Love in the Song of Songs and The Lover

Despite the crucial distinctions between a sacred book and a profane one, the Canticle of Canticles and Marguerite Duras’s novel The Lover present the love phenomenon in a comparable light. In both tales, love inspires the lyrical form. It promotes a relationship with the world, underscores the same family bonds (especially those of the woman), observes the dance of encounter and separation, and touches upon the same themes of femininity and the sacred, in either positive or negative terms. By encountering a man’s love and forming a bond with the body of another woman, mother or friend, both Shulamith and « the girl » are transformed, gaining access to a reality of a spiritual order. According to Marguerite Duras, a self-proclaimed atheist who is an assiduous reader of the Bible, writing is a bridge to the divine.