a sense, it was with the human psyche exclusively that Marguerite Duras was concerned, with the psychological event. In her hands, the chance encounter of a girl and a man who, socially, think of themselves as “the lowest of the low,” becomes a kind of paradigm of one of the basic polarities in human experience. The dialogue form she adopted to deal with the encounter—the basic ingredient of all “romances”—recalls the stylized work of the English novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, and was particularly well-suited to Duras’s theme. The Square tends toward equilibrium, stasis, and the complete, carefully spoken paragraphs give the requisite impression of weight and balance.
In the exchange of words, the girl and the man disclose, through the scrutiny of their own individual positions, two ways of coping with one’s position in life, two approaches to life. Immersed at first in solitude, the two speakers win their way into a differently organized sensibility, complementary to their own. Each, responding to the other’s reality, speaks the words appropriate to a fundamental role, as woman, as man. The biological and the emotional are fused, as are the individual and the basically human. The girl’s stubborn, reiterated hope—that a man will choose her to be his wife—is the simple transcription of her grasp of what will give her fulfillment. Not that her life, in its outer harsh pattern, will necessarily change. Marguerite Duras does not deal in the glossy myths of the commercially advertised “happy couple.” But the girl on the park bench knows that it is in her relation to a man that she will pass from her state as maid, as instrument or object, to her status as an individual person, free within her own sphere of existence. As for the man, his semi-understanding of her desperate need and hope is a first step out of insignificance toward a human responsibility and involvement.
In the facts that the dialogue quietly brings to light there is no sugar-coating, no deprecation of or recoil from truth. The sordid outer limitations of the girl’s position, the insignificance of the man’s occupations are clearly stated. Yet the words hope, beauty, happiness, unhappiness, and, more persistently, “understanding” are woven into the fabric of their language without sentimentality or emotional fakery. The dialogue—like the dance so dear to the girl—is esthetically designed in terms of approach, retreat, pause, re-engagement as the two partners reach within themselves, as each opens the way toward the other. The attitudes they describe seem at first to exclude any possible involvement. The girl’s passionate refusal to come to terms with her situation is, in fact, a form of heightened dramatic suspense. The man’s indifference, solitude, and detachment is accompanied by a poetic receptivity to the present—to a gleam of sunlight in a public garden, to a passing conversation on a park bench. Hence the tension in the dialogue, its urgency, and the sense that, at the end, perhaps fleetingly, perhaps more durably—the conclusion is uncertain—an event has taken place. Between the girl and the man there has been a measure of understanding, an exchange of truth, unambiguous, untainted by self-pity, recrimination, or sentimentality. Each has approached the other with integrity. The quasi-ceremonial patterning of the dialogue in The Square creates a sense of the dignity inherent in the encounter and the exchange.
In form and mood, Moderato Cantabile (1958) is quite different from The Square, more fluid and musical, and apparently less coherent in its development. Again the situation chosen is basic in romance, but in this instance it has a macabre melodramatic appeal: a man brutally kills a woman in the street and then, desperately and in the sight of all, covers her dead body with kisses and caresses—a “true confession” episode. The originality of this short eight-part novel lies in Marguerite Duras’s use of this initial design to set the theme of a story concerned entirely with another couple—Anne Desbaresdes and Chauvin, a man encountered by chance on the scene of the crime. The simplicity and clarity of the narrative design, coupled with its surface incoherence, may at first appear disconcerting. But the incoherence and simplicity prove to be entirely deceptive. Marguerite Duras’s design has a good deal in common with Robbe-Grillet’s techniques in Last Year at Marienbad. Moderate Cantabile is the story of an auto-intoxication, a seduction desired and lived on two levels. At its origin the crime is witnessed, perpetually retold by the second couple and mutely relived, but only emotionally, not in actuality—an artist’s translation of a violent reality.
As in the case of the two protagonists in The Square, the outer facts concerning Anne Desbaresdes and Chauvin—the social facts that, in more conventional novels set the framework and determine the events—here emerge only incidentally. And they are incidental. Anne Desbaresdes, it is slowly revealed, is the wife of a wealthy provincial industrialist, who lives in a large house surrounded by a garden in the residential section of a small town by the sea. During her ten years of married life, not a breath of scandal has touched her. All we know of Chauvin is that he was formerly employed by Anne’s husband and once caught sight of her at a party given for the employees. But the scandal inherent in that ten-day adventure is not the banal scandal of a socially reprehensible affair. There is, in fact, no affair; only five confrontations in a bar, a hand placed on hers, a brief kiss on Anne’s ice-cold lips. The scandal is in Anne’s total alienation from society, the alienation of intoxication, and the revelation of an obsessive sexual desire lived to the limit of annihilation. Moderato Cantabile is a modern restatement of the incompatibility of individual passion with the orderly mechanism of social decorum.
What the novelist first exposes in the overture of the novel, in the music lesson scene, is the emotional center of Anne Desbaresdes’ life. With quiet, poetic humor Marguerite Duras weaves into the familiar situation—music teacher, recalcitrant boy, mother—two conflicting themes: the theme of quiet provincial living kept within orderly bounds, and the tremulous unbounded capacity for passion latent in Anne Desbaresdes’ shy yet delighted complicity with the stubborn little boy, her son, who so resolutely refuses to do as he is bidden. As the Diabelli Sonatina, with its “moderato cantabile” tempo, stops and starts sporadically, and then is played to the end, the sound of the sea, the throbbing of the engine, the mute exchanges between mother and son set up the dimensions of another, larger world. In a few brief pages Marguerite Duras gives Anne Desbaresdes an elusive poetic presence, in harmony with that outer world and incompatible with the restrictions and strictures of bourgeois respectability. The scream of the dying woman, drowning out the sonatina, is the signal of her temporary escape and passion, a fierce passion relentlessly lived beyond all human contact and aid.
Fascinating, in contrast to the stark violence of the theme, is the manner in which it is handled. “Moderato cantabile” suggests a tempo and lyrical mode that are in direct contradition with the violence of the crime, with the fierce desire that engulfs Anne and Chauvin, and with the strange new detached mode of perception Anne acquires in her state of intoxication. The description of the formal dinner, in the seventh section of the story, as Anne teeters between two worlds, an object of scandal in the eyes of her set, an object of wild desire for the man outside circling the garden railings—until she vomits up both the wine he poured and the “strange food” served at her table—is a fine example of a controlled musical interweaving of themes, of a formal simplicity and dignity that envelops and protects Anne’s “fall.”
The Diabelli Sonatina, in the narrative pattern, seems to emphasize, by contrast, the gravity and depth of the relationship between Anne and Chauvin, who between them play out the variations inherent in the shaping of the initial episode, the crime they have witnessed. Unlike the girl and the man in The Square, they do not speak in carefully constructed sentences and coherent paragraphs. They speak in snatches, hesitantly, restating fragments of the theme, their exchange of words revolving around a hidden center, which is their urge to relive the passion of the couple that has died. In their five encounters in the bar, Anne and Chauvin, like two musical instruments, must repeat and relive, in a kind of purity and eternity, the movements inherent in the initial design, until they confront the stark, sexual, destructive nature of their desire and the design is totally interiorized and completed: “‘I wish you were dead,’ Chauvin said. ‘I am,’ Anne Desbaresdes said.” Relinquishing the very core of her former life, her relation with her child, Anne has re-enacted to the end the tragic modulations of absolute passion which Marguerite Duras holds within the formal confines of melody and rhythm.
The strange, acute, yet different modes of perception reached through intoxication—another form of alienation—give Ten-thirty on a Summer Night (1960) its strange double structure. The poetic intensity and incongruity of vision