Constructing the Exiled Self: Identity and Displacement in Marguerite Duras’s L’Amant
Document Type
Presentation
Location
436 Hodges / Zoom Room B
Start Date
29-3-2025 1:05 PM
End Date
29-3-2025 1:25 PM
Description
Marguerite Duras’s auto-fictional novel L'amant explores the questions of identity and exile through the story of a young French girl in colonial Vietnam. The novel challenges fixed notions of cultural identity, presenting it as dynamic, shaped by social, emotional, familial, and geopolitical exchanges. The protagonist's liminal existence, caught between her enmeshment in a French colonial and social milieu, and her Vietnamese environment, generates a profound sense of displacement. Exile in L'amant extends beyond geographical boundaries to encompass emotional, social, familial, and socioeconomic realms. Though born into a French family, the protagonist’s household is marginalized within the colonial society, intensifying her alienation. She occupies a contradictory position, embodying both colonizer and colonized, French and non-French, as she navigates the blurred boundaries between childhood and adulthood. Duras’s narrative structure employs bricolage, piecing together fragmented memories to construct a layered understanding of identity. This non-linear storytelling reflects the protagonist’s internal negotiation of her contradictory subject positions. Bricolage of identity becomes a means of reconciling disparate elements of selfhood, emphasizing the fluidity and multiplicity of identity. Rather than presenting a fixed or static identity, the protagonist continuously reassembles her sense of self, embracing the complexities of her existence. Duras subverts traditional notions of childhood by portraying the protagonist as both innocent and transgressive. Through bricolage, the protagonist reconstitutes her identity, reconnecting the fragmented pieces of her experience and ultimately finding a means to reconcile the various facets of her identity.
Constructing the Exiled Self: Identity and Displacement in Marguerite Duras’s L’Amant
436 Hodges / Zoom Room B
Marguerite Duras’s auto-fictional novel L'amant explores the questions of identity and exile through the story of a young French girl in colonial Vietnam. The novel challenges fixed notions of cultural identity, presenting it as dynamic, shaped by social, emotional, familial, and geopolitical exchanges. The protagonist's liminal existence, caught between her enmeshment in a French colonial and social milieu, and her Vietnamese environment, generates a profound sense of displacement. Exile in L'amant extends beyond geographical boundaries to encompass emotional, social, familial, and socioeconomic realms. Though born into a French family, the protagonist’s household is marginalized within the colonial society, intensifying her alienation. She occupies a contradictory position, embodying both colonizer and colonized, French and non-French, as she navigates the blurred boundaries between childhood and adulthood. Duras’s narrative structure employs bricolage, piecing together fragmented memories to construct a layered understanding of identity. This non-linear storytelling reflects the protagonist’s internal negotiation of her contradictory subject positions. Bricolage of identity becomes a means of reconciling disparate elements of selfhood, emphasizing the fluidity and multiplicity of identity. Rather than presenting a fixed or static identity, the protagonist continuously reassembles her sense of self, embracing the complexities of her existence. Duras subverts traditional notions of childhood by portraying the protagonist as both innocent and transgressive. Through bricolage, the protagonist reconstitutes her identity, reconnecting the fragmented pieces of her experience and ultimately finding a means to reconcile the various facets of her identity.