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Anuk
- Story of the narrator’s face
- Preordaining. What will happen to her face has already been written.
- Photograph part. It’s an imagined self observing the self. There’s no way she could have the distant perspective of her self. What does this have to do with desire? Why do we see ourselves from the outside? Later, she discusses a photograph of her son “trying to assume a certain posture” the way people do in front of a camera. It comes closest to the image of her on the railing that was never taken. [Meghna's note: The image never taken is like Tolkien’s untold stories.]
- Shame comes up again and again. Is it a reaction of a certain part of the self? Desire as seeing oneself from the outside. In desiring, we seek to become a new kind of self. A parallel motion with shame, where we flee parts of the self.
- The white narrator and the relationship with the colonised self.
Vqueer
- Cixous—écriture féminine. Duras pioneers autofiction.
- Story of a face as an allegory for the French nation. Relationship between time and desire.
- The lovers will meet their destined fates irrespective of the affair.
- No voice for the Vietnamese people. They are silent. White women brought in to Vietnam to regulate the sexuality of white men. But here’s an errant white women who ends up sleeping with a Chinese man. The burden of the nation is then on both of them.
- Eroticising her poverty and her shame (gold lamé shoes, her fedora hat). Rejects the sorts of femininity that are available to her. Classic psychoanalysis—If there’s no lack, there’s no desire. Non-normative white woman.
- Relationship doesn’t move in binaries of active and passive.
- A kind of silence/misrecognition that is colonial—descriptions of beauty. When they make love, she thinks there’s nothing masculine about him except his sex. Then why does she attribute masculinity to his sex? It’s precisely what makes him a man for her; that’s the binary available to her. Related to the gender transgression throughout the novel.
- Articulate shame and unspoken shame. Unspoken—her relationship with a man who’s not a man: an Asian man. In the film, the sex scene is almost a simulation of a lesbian relationship. Sets up readings of nonbinary gender models.
Anuk
- The colonised subject constantly referred to as weak. The smoothness of his skin, he’s ‘elegant’, etc. Fetishisation of the colonised male. Desexualisation of the East Asian male in contemporary pop culture.
- She feels shame for her mother—she feels her mother should be beaten, locked up. Her pride in being with a rich man—she doesn’t have to take native buses anymore. His enforced silence with her family, even though they exploit him for his money. This is their power. She says her desire obeys her older brother and rejects her desire. “In my brother’s presence, he becomes a cause of shame”—the same ‘weakness’ that “transports me with pleasure”. His ‘effemininity’ is also what transports her into pleasure. In choosing him, she’s rejecting a certain norm of masculinity. Her desire clearly has to do with the economic power he has over her. When he asks, she says she hasn’t seen him without his money. She doesn’t deny that his money has to do with her desire, but her desire is also not transactional.
- He’s desirable precisely because he’s not like her brothers or father. Her family are the only retains she has. She has no relations in the land. Part of her shame is not being able to accept the shame of her desire. The fact that he can be a fantasy is not given to him; she’s constantly trying to make it banal. Constantly attempts to make him something else: a transaction for money, etc. She doesn’t ask him who he is until he compliments her.
Anuk
- Desire and confession. The role the lover may have in creating a space for one to confess. “To look is to feel curious” (in the context of why her brothers won’t look at her lover. “United in a fundamental shame at having to live.” “Our first confidants are our lovers, the people we meet away from our homes.” The family keeps silent about its poverty, its shame. There’s a great liberation in seeing. The things one feels too ugly, too repulsive, have been accepted. Accepted in being seen [by the lover]. The dynamic of showing and being seen. The act of sharing, telling stories, sharing one’s histories, one’s intimacies. Accepting aspects of the self that haven’t been shared; shame evaporates. Home as the site of shame. The lover desires her despite all of this shame. Is he the answer to forms of shame she encountered before meeting him?
Vqueer
- All refusals then become part of this dialectic of desire and shame. The resistance to complete transparency—various refusals form the love affair. Sexual tension maintained both by the outpouring, the revelation of the self, but also the opacity offered by refusal and non-absorption. (‘God’—if revelation is actually truth.)
Anuk
- Narrator talking about how she’d like to eat Helen’s breasts while her lover eats hers. Her desire for Helen is mediated through her desire for her lover. Substitutes herself or the man into her imagined fantasy. Desire for anonymity or replaceability. Desire for other aspects of the self to be eradicated. What does this desire have to do with shame, with seeing oneself as acceptable in the eyes of others? Does it mean that one has nothing to be ashamed of? Is she just young and lustful?
Vqueer
- In psychoanalysis, the move from melancholia to the desire for suicide. The unburied, dead/not dead, ‘cryptic’ mother she can’t let go of (who allows her to step out “like a whore”). An act of will—she told me to become the whore than I’m becoming. Death or ungrieved loss, an absence. The mother whose madness she also comes to inhabit.
Anuk
- “I noticed that I desire him” comes after the awareness of the mother’s approaching death.
- “People ought to be told that immortality is mortal.” “It’s while it’s being lived that life is still immortal.” Connect to photographs/images used throughout the text. Memories seem to coalesce around images, moments outside of time. There’s a certain sense in which time does not pass in the text. Reading texts outside social/historical context. The nature of time spent with the lover. Separated from the outside world when she’s with him: people moving around outside, but they stay silent inside. Their time is governed by repetition and rhythm, keeping it still. Eschewing linear time, how time is experienced in the act of love. The role images have in memory. Photographs mark one out for eternity. Her brother’s death—time has passed, but he remains the same in her memory, just as the lover does.
- Barthes’ book Camera Lucida—begins with the photograph of his mother. The person who actually moves exists outside the photograph. Desires and photographs seek a kind of transparency, a kind of presence even in contexts beyond death, standing as archives or evidence of the subject having lived in a way that actually denies that life. [Meghna's note: connect to the photograph chapter in Ondaatje's Divisadero.]
- The playfulness through which roles get interchanged: men referring to women as “the man of the house.” Duras refuses to talk about her family’s history. Also a part of queer, non normative or anti normative love—imagining that to has more pleasure because it transgresses. Eroticism tied to transgression—Story of the Eye. People living normative lives not offered pleasure because then we wouldn’t know what to do with our transgression. The ghostly mother and the childlike mother.
Questions
- Question: if one constantly moves from home to home, is one recreating shame?
- The word “ravaged” re shame and violence.
- Anuk: her change of face as a response to her departure from the lover.
- Vqueer: one of the greatest transgressions is to turn the sacred into the profane. Eroticising shame. The eccentricity of structural violence, of her clothes, her exceptionality, make her stand out. Eroticism lies in turning violent conditions into desirable ones in which her spectacularness emerges. She desires annihilation—substituting herself with Helen—a kind of suicidal tendency, annihilating herself so that a loss can be seen in the world.
- Anuk: playing out of early traumas in later relationships. Shame is a condition attached to parts of the self one wants to move away from, to close one’s eyes to, as opposed to something like guilt or pain or trauma.
- Vqueer: is it a recreation of shame, or trying to create something from it? Create joy, create something out of the shame rather than create something of it. We have to be more forgiving of ourselves. Narcissism of colonial desire—speaking role given to the subaltern. Liminal figures in the background.
- Anuk: reading a text presents me with the possible person that I may become, who may deal with my surroundings in a better, more graceful way. Being presented with a different mode of life. Intuitive way of reading rather than contextualising socially/historically.
