FOUR NOVELS
WORKS BY MARGUERITE DURAS
PUBLISHED BY GROVE PRESS
DESTROY, SHE SAID
FOUR NOVELS:
THE SQUARE;
MODERATO CANTABILE;
TEN-THIRTY ON A SUMMER NIGHT;
THE AFTERNOON OF MR. ANDESMAS
HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR
INDIA SONG
THE MALADY OF DEATH
PRACTICALITIES
FOUR NOVELS
by Marguerite Duras
THE SQUARE
MODERATO CANTABILE
TEN-THIRTY ON A SUMMER NIGHT
THE AFTERNOON OF MR. ANDESMAS
Introduction by Germaine Brée
GROVE PRESS
NEW YORK
This collection copyright © 1965 by Grove Press, Inc.
The Square copyright © 1959 by John Calder (Publishers) Ltd.
Moderato cantabile copyright © 1960 by Grove Press, Inc.
Ten-thirty on a Summer Night copyright © 1962 by Marguerite Duras
The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas copyright © 1965 by Grove Press, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.
The Square was originally published in France by Librairie Gallimard as Le Square, copyright © 1965.
Moderato cantabile was originally published in France by Les Editions de Minuit as Moderato cantabile, copyright © 1958.
Ten-thirty on a Summer Night was originally published in France by Librairie Gallimard as Dix heures et demie du soir en été, copyright © 1960.
The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas was originally published in France by Librairie Gallimard as L’après-midi de Monsieur Andesmas, copyright © 1962.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Duras, Marguerite.
Four novels/by Marguerite Duras; introduction by Germaine Brée.
p. cm.
Originally published: 1965.
Contents: The square—Moderato cantabile—Ten-thirty on a summer night—The afternoon of Mr. Andesmas.
ISBN 0-8021-5111-6
eISBN 978-0-8021-9062-8
1. Duras, Marguerite—Translations, English. I. Title. II. Title: Square. III. Title: Moderato cantabile. Iv. Title: Ten-thirty on a summer night. V. Title: Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas.
PQ2607.U8245A21990
843’.912—dc2090-46553
Cover design by Louise Fili
Cover photograph by Marcia Lippman
Grove Atlantic
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
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New York, NY 10011
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INTRODUCTION
by Germaine Brée
NO ONE WHO HAS SEEN and liked Alain Resnais’ film Hiroshima, Mon Amour is likely to forget the moment when the voices of the man and woman rise alternately slow, calm, almost impersonal. They come, one feels, from a long inner distance, far beyond the immediacy of the two tightly-clasped bodies on the screen: “‘You saw nothing of Hiroshima. Nothing.’ ‘I saw everything. Everything. For instance, the hospital. I saw the hospital. I’m sure of that. How could I miss it?’ ‘You did not see the Hiroshima hospital. You saw nothing of Hiroshima.’” Unpredictable, dogged, and strangely persuasive, the dialogue between the man and woman begins to unfold.
On the whole, the movie-going public is more sensitive to the flow of images on the screen than to the words spoken, more attentive to the acting or the direction than to the script. That is why the name of Marguerite Duras, who gave the dialogue of Hiroshima its haunting, unobtrusive beauty, has remained relatively unknown to so many people indirectly stirred by the intensity of feeling she was able to enclose in words.
The script of Resnais’ film is an excellent introduction to her writing, except that she is not usually concerned with great historical events. Rather, she concentrates on individual situations, which over the years she has tended to simplify, isolating in her stories brief but intense moments of awareness when, for an instant, two lives, or sometimes three, unpredictably act one upon the other, and an inner event seems to be taking shape. These are moments when, coming out of their isolation, her characters are willing to communicate, or to make an attempt at communication. To speak one to the other is in essence to relate. That is why dialogue is the key to Marguerite Duras’s world and why, no doubt, her stories move so easily from narrative to stage or scenario. Of the four novels included in this volume, The Square was staged in Paris and Moderato Cantabile adapted for the screen, both successfully.
Fiction, drama, cinema: these are her media, though her ten novels to date point to her greater involvement with the first; yet the hold the cinema has always had on her imagination is great and visibly affects her narrative techniques. Unlike the best known of the “experimental” novelists in France—Robbe-Grillet, Butor, Sarraute—Marguerite Duras has never been an essayist, an exponent of esthetic theories and ideas. But she shares with her contemporaries the desire to discard many of the rather worn-out conventions of the traditional novel, conventions which she put to effective use in her first works. Barrage against the Pacific (1950), the best-known of these, is a Hemingway-type story based on Marguerite Duras’s memories of South Indochina where she lived until she was seventeen. The very title of the story suggests a dogged, unequal battle against a superhuman force. This was to remain one of Duras’s basic themes: barrage against the immense solitude of human beings, barrage against the pain of all involvements, barrage against despair. In two of the stories, Moderato Cantabile and Ten-thirty on a Summer Night, alcohol is just such a barrage and, at the same time, ambiguously a kind of overwhelming Pacific.
The group of four short novels presented here and written between 1955 and 1962 are the works of a mature writer. They all reflect Duras’s major esthetic preoccupation: to shape a story so that it achieves an emotional intensity and unity that goes beyond the limits of the outer events related. Each is a particular embodiment of a fundamental human feeling. Certainly the famous description of the modem novel as “dehumanized” does not apply to Marguerite Duras’s, whose characters are pathetically and humanly vulnerable, humbly aware of the pain involved in human affections, yet dependent upon them, drawing from them the joys and disasters of living. Marguerite Duras’s world is nothing if not intensely, vibrantly human. Were it not for the strict formal control she imposes on it, it might almost appear sentimental.
Duras’s