its repetitions.

The Sea Wall

Because of its critical success, The Sea Wall marks a turning point in Duras’s career as a novelist. Published in 1950, the novel was translated into English in 1952 and was adapted for the screen by René Clément in 1967. Often compared with the fiction of Ernest Hemingway, The Sea Wall is a fictionalized account of Duras’s experiences in colonial IndochinA&Mdash;the sentimental education of its eighteen-year-old protagonist Suzanne and, to a lesser degree, of her older brother Joseph. It is also the story of the siblings’ mother, known as Ma. Like Duras’s own mother, Ma is a widowed French teacher who had settled with her husband in the colonial city of Ram, near the Gulf of Siam. Forced to support the children after the death of her husband, she works nights as a piano player at the Éden Cinéma (whence comes the title of Duras’s 1977 play) in order to buy a land grant from the French government. Her dreams of establishing a fortune by farming are shattered when she realizes that she, like the other settlers in the area, has been sold an uncultivable tract of land by the corrupt colonial government. The farmland is inundated by the Pacific during the summer rainy season. Ma’s story is one of a Herculean, almost ludicrous attempt to hold back the forces of nature by constructing a dam at the ocean’s edge. Her revolt against the Pacific and her angry protests against government corruption are evidence of her undaunted and overweaning spirit. Suzanne and Joseph must liberate themselves from their mother’s control if they are to pass from adolescence to adulthood.

Most of the novel centers upon Suzanne’s relationship with the men who actively court her. The wealthy Monsieur Jo represents release from the hardships of life on the plains and from Joseph and Ma. Suzanne feels nothing for him, but she prostitutes herself in order to satisfy her family’s materialistic longings. Passivity characterizes most of Duras’s protagonists: Their desires remain lodged in the imagination. Suzanne’s concept of love derives from long afternoons watching romantic films at the Éden Cinéma. A modern-day Emma Bovary, Suzanne’s interpretation of the stormy, passionate affairs that she sees on the screen is that love is destructive and tinged with violence, a conclusion emblematic of her own repressed desire. Like so many Durasian heroines, Suzanne fantasizes love, and, although she succeeds in working out some of her fantasies in other relationships, particularly with Jean Agosti, her emotional involvement is still characterized by passivity, and she retreats into a bitter stoicism. In the subplot concerning her brother, Joseph turns to women and drink to escape from the quotidian boredom in this desolate outpost. At the novel’s end, however, the only true release for the siblings comes with their mother’s death.

The exotic Vietnamese landscape is a lush background for this novel of thwarted dreams and repressed sexuality. Duras’s descriptions of the tropical forest and the forceful powers of the sea are rich in a feminine sensuality. The spiritual and physical misery of life on the plains, together with the sexual awakening of Suzanne and Joseph, bathe the novel in an atmosphere of morbidity and longing. The theme of desire is firmly implanted in the Durasian corpus, to be picked up and elaborated in succeeding novels. The memories of a harsh yet sensuous childhood spent in Vietnam haunt the author and are reflected in practically everything that she has written. Her talent for dialogue—which sparks her plays and films—is evident in this novel, in which characters seem to talk past one another and in which the revelation of feeling resides in what is left unsaid rather than in what is explicitly stated.

Moderato Cantabile

Like The Sea Wall, Moderato Cantabile is the study of a female protagonist caught in a web of fantasy and repressed desire. Duras’s most critically acclaimed novel, Moderato Cantabile is a masterpiece of stylistic control and emotional transport. Duras prefers to call this text a poem rather than a novel and refers to it as a “metaphysical adventure organically experienced in a blinding moment of near-imbecility.” Clearly, the rational forces of order (the moderato principle) in this work are in constant conflict with the disorder of a passionate madness (the cantabile) in a poetic evocation of an inner experience. Duras eschews the direct, linear narrative of the first group of novels for a more lyric prose.

The central character, whose inner adventure governs the telling of the tale, is Anne, the wife of a prominent factory owner in an unidentified port town. She encounters Chauvin, an unemployed former worker in her husband’s factory, at the scene of a crime of passion: the murder of an unfaithful wife by her madly jealous husband. Duras has indicated that the entire novel—and thus fantasy—was generated from this initial scene, in particular from the morbidly erotic image of the husband licking the blood from his dead wife’s face, a strange expression of desire in his eyes. Against this backdrop, Anne Desbaresdes and Chauvin meet almost daily in the café to work out in their imaginations the motivation for the crime. The theme of writing and remembering the past as pure fantasy or desire is accentuated as the novel develops and as the reader realizes that Anne and Chauvin are writing their own story of desire, intertwining inventions of possible motivations for the crime with fragments of their own lives. Self-conscious narration, along with a blurring of events and character psychology, aligns this work with the New Novel.

The story unfolds in a contrapuntal fashion best illustrated by the title; it refers to the weekly piano lesson to which Anne accompanies her free-spirited little boy, who refuses to heed his teacher’s injunction to play a sonatina moderato cantabile. The sonatina is closely associated with the murder, because the crime (the gunshots and cries of the townspeople) interrupts the piano lesson in the opening scene of the novel. The basic conflict between order and disorder is amplified by the very impossibility of the task imposed upon the child. Oppositions in character and plot (between the disorderly child and the disciplined teacher, the bourgeois wife and the mother-adultress, musical culture and crime) are carried out in a quasi-mathematical fashion. Anne and Chauvin meet five times in the course of nine days in a re-creation of the emotional event that is itself a structure of opposites: The control of ritual alternates with the intoxication of liberated desires. These conflicts are buttressed by contrasting motifs in scenic descriptions. The tale is exploded into fragments of decor that are adumbrated in musical modulations. For example, in chapter 1, the pounding surf is indistinguishable from the woman’s cry, the murmuring of the onlookers, and the child’s attempt to attain the desired moderato cantabile at the piano. Throughout the text, scenic motifs, together with Anne and Chauvin’s snatches of conversation, are introduced separately, intertwined, and intensified in an orchestration that leads to theclimax of moderato cantabile at several different textual levels: the child’s glorious rendition of the sonatina as marked, the orgasmic moment of the crime of passion, and finally the verbal consummation of Anne and Chauvin’s imagined affair. When Chauvin symbolically kills Anne at the end (“I wish that you were dead”), she accepts it with relief (“So be it”), having worked out, in the realm of fantasy, her desires. The insistence on imagination and the almost fatalistic passivity with which Anne undergoes the ritual of self-negation with Chauvin link her to other Durasian protagonists, victims of a desire that they constantly seek to exorcise but that they are doomed to work out in their imaginations. Moderato Cantabile’s power lies in its musical resonance, prompting one critic to refer to this novel as “Madame Bovary rewritten by Béla Bartók.”

The Ravishing of Lol Stein

The story of repressed desire that structures the plot of both The Sea Wall and Moderato Cantabile also informs Duras’s 1964 novel, The Ravishing of Lol Stein. Like the preceding works, this text excels in character portrayal and evocation of decor; its protagonist, a sensitive but passive young woman who thrives on reliving a thwarted passion, is but another version of Suzanne and Anne. In narrative form, however, The Ravishing of Lol Stein goes further than either of the two earlier works in its subversion of traditional novelistic techniques. Conflicting elements of order and disorder, reason and madness, Eros and Thanatos, narrative control and narrative abdication serve to anchor the text in a series of contradictions. The very title, for example, suggests a dual interpretation of the heroine’s predicament; the English title is an unfortunate mistranslation of the French. Ravissement is more accurately rendered as “ravishment,” which can mean both ecstasy and ravage. This ambiguity recalls the juxtaposition of two contrary worlds implied by the title Moderato Cantabile. The contrapuntal technique continues to dominate Duras’s style.

The Ravishing of Lol Stein marks a reorientation in Duras’s writing; successive works, including those works of the India cycle, espouse a more open, less controlled form in a radical portrayal of the negation of self implicit in Duras’s treatment of desire. These texts, in particular The Vice-Consul, L’Amour, India Song, and the film Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert, seem to flow musically from The Ravishing of Lol Stein, elaborating in fuguelike fashion its basic themes.

Set in a seaside village referred to as S. Thala, the decor is a stylized reflection of the lush, tropical landscape of Duras’s youth in Vietnam. The site is emotionally charged in the novel and haunts the heroine of the story, Lola Valerie Stein, as a reminder of an unrequited love experienced when she was nineteen years old. At that time, she was engaged to be married to Michael Richardson, but, at a ball held at nearby T. Beach, she watched helplessly as her fiancé was seduced by an older, beautifully mysterious woman, Anne-Marie Stretter. In voyeuristic fashion, Lol observes their dance of desire from behind a row of plants. The scene of rejection that opens the novel has the same impact on Lol as the passionate crime that generates the action of Moderato Cantabile. It crystallizes Lol’s identity in a “lack”; the center of her personality (which, the narrator informs the reader, has always been distant and difficult to grasp) is paradoxically “grounded” in negation and unfulfilled desire. Although she later marries, has children, and leads a “respectable” life, an undercurrent of violent desire threatens to burst forth at any moment. As in the case of Anne Desbaresdes, Lol’s passion is triggered by an amorous encounter that is a reliving of the primal scene of triangular desire and exclusion.

The alliance of form and content already present in the second group of novels is perfected in the third group. The triangular mediation of desire that serves as catalyst for the plot is underscored by the novel’s tripartite division. Part 1 relates Lol’s initial rejection and her temporary madness. Part 2 deals with her marriage and espousal of bourgeois values, reflected in an excessive orderliness of manner. In both parts, the style is clean and direct, and the narrative is in the straightforward mode of the third person. In part 3, the breakdown of Lol’s compulsive behavior, induced by an affair, is reflected in the narrative style, which becomes rambling and confused. When Lol is seduced by Jacques Hold, the lover of her best friend, Tatiana, she is thrust once again into a triangular situation; part 3 repeats part 1. The revelation, by a sudden intrusion of first-person narration, that the narrator is Jacques Hold and that the reader’s perspective on preceding events has been manipulated by an interested character-narrator casts a different light on the story and accounts for the narrative confusion. Jacques’s constant reminders in part 3 that he can only “believe” what happened and that he is “inventing” Lol’s story erode the reader’s confidence and underline the theme of memory as a fictive replay or rewriting of the past. Visually, the text betrays this erosion. Question marks, suppositions, hypothetical formulations, unfinished sentences, and blank spaces on the page convey an abdication of control and the very uncertainty of the text that is being read. Desire as lack is translated both formally and thematically.

Stylistic and narrational violence are complemented by subversive elements in time and place that enhance the portrayal of desire. Part 3, a replay or remembering of part 1 (which is itself a replay of preceding texts), continues the theme-and-variations pattern that characterizes the novel. The continual return to an elusive and illusional past succeeds in collapsing distinctions between past and present—a confusion supported by associations in the setting. Lol’s seduction by Jacques Hold in part 3 takes place in a room reminiscent of the ballroom in part 1, to which Jacques and Lol make a pilgrimage. The site is consecrated as a sacred place of desire, like the café to which Anne and Chauvin return to reenact the passionate crime. Ambiguities resulting from confusion of past and present, ballroom and hotel room, occur also in character portrayal. The three female protagonists, Tatiana, Anne-Marie Stretter, and Lol, are variously described by the same characteristics of desire and death. They, like the entire Durasian corpus, take on the attributes of allegory in a progressively stylized and thus universalized story of absolute passion.

India Song

The publication of India Song in 1973 culminated the India cycle (which includes play and film); indeed, India Song is a transparent text through which are filtered the essential themes, characters, and events of Duras’s novelistic world. It might be regarded as the allegorical blueprint of all Duras’s preceding novels, containing them yet transcending them in an increasingly fragmented rendition of what Duras maintains in the preface to India Song to be the essence of her story, “a story of love immobilized in the culminating moment of passion.”

The Malady of Death

In The Malady of Death the narrator, an unnamed woman, is paid to be at a man’s disposal for several nights. The woman is seen as a commodity that can be purchased. Although the woman is not a prostitute, she allows herself to be bought by the man. The male, also unnamed, has total control of the female (in fact, she is to be paid only if she remains submissive to his oppression). The seduction in the novel is sparsely told by the female speaker. As the nights go by, the narrator speaks for the male who, though he exerts his power of silencing the female, has no voice of his own. At first he wants her silent; he does not want to know her. He eventually wants to know more about the woman and releases her from her silence by asking her why, if she is not a prostitute, she has accepted his offer: She answers that as soon as she saw him, she knew he was afflicted with a malady of death. During the first days of the relationship, she did not know how to name that malady, and then she found her voice. She calls him a dead man because he has never loved or desired a woman.

Once awakened, she will no longer play the part of the silent, submissive prostitute. He attempts to engage her on a more maternal level, begging her to listen to the story of his childhood. Again she refuses to be what he wants her to be. By not exerting her power, by not recognizing her power until she recognizes his malady, she gains power over him. No longer willing to play his game, she ends it by leaving.

The Lover

Duras’s final group of novels is characterized by her sparse prose and stories shifting both in time and narration. This kaleidoscopic shifting is most evident in The Lover. The story of the protagonist’s relationship with her Chinese lover is told in the midst of a swirl of images, shifting points of view, and brutal violence. The story is narrated by a female speaker, and it leaps startlingly back and forth in time; the periods of the speaker’s life are marked as happenings before the seduction, at the time of the affair, and after the seduction. The three time periods structure the narrative, with the seduction at the center. Past and future come together in Duras’s novel, and it is not clear who has been, or who is being, seduced—the Chinese man or the narrator.

At the beginning of the story the narrator is a fifteen-year-old boarding school student in Saigon. The meeting with her Chinese lover is yet another fictionalized telling of the Durasian mythology. His relationship to the young girl is at once paternal, erotic, and, after the introduction to her family, violent. The lover is afraid to make their affair known, not only because he is Chinese and she is white, but because he is twelve years older than her.

The narrative shifts between the first person and the third person, especially in violent scenes. When her mother suspects that she is having an affair with the Chinese man, the narrator talks of herself in the first person while the scene unfolds. However, when her mother begins beating her, she shifts into the third person, distancing herself from the violence of her mother’s blows. Duras’s manipulation of the narrative continually challenges the reader.