Meander, Spiral, Explode by Jane Alison

Author:Jane Alison
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781948226141
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2019-01-23T16:00:00+00:00

I’m wearing a dress of real silk, but it’s threadbare, almost transparent. It used to belong to my mother. . . . I’m wearing a leather belt with it, perhaps a belt belonging to one of my brothers. I can’t remember the shoes I used to wear in those days, only certain dresses. . . . This particular day I must be wearing the famous pair of gold lamé high heels. . . .

It’s not the shoes, though, that make the girl look so strangely, so weirdly dressed.

M turns herself to object most often when speaking of herself as a girl but also, oddly, late in the book when speaking of herself as a writer. And she uses language that not only objectifies but makes legendary the girl and her world: they are the girl, the mother, the lover, “the famous pair of gold lamé high heels.” This makes them singular, worth regard. Further in the description of M on the ferry, Duras writes, “look, I’ve still got my hair. Fifteen and a half.” That look creates an interesting situation: we’re with her looking at a picture, and she chooses what and how we see. When M first bids the Chinese man to “do as he usually does with the women he brings to this flat,” she again writes in the third person and in the present tense, converting the moment from personal memory to watched scene: “He’s torn off the dress, he throws it down. He’s torn off her little white cotton panties and carries her over like that, naked, to the bed.”

This sounds like scene voice-over or captioning to me. M makes a photo or film of herself. Indeed, all of those portraits of women become a way to portray herself, but through refraction. They’re what M came from, what lurks within her, or what she might become—facets. She could grow to be like her mother, despairing, half-mad, making one hopeless decision after another. Or like her friend Hélène Lagonelle, who can’t learn and must be married off fast. Or one of the expatriate women in Paris, wearing clothes that don’t fit, belonging nowhere, having a “particle of death” in the eyes. Or like the Lady of Savanna Khet, scandalous and ostracized; or like the madwoman of Vinh Long who wanders shrieking. This is refractive portraiture, creating a mosaic of other possibilities for the girl who crossed on the ferry and stepped into a stranger’s car.

So: we watch some of the drama, pause to ponder a peripheral figure, then return to the story; our narrator speaks of herself as I or she, making us see herself as she does; the narrative has a striking look, short blocks of text floating in white space: and all of these decisions make bright sense when I learn that The Lover was first meant to be a text accompanying a photo album about Duras’s life. When she realized that the crucial photo didn’t exist, she devoted this text to creating an image and did away with photos.

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