“Le Boa” contains very little dialogue. It is a first-person brief memoir of a woman who looks back to the time when she was thirteen and she attended a school for girls whose directress, a virgin septuagenarian, had admitted her out of pity for her mother who was too poor to pay the full amount of the tuition.

Mademoiselle Barbet was at worst vicious, at best eccentric. While the other students were permitted to go out every Sunday, to the movies, for walks, to play tennis or otherwise amuse themselves, the narrator was subjected, each week, to two unvarying spectacles: a boa devouring a chicken at the local zoo, a free show which allowed the directress to charge her pupil's mother for “Sunday outing” expenses; and, upon returning to the seclusion of the school, the ugly nudity of the old woman who forced the girl to watch her undress so that she could boast about the quality of her underwear. These two unusual weekly events acted upon the mind of the young girl with almost catastrophic consequences, although her present ability to review them logically, clinically, points to the absence of major damage on her personality.

The intuition of the child told her that the boa's killing and assimilation of the chicken was a pure, innocent act, and that her directress' exhibitionism was the embodiment of mature vice brought about by the frustrations of virginity. Marguerite Duras' description of the first Sunday occurrence is a blend of ferocious cold-bloodedness and poetic admiration. The spectacle of the boa's feast moves her character to remark:

What an impeccable crime, consumed in the warm snow of its feathers which added to the innocence of the chicken a fascinating reality. This crime was without stain, without a trace of spilled blood, without regret. The order after the catastrophe, the peace in the chamber of the crime [the boa's cage]. Entirely curled, black, shining with a purer dew than that of morning on berry bushes, of an admirable shape, a swelled roundness, tender and full of muscles, a black column of marble … replete with shiverings of contained power, the boa was integrating this chicken in the course of a sovereignly lofty digestion, as perfect as the absorption of water by the burning sands of the desert, a transubstantiation accomplished in sacred tranquillity. In a formidable interior silence the chicken became boa. With a happiness to make you dizzy, the flesh of the biped was flowing through that of the reptile.

By opposition, the sight of Mademoiselle Barbet's nudity fills the forced spectator with scorn and disgust:

She would keep herself erect so that I would admire her, bending her eyes to look at herself lovingly. … It was too late. … A terrible odor emanated from the body of Mademoiselle Barbet. … I would stop myself from breathing. Yet, she had her own sort of kindness. And in the whole town her reputation was secured, perfect, as virginal as her life. I would tell myself that, and also that she was, after all, an old woman. But it didn't matter. I would still stop myself from breathing.

In the child's mind, then, violence meant purity and virginity signified vice. To guard herself against the possibility of winding up like Mademoiselle Barbet, the narrator would go to the window and smile to passing colonial soldiers, much like another Duras heroine, in the hope that one would stop and kidnap her and rape her and save her from the horrifying infirmity of a sexless existence. More than that, she began to suspect the good, and to feel limitless sympathy for the dispossessed, the villain, the evil in society. Confessing that she had heard only much later about the commercial side of prostitution, she then tells of her vision of a bordello “as a temple of defloration where, in all purity … girls … who were not destined to get married [because of a poor financial background], discovered their body with the aid of unknown men of the same species as they. A sort of shrine of impudicity, the house of prostitution had to be a silent place where no one spoke, everything being so arranged that no word need be pronounced in its sacred anonymity.” And she pursues: “I imagined that the prostitutes put on a mask on their face before entering. Without doubt, in order to earn the anonymity of the species, the absolute lack of personality of the boa. …”

It is useless to wonder whether the narrator, who ends her story in a beautifully poetized vision of her future, should have been more prompted to choose the path of the boa than that of Mademoiselle Barbet. This piece makes no pretense at plot or credibility. It merely points, with simplicity and sobriety, to the workings of the mind of a young girl under the imperious fatality of two events imposed upon it from the outside and viewed now from the vantage point of maturity. It suggests, of course, the very little choice a child has in the difficult process of growing up and of shaping a personality: for while not everyone contemplates a boa devouring a chicken, nor smells the decaying body of a naked septuagenarian week after week for a number of years, other similarly uncontrollable forces mold and petrify human life. This is a pathetic consideration, especially when made (perhaps only intuitively) by a teen-ager. Yet, Madame Duras' approach prevents “Le Boa” from becoming a soap opera type of narrative. Her introduction of the developing feelings and ideas of the girl remains, throughout the brief pages of the story, cautious, medical, a bit too calculated perhaps. We are left with the impression that what we have before our eyes is not fiction at all but rather a well-studied case history. That the author could have accomplished this in spite of the many poetized passages points to the writer's ability to weave in a brilliant style even the most ludicrously violent events to have been described by her pen. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in “Le Boa”'s last paragraph:

Thus the world, and therefore my life, opened up on two avenues which gave me two distinct alternatives. There existed, on the one side, the world of Mademoiselle Barbet, on the other, the compelling world, the fatal world of the species considered as fatality, the world of the future, luminous and burning, singing and shouting, of a deft beauty, but to the cruelty of which one had to accede as one had to accede to the spectacle of devouring boas. And I would see that world pointing to my future, the only possible future for me, I would see it opening up with the music, the purity of a serpent's unfolding body, and it seemed to me that, when I would come to know it, it would be in this way that it would appear to me, in a development of mystic continuity … with movements of terror, of enchantment, without rest, without fatigue.

But a woman is not a boa, and for most young ladies the fascination of the bordello decreases with maturity. It is quite probable, then, that Marguerite Duras' narrator, who never mentions a family, or a husband, and who confesses having learned, eventually, of the commercial side of prostitution, never did attain the serenity and innocence of the serpent. Did she become another Mamedoiselle Barbet, or was she simply afraid, at the time she began to recollect her childhood, that her emulation of the old directress was an inevitable prospective? In either case, the reincarnation that the young girl had dreamed of, as she smiled, naívely, to passing soldiers, appears to have struck the older woman as a fanciful utopia she could only look back to with a mixture of nostalgia and cold-blooded lucidity.

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The two husbands Madame Dodin had had were drunkards. She had left them both. … [her children,] she did not want to see them, they bored her. She had given them a fine education … and for them she had worked in a factory for fifteen years. In the evening, her earnings not being sufficient, she would take in other people's washes.

“I worked so much for them,” she explains, “that I've had enough. All I ask is that they leave me alone.”

But the others hardly ever leave anyone alone, and Madame Dodin [the protagonist of “Madame Dodin”] caretaker of a modest apartment building, is even less in a position to aspire to the peace and quiet due a tired, old woman.

One of the duties to which she objects constantly is the daily chore of emptying the tenants' garbage cans. She has done it for years, of course, every morning of every day of every week, but she has complained about it all day, every day of every week, to tenants, to neighbors, to a street-sweeper whom she befriends, Gaston, to anyone who would listen. Specifically, she detests the odor, the weight, the contents; generally, she is bothered by the servitude that emptying other people's garbage suggests, her relegation to a position of inferiority, her intuition that, somehow, her chore reduces her to a subhuman. In her impasse, Madame Dodin, too lucid and too experienced to hope in the accepted sense of the word, cannot be aided by faith or by revolt: “God is nothing to brag about,” she says, “I'm telling you. And then, the Son, just as bad as the Father … and the Communists, they're just like the priests, except that they say they're on the side of the workers. They repeat the same thing, that we've got to be patient, so there's no hope from them either.” Dispossessed as she is, what is left for Madame Dodin to do? Not very much, not much more than other Marguerite Duras heroines have been able to devise: she unravels old pullovers, for example, and she talks a great deal. Not that she does anything with the wool or that she says anything when she speaks. Her remarks are nothing but clichés: “The sky is heavy … there is going to be a storm.” Or else: “The sky is clear, it's going to be nice for the rich.” But although she lacks both faith and the ability to revolt, she has not quite given up. Her daily complaints keep her busy, alive, and give her a measure of significance which keeps her one step above the garbage-can type of existence she leads. But there is more: she refuses to go to church, as a friend suggests, for that would mean accepting the idea of patience, of compromise with the present for the sake of an illusory future; she has visions, at times, of impossible solutions, such as “special sewer openings in which, everyone, each night, would be compelled to empty his garbage”; she has a certain passion for Gaston, with whom she laughs, quarrels, perhaps even goes to bed; she is not above stealing, on occasion, the home deliveries of the tenants, and of boasting about the thefts; finally, and more importantly since the wish is made part of the last paragraph of the story, Madame Dodin looks forward to dying with a certain sadness but also with satisfaction if, death coming during the night, there would be no one to empty the trash cans in the morning: “It's a pity,” she often says, “I won't be there to see their face.”

Gaston, the male counterpart of Madame Dodin, only thirty years old (she is sixty), is no different in spite of his younger age. She empties garbage, he sweeps it. As if he were already quite old, Gaston works slowly, walks painfully, his head bent, his broom dragging behind him, paying attention to no one (except, occasionally, to Madame Dodin), and is almost always indifferent, anonymous, alone. He drinks, he gets fat, he is a picture of progressive decay: “He has lived too long … the people in the neighborhood can die or take their First Communion, nothing moves him. He is no longer interested in human ends. They bore him. … And in all the human joys or mournings he perceives nothing but gradual deterioration.” Because he is younger, the unchanging monotony of his work appears even more pathetic. Old or young, Marguerite Duras seems to suggest, the routine and the dirt of the subhuman functions which we must all perform to a greater or lesser degree, make life barely bearable and inconsistent with our more beautiful, more fanciful visions of it. For like his friend, Gaston too dreams: “What I need is 20,000 francs. To go to the South, take in the sun and maybe, who knows, get another job.” And in this ideal location he would stop working at four in the afternoon, he would be free, he would be known, people would shake his hands, he would take part in conversations, he would meet a girl, a brunette, she would smile to him, he would smile back. There is nothing much in the meantime, however: three glasses of white wine a day, the daily exchange of banalities with Madame Dodin, the possibility, quite vague and certainly meaningless, of a physical relationship in a moment of stupor or drunkenness.

Both Madame Dodin and Gaston, then, lead the existence of previously met Duras characters: theirs is a miserable life, a human condition they are unable to change. Yet, increasingly, they become used to it, and only in moments of removal from reality are they capable of imagining something better. These moments are sufficient for survival, however. They guarantee a trace of security, they reincarnate humans into a more humane, more acceptable situation. More than that, in “Madame Dodin” the author inserts some of her rare humorous passages, at which readers laugh with, and sometimes more than the protagonists: the old woman's way of kidding Gaston by emptying, on him, from her window, her pots and pans; and Gaston's impatient wait, under the window, for Madame Dodin to appear and to splash him with the contents of her kitchen vessels. Some of the conversations between the two are particularly comic, notably the one in which Descartes and philosophers in general are taken to task for theorizing about matters that are too remote and of no immediate value to the masses:

“It urinates, therefore it drinks,” Madame Dodin said.

“This reminds me of something,” Gaston noted. “A philosopher said the same thing: I think, therefore I am.”

“He would have done better to keep quiet,” Madame Dodin said, “if he didn't discover anything better than that.”

“The one who discovered it was Descartes,” said the street-sweeper.

Madame Dodin burst out in laughter.

“What kind of cards? As far as cards go, I only know about ration cards … with all their brains … why didn't they find something to do away with garbage cans?”

Unlike Beckett and other anti-novelists who use humor efficiently to point to the tragic side of the human condition, Marguerite Duras takes advantage only rarely of comic devices, and the passage quoted is the lightest to be found in her publications to date.

But “Madame Dodin,” in spite of its aliterary aspects which place it in the larger context of Marguerite Duras' ties with the New Novel, and in spite of the fact that it points to an unsuspected, though sparingly used ability to handle jocularity, has not been, so far, the object of critical comment. Like “Le Boa,” it has been eclipsed by the success obtained by the first story in the collection, Des Journées entières dans les arbres. Yet, “Madame Dodin,” and “Le Boa,” are carefully written compositions suggesting unmistakably the mature pen of a novelist whose talent will result in books of increased and permanent literary value.

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Positioned last among the four short stories under discussion, “Les Chantiers” does not appear to have the gripping qualities of the first three. In it Marguerite Duras plunges into the New Novel (as a matter of fact, it is barely possible to speak, in this instance, of a mere connection with it); yet, as we shall see, the ending of the brief narration constitutes a sudden and unexpected ascent from the world of the despairing and the dispossessed, and what had started as a deeply pessimistic relation of the impossibility of human communication and relationship winds up in a syrupy, semi-Hollywood type of denouement.

She and He, guests at a resort hotel, meet outside of it, in front of an enclosure where an edifice is about to be built. There is nothing remarkable about either protagonist, and their anonymity coincides with their lack of luster. As does the reader, so do She and He notice the average in the other: the plain physical appearance, the lack of excitement of their movements, the slow pace of the daily routine in which they engage. Vacation here, even more than in Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinia, is synonymous with stagnation. Whereas in the previous work a number of events did take place, and dialogue was at least apparently possible, in “Les Chantiers” the characters are unable to exchange more than a few words, and whatever microscopic action there is, it remains locked in the mind of the personages. He, for example, takes more pleasure in observing her furtively than in talking to her or in establishing a more tangible rapport. She, on the other hand, ignores for a while that she is being watched and proceeds with the mechanical activities of her vacation: the meals, the walks, the aimless entries into and exits out of the hotel; and when she becomes aware of his silent attention, like him, she makes a subconscious effort to avoid a meeting and to check the possibility of verbal intercourse. These subconscious attempts become more conscious later on, so that the two are able to hold on to that more subtle, more pleasurable feeling derived from indefinite waiting periods and from vague but passionate and unfulfilled desires.

In the man's case at least, the happiness he experiences is purely intellectual, and he soon begins to lose appetite and the ability to sleep; for it is eminently difficult to wait everywhere for a woman one hopes would never appear; and to watch everyone of her gestures without being seen and without making the interest visible to her or to others. In addition, the sight of the slightly soiled collar of a blouse she wears one day awakens in him a sexual image that leads to the discovery of more potent reasons for postponing the development of a real friendship:

The view of this collar dirtied and wrinkled by this neck, this back of her neck half hidden under her hair, that material [of the collar], these things that he alone saw, that she did not know he saw … it was as if they were two to live in this body she had … [and] the night which followed that day the memory transformed itself into desire … but this desire was immedately so strong that he wanted her to be even more ignorant than she was of the life which was taking place within her [ignorant of his participation in that life]. Thus, once successful in possessing the woman he would be able to get hold of her more fully, to take advantage of her entirely, to dispose totally of this body whose sovereign negligence he had been able to uncover.

There is, then, no reason to force or to hasten an acquaintanceship; there is every reason to savor the delicious misery of waiting.

Or is there? The tone of the writer in “Les Chantiers” does not favor a precise conclusion. While she describes at length the protagonists' mysterious joy in the highly sophisticated game of hide-and-seek they play, she also appears to mock their vie tranquille (the words are repeated several times in the story and they recall, of course, her 1944 novel of the same title), the way He “plunged slowly, each day, more deeply into the red forests of illusion,” the actual pleasure he feels when she passes by without recognizing him, his secret wish that she leave the hotel and his silent enumeration of all the reasons she might have for leaving, his refusal to stop her in the street and talk to her, his equally emphatic decision, “No, at the risk of losing her I would never strike a conversation in public,” and, finally, “the absence of drama in his life.” But over and above the derision in which she holds, perhaps, her characters, Marguerite Duras, in typical anti-novelist manner, does not fail to point with sober sensitivity to the tragedy of their condition. The few banalities which she has them exchange, not about themselves but about exterior, unimportant things (comments on the building under construction, on the men who work on it, on the changing landscape), reveal beyond doubt the emptiness of their existence. Their nervous gestures too, their forced smile and occasional laughter which “expressed neither irony, nor confusion, nor coquettishness but only a certain incertitude,” their extreme care “to ignore one another as if, in this resort hotel, in the middle of the summer and in spite of their freedom love had been condemned to death,” unveil brutally the personages' marginal participation in life. He and She have everything going for them, and there are no outside impediments to the birth of love. But contact beyond the mere trivial and the briefest moment is impossible since there is no inner drive, no initiative, no desire to satisfy desire. There are only certain glimpses, a number of material, solid objects (the bricks and mortars and ropes the men work with, for example), and the strangely consoling catharsis to be derived from them: “When she left again … the man felt like calling her back and shouting to her that this was a chance, a joy, the existence of things such as the fence around the enclosure inside of which the men were working. He did nothing of the kind. He could neither cry out to her to stay, nor could he get up in order to try and hold her back. This impotence was also mysteriously satisfying.”

The very idea that satisfaction can result from a deficiency points to what extent Marguerite Duras adheres to that literature of consent mentioned in conjunction with earlier works. But unlike before, in “Les Chantiers” she adheres to it until the very end (or almost), and the reader has no advance notice of the possibility of even a modestly happy outcome. In a very tight structure, untainted by the slightest suggestion of sentimentality, the author appears to endow her characters with such petrified qualities of timorousness, timidity and reserve that we seem to deal more with some Beckett or Ionesco-type personages than with the more malleable, more flexible protagonists we had encountered on previous occasions. In the shorter format of the nouvelle, we are led to think, there is very little time for He and She to engage in any sort of liberating act which would insinuate at least the appearance of a closer rapport. Besides, He and She find, increasingly, a curious fulfillment in desire without satisfaction or in satisfaction derived from incongruous sources. That is why, when at the end of the story the two meet abruptly, at the edge of a forest, after a long walk in the course of which she had followed him with mechanical precision, we are unprepared and unwilling to accept what is obviously a contrived conclusion. The characters, it seems, had tasted such extreme pleasure in waiting, and had experienced such intense emotions in deliberately vain efforts at contact that we now view their encounter as anticlimactic if not as a non sequitur. The reader who has allowed himself to be drawn into the rhythm and tempo of the story sees himself suddenly outside it. Events which had appeared to him to lead to an essentially negative outcome in line with the characters' makeup take a turn away from the inner truth of the situation, and an artificially happy ending is constructed at the expense of the stated limitations of the personages' ability and desire to make contact. The meeting in “Les Chantiers,” the back cover of the 1967 French edition informs us, “is the story … of the first beginning of love.” That love can still begin after most of its emotional intensity has been experienced and consumed is as dubious a hypothesis as is the future of the now united couple, facing one another, without comment, fresh out of words (the inner dialogue has used them all) and of feelings too (He and She had waited too long, had met too often before they actually met).

The fact that Marguerite Duras ends her narrative with the unexplored union of hero and heroine points at once to the necessity of keeping within the boundaries of a short story and to the impossibility of going beyond the mass of internal reactions which had fatigued and weakened the characters. Thus, the sugar-coating of the denouement is not prolonged by sentimentality or emotional fakery. This, of course, is to the credit of the writer who will not, in the future, depart so radically from the circumscribed and limited status of the initially described reality. That she had, in a story more closely connected with the tenets of the Anti-Novel than any other, remains without explanation; unless it be that in “Les Chantiers” she felt suddenly that she had gone too far in a direction that she was not prepared to accept fully for fear of seeing her own, very personal fictional potentialities conform exactly to those of a semiestablished literary school. Madame Duras' integrity clashed, perhaps, with the writer's domination of plot and characters, and the writer lost. But “Les Chantiers” does not occupy a prominent place in the author's fiction. Except for the usual reviews concomitant with the publication of all her books, it has not given rise to critical comment. Marguerite Duras can easily afford to charge her last story to experience and emerge, as she will, in stricter control of subsequent literary endeavors. …

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Three years after the publication of Le Square appears the very short (sixty-five pages in the Grove edition mentioned above) narrative of Moderato cantabile. It is noteworthy that only once before (the six-year period between the appearance of La Vie tranquille and Un Barrage contre le Pacifique) Marguerite Duras has taken a longer time to complete a book, and that, since 1958, no more than two years have elapsed between publications. Apparently, in spite of its brevity, this carefully written composition required an expanded period of concentration on the part of the author.

Armand Hoog, in whose opinion Moderato cantabile is not a real anti-novel but, as he cryptically states, “a novel which hesitates, which falls back upon itself, a hesitating novel, undecided and perplexed,” considers it paradoxical that she should have gone with it from Gallimard to the Editions de Minuit, headquarters of the New School. It is curious, however, that the critic's article on Marguerite Duras appears in a special number of the Yale French Review entitled “Midnight Novelists.” But more about this later.

As John W. Kneller has observed, moderato cantabile is to be interpreted as an antithetical term which is never used for a musical composition: the directions usually specify moderato by itself or in connection with allegro and andante in order to qualify the meaning of the single word; cantabile, which means “singable,” points to a group of notes that are to be sung. Moderato is viewed by the same critic to signify the routine and restraint imposed by habits and by society on the novel's principal character, Anne Desbaresdes, while cantabile, on the contrary, is to be interpreted as the temptation, on Marguerite Duras' heroine, of ultimate freedom, of involvement, of love and violence, of metempsychosis.

The two themes unfold admirably in the brief novel, from the very first scene and through the eight chapters into which the story is divided. The author manages to create immediately a tense drama between a stubborn child, a bored mother, Anne Desbaresdes, and a stern piano teacher, Mademoiselle Giraud, whom the pupil cannot or will not obey. Largely through dialogue, Marguerite Duras succeeds in evoking a powerful inner-outer struggle. There is nothing between the three personage-enemies in the room but an indirect contact, a bond of chance. Miles separate the characters: the child goes through the motions of playing the piano, automatically and badly; the teacher insists on technicalities which are meaningless in terms of the pupil's early development of method; and the mother appears to despise her unbearable and indocile offspring. Actually, twice in the novel (once to her boy and later to a man, Chauvin, whom she will meet) she remarks that, often, she thinks she invented her son, that he does not really exist.

As the music lesson proceeds, with quiet, poetic humor Marguerite Duras points to the dramatic distance between the protagonists: the child's attention to the noises outside (of the sea, of the motorboats) and to the beauty of the sunset (“The child, motionless, his eyes lowered, was the only one to remember that dusk had just exploded. It made him shiver.”); the teacher's harsh reprimands but obvious lack of interest and charity; the mother's secret pleasure in the obstinate refusal of her son to learn, to conform, which she associates with her own stifled desire to escape the conventionality and humdrum of an empty existence as wife of a rich industrialist, on vacation at a remote seaside resort. To the teacher's persistent request for an explanation of the meaning of moderato cantabile, the boy's ignorance, feigned or real, points, for his mother, to the possibility of eluding the routine and the monotony of her life. Cantabile “fights” moderato outside of the apartment also, for while the bickering goes on inside, a murder takes place in a café across the street. And the cry of the victim, of the gathering crowd, of the police sirens insinuates itself into the room, into the inner fibers of the three personages, like a terrible and inescapable obsession. Anne is most afflicted, for while others live and die outside, she waits and is bored and has no hope of participating in real human dramas.

Across the street the killer has been arrested, and the crowds have dispersed. No one knows exactly why the murder took place. Rumor has it that assassin and victim were too much in love. When the police arrived, the murderer stood over the body of the woman, his lips grotesquely chained to hers, her blood spotting the collar of his shirt. Anne goes into the café and meets Chauvin, one of the workers in her husband's factory. He had witnessed the murder and now attempts to satisfy Anne's curiosity about the details. As they speak, they are mysteriously attracted to each other, and they will meet, day after day, in order to drink and talk about the crime that had taken place. There is, of course, no real reason for their clandestine meetings. The simple explanation which they share at first, and which becomes more and more difficult to accept as time goes on, is that Anne must know the motives behind the murder and that Chauvin hopes to dig into these motives and relate them to her. But pressed continuously by questions, he soon runs out of details. He does not recall very much about the case, he has not been an attentive witness. “I'd like to know a little more,” she keeps repeating. “Even if you're not sure of your facts.” So he imagines how the others must have met, how their relationship must have developed, what they could have spoken about. Anne becomes intoxicated with the personality of the victim, she cannot help mimicking the gestures and movements the other woman must have made, or repeating the words she must have said, in the intonation she must have used. Her identification with the other is her incarnation, her participation in life, in the mystery of life, in the happiness and violence of life. Little does it matter that Chauvin, too, begins to play; that his role is that of the killer; that their perusal of the game of unbearable passion the others must have gone through can only come to one predictable end: Chauvin, the assassin, will have to kill Anne, the voluntary gull. But when Chauvin raises his hand and utters: “I wish you were dead,” Anne responds simply: “I already am.” His gesture is useless, for the woman has already discarded moderato and has chosen cantabile in its place.

Or has she? The choice is not certain, although it appears that the answer is in the negative. If we place Moderato cantabile in the context of Marguerite Duras' previous novels we cannot escape the fact that, for most of her characters, incarnation remained utopian. Becoming someone else, finding identification with another, are not simple operations like that of forging a passport. And the flimsiness and sketchiness of Anne and Chauvin do not point to the strong will required for the complete process of metempsychosis. Actually, what do we know about hero and heroine? We know that she is intrigued by or falls in love with Chauvin; we suspect that he is intrigued by or falls in love with Anne. But the psychological adultery in which they engage does not go past one dubious kiss in the café. And if “they lingered in a long embrace, their lips were cold and trembling … performing … a mortuary ritual.” There is, of course, the much-acclaimed regurgitation scene of chapter seven, when Anne, arriving home late for a reception scheduled by her husband, goes through the hostess' motions poorly, eats the saumon glacé, the canard à l'orange, and the mocha ice on top of the many glasses of wine she had drunk before, and winds up vomiting “the strange food that had been forced upon her.” This scene, interpreted by John W. Kneller as symbolizing “the end of the conventionality theme,” the abandonment of moderato, does not make up for the fact that Anne's love for Chauvin was lived only emotionally, that there was no love affair as such, and no actual murder. In spite of the five confrontations with Chauvin, in spite of the wine and the almost accidental kiss, the heroine has remained herself, the bored, lifeless Anne who had been mimicking the other who was indeed assassinated because she had been alive, really alive, and because she had kindled in her husband, or lover, or whatever he was, a passion or a hatred or a madness that is only possible with the living. Likewise, in spite of Chauvin's perseverance and efforts in trying to satisfy Anne's curiousity, in spite of his emulation of the assassin's gesticulations and phraseology, he too fails in his attempt at incarnation: he does not succeed in possessing the wife of his boss, nor in killing her. And his last attempt at reaching for the woman's neck is as futile as the kiss in which their icy lips had met when he had tried, vainly, to give to their relationship the aura of passion that the other couple must have known and enjoyed.

The relationship between Anne and Chauvin proves only that an alienation from society is possible, for a short time, and that the strictures and restrictions of bourgeois respectability can be avoided without permanent danger by those rebels who repent and return within the orderly mechanism of accepted decorum. Just as the child learns eventually the meaning of moderato cantabile, so do hero and heroine discover the futility of stubbornness, of contradiction, of revolt, as evidenced in their final separation. However, their capitulation and consent are in no way inconsistent with the short-lived adventure and imitation of the others. The latter played a major role for they rekindled in the protagonists an awareness of the existence of other dimensions, other values, other rules: extralegal, violent, fiercely relentless and almost within reach. This newly acquired cognizance is sufficient to make them go on, to survive. Thus, it may be said that the unnamed town in Moderato cantabile is no different from Tarquinia. In both places, a number of calamitous events took palce, but even those most closely connected with them could only be touched temporarily. And characters who had attained an elusive poetic presence, a kind of purity and eternity in another, a different and forbidden world, realize that moderato alone is a practical sine qua non of the human condition.

The incompatability of the two musical themes of the title is beautifully interwoven in the narrative pattern. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the seventh chapter, with its description of the formal dinner scene inside the house and the relation of Chauvin circling the mansion outside the garden railings. Anne is painfully aware of the double role she must play as respectable hostess, trying desperately to behave according to the norms of the society within which she lives, and as frustrated woman prey to the stark sexual and destructive desire which she feels welling within her for the man whose nearness she guesses with every fiber of her inebriated being. An object of scandal to husband and guests inside, an object of wild passion to the man prowling outside, Anne moves and speaks with hesitation, uttering fragments of sentences and restating with every gesture and every word the dichotomy that is within her until she vomits both the wine she had drunk earlier and the socially acceptable victuals of the gala dinner of which she had been forced to partake. All this corresponds pointedly with the sonata form which is usually divided into three parts: exposition, development, and recapitulation. Two opposing themes, in this case moderato and cantabile, unfold through these stages and end in a coda or closing theme, in the present novel the act of vomiting. But Anne's regurgitation is neither an acquiescence in the invitation to freedom of cantabile nor, for the time being, a return to the security of moderato (it is only after the fifth meeting with Chauvin in the eighth and final chapter and following her inability to become in actuality a victim and his to become in actuality a murderer that the separation will take place); it is, in its simplest interpretation, an expected physical reaction on the part of a person that has had too much wine to drink and too much food to eat. But it is also an indication of the heroine's utopian incarnation, for while the salmon, the duck, and the mocha ice are her husband's, the wine, which is also ejected, has been bought for her by Chauvin. To see in her temporary ailment a proof of definitive metempsychosis is to be taken in by the tragic modulations of the finely controlled musical themes and to forget that no absolute emulation has taken place, for after all there has been no actual consummation of love and no actual murder.

Excellent control is evident not only in chapter seven but in the novel as a whole. For example, Marguerite Duras is extremely careful about her chronology; all episodes take place at the same time of day, the first begins on a Friday; the fifth, sixth, and seventh on the following Friday; the eighth two days later. The entire plot unfolds in clearly delineated sets, all positioned between late afternoon and evening. Control is likewise apparent in the author's use of verb tenses. While most of the composition is written in the narrative past, we are fully aware that the action takes place in the present, and the illusion of the past only serves to enhance the sense of immediacy of the situation. In the dinner scene of chapter seven there is an unexpected shift to the present tense in order to make absolutely clear the urgency of the rapidly moving events that will culminate in the vomiting incident. But the act of spewing itself and the rest of the chapter are written in the future, as if to cast additional doubt on an already complex climactic scene. Finally, there is a return to the narrative past in chapter eight, as befits Anne's and Chauvin's impending reversion to moderato, the inescapable solution.

The enthusiastic reception accorded this novel can be explained also by the writer's continued interest in the stylistic devices of the New School: the broken, interrupted conversations, the repetitions, the lack of specific details, the alcohol-blurred vision of the personages through which the reader must interpret the development of plot, to an extent the anonymity of characters (we learn Chauvin's name very late in the book, and those whose names we know from the beginning remain vague, sketchy, and wanting in completeness), finally, the cinematographic technique of set construction, not unlike that of Alain Robbe-Grillet's Last Year at Marienbad (1961), to which Moderato cantabile has already been linked. Much of the dialogue is also in the tradition of the New Novel:

“I meant to ask you, you're not working today?”

“No, I need some free time for the moment.”

“Time to do nothing?”

“That's right, nothing.”

Recalling a somewhat similar exchange between Sara and Jean in Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinia, the passivity to which this passage points is often under the protagonists' attack during their encounters. To guard against it, to make it less visible to each other, she asks question after question and he attempts to respond, as best he can, inventing when he no longer knows what to say. But periods of silence sneak up on them just the same, and they find their awkwardness unbearable. At one point he pleads: “Hurry up and say something. Make it up.” And she reacts with a long speech, without punctuation, in the film version declaimed by the actress almost in one breath: “People ought to live in a town where there are no trees trees scream when there's a wind here there's always a wind always except for two days a year in your place don't you see I'd leave this place I wouldn't stay all the birds or almost all are seagulls you find them dead after a storm and when the storm is over the trees stop screaming you hear them screaming on the beach like someone murdered it keeps the children from sleeping no I'll leave.” Lack of communication and the inability to agree on even the slightest matters are likewise continuously pointed to. In this connection, Marguerite Duras appears, on one occasion, to recall another passage from Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinia when she writes: “Some people declared that the day had been hot. Others—and they were the majority—did not deny it had been a beautiful day, but claimed that it had nevertheless not been hot. Still others had no opinion.”

It is clear, then, that Moderato cantabile belongs as much to the New School as did Des Journées entières dans les arbres and Le Square, as will all of the author's subsequent fiction. “On page 77 the man who was simply The Man can no longer persist in anonymity,” observes Armand Hoog. “‘I am called Chauvin,' he says. How that little sentence pleases me! I have confidence in Marguerite Duras. She is a great novelist who will rise superior to the perils of the literary school [the Anti-Novel school].” Outside of the fact that, eventually, we learn Chauvin's name, and that Armand Hoog appears to have philosophical reservations on the merits of the anti-novel, it is difficult to see how Moderato cantabile can be interpreted as the beginning of a return to traditional fiction. The books which follow it deny this. And if Madame Duras rises superior to the unspecified perils of the New School, it is because she does not follow to the extreme its abstract, disintegrated, and often cold-blooded themes; because her personages remain essentially human in their preoccupation with the problems of solitude, of communication, of desire and love tempered and frustrated by social deliberations; finally, because they rebel against the subhumanity to which they are frequently relegated, and because they fail and they consent to it, as tragic heroes and heroines do once the glossiness of revolt is erased with the passage of time.