SOURCE: “Transgressive Bodies,” in Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative, Harvard University Press, 1993, pp. 257-86.

In the following essay, Brooks analyzes what he considers Duras's subversive techniques of dealing with the problem of the visual in The Lover.

The body quickened through sexuality remains the object of most intense interest for our culture. It is worth dwelling on one example that will serve to draw attention, once again, to the problematics of the gaze directed at a body which is conceived as the object of a writing project, this time by a woman. The author, Marguerite Duras, is particularly sensitive to issues of looking, and has indeed worked successfully in the cinema, as well as in the theater and narrative fiction. Duras accepts the tradition of the body in the visual field but works subtle and subversive displacements within it. Although any and all of her...