Gender, Reading, and Desire in Moderato Cantabile

Abstract

a story that will awaken, or, as the author puts it, ravish them. Observation and interpretation of other lives provide Duras's protagonists with their only content: Lol Stein (Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein) experiences sex vicariously by crouching in a field outside of the hotel where a friend and her lover meet; the French diplomats (Le Vice-Consul) can feel the suffering in Calcutta only through their observation of the vice-consul's reaction. Existence takes shape in response to others, and, therefore, it has about it much of the unreality and indirectness of fiction. Perhaps I am an echo chamber, says Duras when speaking of her method of composition (Les Parleuses, p. 218). I shall examine this structure of mediation and response in Moderato Cantabile, arguing that the characters, in their unraveling of a mysterious murder of passion, actually enact a literary process, namely that of interpreting an incident by recounting it in narrative form. The resulting imaginative identification with the lives of others leads the characters not to re-create, but to create, out of their own feeling and in their own lives, a version of the murder they have witnessed. Their involvement in this murder constitutes an act of reading; its mode is an