio-cultural framework and engage into an intertextual dialogue with the novelistic Bildungsroman convention. I argue that the above-mentioned works belong to the new Bildungsroman genre which, by presenting the growing up of the protagonists in a subverted way, proposes an alternative vision of the characters’ initiation into the adulthood. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Marguerite Duras’ The Lover (1984) and The North China Lover (1991). In my paper I would like to concentrate on three novels that offer the distorted Bildungsroman model: J. Hence, the Bildungsroman presents an individual who is eventually assimilated into the given society and turns into a useful social contributor. In its schematic representation, its primary function is to make integration into the existing social order legitimate by channeling individual energy into socially useful purposes” (12).
Moreover, she remarks that “The Bildungsroman,” she remarks, has a certain baggage attached to it. The Bildungsroman is what Stella Bolaki briefly defines as “the novel of individual development” (9).
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