Moderato Cantabile Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Trista Selous

Critical Essay by Trista Selous

SOURCE: “The Blanks,” in The Other Woman: Feminism and Femininity in the Work of Marguerite Duras, Yale University Press, 1988, pp. 97-111, 127-32.

In the following essay, Selous examines the significance of what she describes as the “blanks” in Duras's writing, suggesting that those periods of silence or emptiness represent, particularly in Moderato cantabile, the “unsayable.”

[As] opposed to Un barrage contre le Pacifique, which recounts events and gives insights, usually through free indirect style, into the psychology of the characters, ‘in Moderato cantabile, not only does it not say what happened, but it may be that nothing happens at all’¹ and, even supposing something is happening, ‘who can give a name to what happens between strangers, to what is happening now between Anne Desbaresdes and Chauvin?’² In this text, according to one critic, Duras refuses ‘to name, to recount, to entertain, to fill the blanks.’³ It is possible, however,...
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