Almost all Duras's works have a careful observation and constant resistance to personal and times pains. For example, in the novel "Dams on the Pacific Ocean", which is also autobiographical, the mother leads her children to build dams on the Pacific coast to resist the erosion of the land by seawater, while the younger sister has secret and fanatical feelings for her brother. Finally, her brother left with a rich woman, and the poor sister stood on the side of the road facing the terrible reality and fell into hopeless waiting. The hero and heroine in Love in Hiroshima are a pair of men and women who are far apart in all aspects, but they meet and fall in love in Hiroshima and love each other deeply. This kind of love was doomed to be a tragedy from the beginning, and finally ended with the final departure of a French woman. The heroine's first love took place during the war years ago. She once fell in love with a German soldier. They are also a couple with a big gap. Their passionate love kept them inseparable and she almost wanted to stay. This blocked love, desolate and helpless life, nothingness and despair, or the situation facing destruction in her works, are all related to the background of her life and the environment of her childhood in India.
In this context, World War II destroyed countless lives and material civilizations, and mankind experienced the most serious spiritual crisis, which directly led to the turmoil of people's values and beliefs during and after the war. Mankind has entered a "confused era", doubted human beings and their existence, and deeply felt the absurdity of human existence after losing the ownership of God and reason. The gradual development of industrial civilization has brought unprecedented great impact and social problems to human society. The literary philosophy at that time was deeply influenced by irrationalism and pessimism.
Duras' childhood environment in Zina, India: In order to stabilize colonial rule, France called on everyone to start a new life in Duras colony. In The Dam Against the Pacific Ocean, Duras wrote: "My mother is a senior primary school teacher in northern France. She recently married a primary school teacher. They are all tempted by advertisements and pierre loti's books and are eager to explore the colonies. " The life scene of Zina is full of primitive, wild and dead breath, with a terrible and fierce tropical monsoon, a small life who died after eating too many mangoes and was abandoned in the wilderness, and local people who left their homes by boating because of the tide in hot July.
"The river flows downstream from Tonle Sap Lake and Cambodian forest, and everything is swept away by the current. Whatever you meet, let it wash away. Huts, jungles, extinguished fire embers, dead birds, dead dogs, tigers and buffaloes submerged in water, drowning people, bait and mud mounds covered with hyacinthus orientalis were all swept away by the flood and rushed to the Pacific Ocean. " The great power of nature is full of unknowns, and life and death have no direction.
Duras's family life in a colonial environment is also very embarrassing. Compared with the white colonial ruling class, their life is out of reach, and they are often despised and rejected by these colonists. However, compared with the life of local aborigines, Duras is relatively superior and is a gentleman in the eyes of local people. This extreme floating state makes the Duras family not completely belong to which one. Give Duras an identity anxiety.
"People often say that I grew up in the scorching sun, and my childhood was spent in the scorching sun. I don't think so. I am often told that poverty makes children think more. No, no, it's not that. Teenagers-old people who have lived in regional hunger for a long time, they are like that, we are not like that, we have never been hungry, we are white children, we have a sense of shame, we have sold our movable furniture and the like, but we have never been hungry. "
My father died of a serious illness when she was seven years old. My mother bought a 200-hectare property next to the Siam bend, but this is an uncultivated saline-alkali land, and half of the land is immersed in seawater for one year. Only when the sea ebbs can the river be used to grow rice. The first year's harvest was only a few bags of rice. Mother decided to borrow 300,000 francs to build a dam once and for all to intercept the seawater in the Pacific Ocean. As a result, it took seven years, and after several repairs, when the harvest was finally approaching, "the river flooded everything, flooded my mother's dam and destroyed her hope, just like the flood at the beginning of the century, mysterious and powerful, and no human will could help."
Duras lived in a dull, restless and hopeless life atmosphere in his childhood. As written in Lover: "I'm only fifteen and a half years old. There are no four seasons in that land. We only live in one season, the same heat and the same monotony. We live in a long and narrow hot zone in the world. There is neither spring nor seasonal change. "
The mother in Lover has expectations for her children's future, expecting her daughter to "finish high school and then formally pass the middle school math teacher qualification examination" and "always work hard for her children and her future". She ran a French junior college, hatched chickens in castles and built dams to resist the sea, hoping to bring hope of family reunion and improvement of life through her own hands. But just like Sisyphus, his sons "stick to their duties and block all opportunities in front of them", and all the money was wasted by his eldest brother. "Children in their fifties still don't make a living, and they can't make money." Chickens died, fields were distributed to saline-alkali land because they didn't pay bribes, and dams were washed away by seawater. In reality, the existence of this giant is very small, and finally it can only face the sense of disillusionment. "It lasted seven years. Then, finally, there was no hope. Hope had to give up. The plan to build a dike around the sea has to be abandoned. " "Mother finally calmed down, as if she had been locked up." "Everything in this family has come to an end. She kept running around, and then it was over. It was at this time that I really figured out madness for the first time. " "She didn't become a patient because of madness. She just lives crazily, just like living healthily. "
The desire to live is like a dam built with hard work, which disappears overnight. When I have always believed that the end of my desire is about to be shattered, this psychological trauma is enormous, but it has not stopped the forward force brought by the survival instinct. So desire changed its way, hoping to be released and satisfied in love and body.
Love in Duras' works always contains endless desires and passions. Duras established the gender identity of women from the perspective of desire. She said: "women are desires, and women can't do what men write." If a woman does not start from desire, she is not writing, but copying. " In Duras's works, the theme of desire is often presented in the form of love, which is the living state of her characters. The equivalence between desire and love is a principle in her book: "Every time I have desire, there is love".
Irrepressible, even crazy, deadly passion surged in Duras's words, and she integrated every detail of the passionate moment into her works and into the depths of life. Therefore, her feelings are transformed into life itself. At the same time, in her spiritual world, love can illuminate people's spirit and senses, and can maximize self-improvement through the opening of "I" to others. Therefore, in the catharsis of this desire, people can control their own life direction, temporarily abandon the confusion and absurdity of reality, and feel the most primitive happiness and the most real existence.
Just like China's lover, "His body is thin, soft and weak, with no muscles. Maybe he is recovering from illness and is in the process of recuperation. He has no beard and lacks the strength of a man. " "People are thin and seem unable to bear the painful humiliation", but "only genitals are powerful"; "He is not my eldest brother's former lover. Although he is here, to me, he no longer exists and is nothing. He became a burnt-out ruin ",and even his family commented on him to the effect that he was" similar to a rotting corpse found in the desert ". He is lifeless, he just cries when his father obstructs him, but he is like a young murderer or a young hunter in his last sex. His skin and sex organs are "indescribable tenderness and sweetness". Poor families, strong parents, and weak bodies are all shattered by rushing love at this time, and the power of life becomes strong and becomes a weapon against despair.
But Duras's metaphor of love and desire is like the hero and heroine in the novel Ship in the Night who meet by phone by chance and then have a long talk in the dark. Although they have never met, they enjoy it, and the painful love of missing, expecting and waiting makes them crazy. "Only the love of love still exists. As long as we constantly feel the burning desire, this kind of love will be enhanced in the long-term unrestrained pursuit of enrichment and nothingness." Love is always concrete and limited, and desire is noumenon and infinite. All desires are broken by unsatisfied desires soon after being stimulated by temptation, which in turn highlights the eternity of temptation.
However, passion cannot exist for a long time, novelty will eventually die, love is doomed to die, desire is doomed to be unsatisfied, and the real object of desire is lack. The tragedy of life is that desire is immortal and it will haunt you all your life. Desire can be destroyed countless times, but it can't be prevented from happening again, and it will be manifested in many different forms and modes, and even will do whatever it takes to achieve its goal. The satisfaction of desire is only an exile of no return, so sex can't save love after all. In "Lover", after the lover has heartfelt love, he has to face the cruel reality that he will leave forever, so "the date of departure is too early, but once it is determined, he can do nothing for me and my body". The body breeds sexual desire, which may make the intimate parties feel the closeness of love to the greatest extent, but after all, it can't save the fall of love in the world, and the passion for sex is still lost.
Duras' pursuit of desire eventually went to nothingness, but her profound direction was to liberate people from the morality that tightly bound desire, let people return to the desperate but eternal desire itself, let people's guilt of shrinking and fear be shattered purely and naturally, and let people return to their own joy and continue to look for life freely. The real pain is not desire, but human beings give evil desire. The desire in Duras' works is full of the power and beauty of life. It is true that man is first of all a person with physical reality, and the existence of life is first and always the existence of physical body. Controlling the desire for life will only make life wither, while the desire to destroy the flesh means the death of life.