Café as a Dual Space in Marguerite Duras's Moderato Cantabile

Abstract

This article examines the dual role of the cafe in instigation, development, and termination of the public display of transgressive desire in Margaret Duras’s (1958) Moderato Cantabile. To approach Duras’s narrative this way, we draw on Michel Foucault’s (1977) theories concerning Panopticon to bring into light the sociallyimposed codes and the method of their implementation. Duras’s mode of expression, we intend to discuss, brings to the reader’s attention the dominance of the silent social gaze in each transgressive scene between the two characters. Despite its laconism, therefore, Moderato Cantabile reveals the omnipresent and active bourgeois codes that are interwoven to the very fabric of the bourgeoisie. The effective operation of these codes, set through discourses of truth and power, is guaranteed through the Panopticon present in public spaces like the cafe, whose dual nature enables it to allow for manifestation of desire on the one hand, and effective inspection and containment of the situation (by imposing norms) on the other.