SOURCE: “Fiction and Autobiography/Language and Silence: ‘The Lover’ by Marguerite Duras,” in Redefining Autobiography in Twentieth-Century Women's Fiction: An Essay Collection, edited by Janice Morgan and Colette T. Hall, Garland Publishing, Inc., 1991, pp. 73-84.

In the following essay, Morgan discusses the autobiographical significance of the silences in The Lover.

To write is not to comment on what one already knows but to look for what one doesn't know yet.

—Viviane Forrestier¹

In 1984, Marguerite Duras surprised the French literary world by producing L'Amant (The Lover), a lyrical, darkly-candid autobiographical book about her adolescence in Indochina during the late 1920s. The book, which opens with the young Duras crossing the Mekong river on a ferry and closes one and a half years later with her departure on an ocean liner for France, traces the young woman's passage from childhood to adulthood. In many ways, The Lover—written toward the...