Gender, Reading, and Desire in Moderato Cantabile
1982; Duke University Press; Volume: 28; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/441445
ISSN2325-8101
Autores Tópico(s)French Literature and Criticism
Resumoa 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
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