Diabelli's sonata provides the mood for many encounters in Marguerite Duras' Moderato Cantabile. The enchantment of this sonata performs much like the Sirens who provided Ulysses with a magnetic attraction and a need for self-discipline. In Moderato Cantabile, the sonata creates a "controlled" (moderato) and "lyrical" (cantabile) atmosphere for Mlle Giraud and the young Desbaresdes, Anne and her son, as well as Chauvin and Anne. Each of these couples participates in the alternation between the binary themes of reason-madness, possession-dispossession, the explainable-inexplicable, and construction-destruction. The setting of Moderato Cantabile is organized according to a perpetual alternation between those poles. At first, the mood of Diabelli's sonata attracts the characters toward a milieu of "hateful contraries." The tune itself becomes an enchantment of the "controlled and lyrical" community of these "hateful contraries." On the one hand, the "controlled" elements are lined to reason, possession, the explainable, and construction. These elements dramatize a world of correspondences which can be articulated, created, and mastered. On the other hand, the "lyrical" elements are linked to the irrational, dispossession, the inexplicable, and destruction. These traits characterize an unchained world which cannot be grasped. Thus, two forces are produced which fascinate and polarize the community of Moderato Cantabile. Nietzsche's Apollonian and Dionysian distinctions (The Birth of Tragedy) are akin to these two worlds. Indeed, Marguerite Duras' novel develops Nietzsche's study of the ties among music, literature, and culture. These ties in Moderato Cantabile, however, are concentrated about the dual forces of the "controlled" and the "lyric."

Diabelli's music … introduces the music into the literary world of Moderato Cantabile. But this music achieves an ambivalent effect. The very name "Diabelli" implies "diabolic" from which the incantation of Satan's "hateful contraries" develops a pattern of refusal, the supreme diabolic act…. [Moderato Cantabile] presents a "theater of the spoken word" whereby words become animated in a dialogue with silence, gestures, and physical sensations. As the readers of Moderato Cantabile, we become spectators of the isomorphic metamorphosis of mere words into a living dialogue.

The sonata provides the atmosphere for other realizations of the dialogue of "hateful contraries."… The pounding surf, the clamor of the crowd in the café, the siren at the arsenal, and even the silence among the characters echo (redoublement) the musical atmosphere of the sonata. This atmosphere is created by a tension between the two forces of the "controlled" (moderato) and the "lyrical" (cantabile). (pp. 981-82)

The conversations of the characters portray the ambivalence of these controlled and lyrical forces. The "theater of the spoken word" becomes especially vivid in portraying simple and fragmentary dialogues. These dialogues represent the tensions between reason and the irrational, possession and dispossession, the explicable and the inexplicable, and construction and destruction. (p. 983)

The fascination of the binary forces of the controlled and the lyrical is perpetuated by the themes of intoxication and madness. This atmosphere is a fascination which obliterates the distinct relationships among characters and objects. (p. 984)

The gestures, physical sensations, and spoken words are all set in motion to transform the characters into objects (isomorphs)…. Indeed, the very structure of Moderato Cantabile revolves about the metamorphoses of people into objects. While the characters cannot express themselves through words, the objects, as well as the words themselves, recreate the lives of the people around them by tracing the rapports of the controlled forces. The gestures, perfumes, sounds, conversation, and silence replace the characters from whom they emanate.

Silence itself, as the absence of the spoken word, creates a dialectic of "hateful contraries" which generates the bonds among these physical sensations. While conversation creates a rapport among several characters, it is silence which remains to express the love, death, and madness which had tied together those victims of the café-crime…. Indeed, the reader participates in this dramatic portrayal of silence by his own silent reading of the "sous-conversation" but also by his active re-construction of what Nathalie Sarraute calls "the tropisms." Hence, the reader becomes another character "isomorphed" into an object by his silence and his words. (pp. 984-85)

The visions, sounds, and perfumes perceived by the characters also participate in [the dramatic life of the novel]. (p. 985)

The olfactory sensations of Anne and Chauvin especially represent their relationship. The evening of the dinner-party at the Desbaresdes, Chauvin recalls his love for Anne as Anne's magnolia tree emits a unique perfume. The magnolia tree's perfume becomes an "objective correlative" (to use T. S. Eliot's term) for the inexplicable bond between Anne and Chauvin. However, this bond between them excludes the child…. The child cannot participate in this physical sensation which is exclusively enjoyed by Anne and Chauvin. (p. 986)

Gestures evoke the human predicament of being trapped by the "hateful contraries" of controlled (moderato) and lyrical (cantabile) forces…. Duras creates a new phenomenology as the gestures in Moderato Cantabile indicate the relationship between the characters. The hand becomes increasingly important to dramatize human relationships. (pp. 986-87)

The hands of Chauvin and Anne especially portray their relationship. Their cold and deathly ("mortuaires") hands tremble to dramatize a love which is virtually extinct. Sometimes their hands are joined above the table to indicate an open and expressive friendship. Sometimes their hands are hidden under the table to imply a secretive, shameful liaison. Their hands are joined to express their unity during that gesture which portrays the consummation of their love: the kiss of their deathly cold lips. These gestures thus dramatize the impossibility of their love as their "conversations" explore the possibilities of developing their friendship.

The dramatic presentation of silence, sensations, and objects is only one of the cinematic techniques of Duras…. The eclectic techniques of Duras recall three problems with her linking of a literary text with music and film: (1) is it possible to completely reconstitute time with memory? (2) is it possible to escape this new world of literature, music, and the film? and (3) is it possible to speak of "metaphor" or of "symbol" in a phenomenological world of objects? (p. 987)

Moderato Cantabile can be considered to be a study of forgetfulness. Its cyclical structure, indicated by Anne initially ("ça recommence" …) and by Chauvin later ("ça recommencera" …), destroys the linear understanding of time…. The cinematic techniques of Duras seem to be exploring these limits of forgetfulness with a fragmentary narrative that has few formal transitions between the fragments. Thus, the empty spaces preclude the possibility of completely tracing the past or even the present time.

The cinematic presentation also confuses a linear, temporal sequence in the narrative…. The effect is the suspended animation, created by Beckett, whereby the movement of time is assigned to a perpetual beginning, always in the act of being completed, but never finished…. Thus, an ambivalent world of controlled and lyrical forces is being produced which re-creates the impossibility of drawing a timeline uniting past, present, and future in coherent succession….

We have spoken of the isomorphic transformation of persons into objects…. Objects are no longer the signs or metaphors of something else. Objects may exist for themselves, have rapports with other objects, and even predicate human existence…. Humanity becomes transformed into neutral objects in this narrative which studies the polar attractions of objects fascinated by "controlled" and "lyrical" forces.

The destruction of the love between Anne and Chauvin is … the ultimate result of the "greater realism" of this polar community. In order to perpetuate the circular structure of life itself, death is a prerequisite of a rebirth. (p. 988)