SOURCE: “Fiction and the Photographic Image in Duras' ‘The Lover,’” in L'Esprit Createur, Vol. XXX, No. 1, Spring, 1990, pp. 56-68.

In the following essay, Cohen explores Duras's “inter-genre” use of visual imagery in The Lover.

Le seul sujet du livre [L'Amant] c'est l'écriture, L'écriture, c'est moi. Donc moi, c'est le livre.

—Marguerite Duras

Most of Marguerite Duras' work focuses on the referent's essential absence. Duras writes this absence with visual metaphors, but in ways that deconstruct the dominant, centralizing primacy of seeing as documentation. Although much critical comment has been made about her cinematic innovations, on the one hand, and about vision as a theme in her books, on the other, critics have rarely situated seeing with regard to absence and to language in her work. Further, this has not been linked to a form of intertextuality that crosses from one genre to another, which might be...