Duras, Marguerite - Marianne Hirsch (essay date 1982)

Marianne Hirsch (essay date 1982)

SOURCE: “Gender, Reading, and Desire in ‘Moderato Cantabile,’” in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 28, No. 1, 1982, pp. 69-85.

[In the following essay, Hirsch contends that the characters' oral recounting of the murder in Moderato cantabile constitutes a literary narration through which the characters identify with others and come to understand their own desires by reenacting the passion of others.]

Maybe that's what life is all about: to get into, to let yourself be carried along by this story—this story, well, the story of others.

—Marguerite Duras1

Duras's comment might well be a description of the characters in her novels—vacant creatures who exist in a world of ruins and wait for a story that will awaken, or, as the author puts it, “ravish” them. Observation and interpretation of other lives provide Duras's protagonists...

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