L’Amant de Marguerite Duras ou la photographie absolue
The Lover of Marguerite Duras or the absolute photography

Summary/Abstract: In The Lover, written by Marguerite Duras, the narrator recalls her childhood in Indochina. Firstly, she paints this distant past in black and white, two absolute colors portraying a virtual image that her memory seeks to re-create. "The white child" meets the Chinese with "the black car" at the beginning of the story just to get separated at the end. Their relationship is doomed to failure due to the highly-symbolic chromatic opposition, specially within a colonial society which rejects interbreeding. Between the encounter and the separation, however, bright, vivid, enchanting colors appear, lighting up Saïgon's life. Sensory memory and revived synaesthetic perception of adult women give birth to the child in her, taking the reader through the colors of the passion, the forbidden, and the difference.

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