SOURCE: “Gender, Reading, and Desire in ‘Moderato Cantabile,’” in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 28, No. 1, 1982, pp. 69-85.

In the following essay, Hirsch contends that the characters' oral recounting of the murder in Moderato cantabile constitutes a literary narration through which the characters identify with others and come to understand their own desires by reenacting the passion of others.

Maybe that's what life is all about: to get into, to let yourself be carried along by this story—this story, well, the story of others.

—Marguerite Duras¹

Duras's comment might well be a description of the characters in her novels—vacant creatures who exist in a world of ruins and wait for 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...