In each story, mood, setting, and encounter are thematically developed and blended to achieve a certain pitch of emotional intensity bearable only because of the control Marguerite Duras maintains over her medium. To create her effect, she makes a flexible and unobtrusive use of point of view. Her stories at first seem to have no end or beginning, no central focus. A child comes up to the bench in the park; a child refuses to answer his piano teacher; a woman drinks manzanilla in a Spanish bar as a deluge of rain comes down; a dog appears at the corner of a terrace. As in films, the viewer, or listener, is not immediately described; only what is seen, or heard, and the narrative guided by the storyteller shifts, often without transition, from character to character, from the world inside to the world outside. The reader must, to a certain extent, yield to the narrative, allow himself to be drawn into its rhythms and tempo. Rhythm, tempo, silence, pause, repetition, modulation, a contrapuntal use of descriptive passages alternating with dialogue replace the habitual analysis, motivation, the logical sequence of events and rationally substantiated conflicts of the run of the mill novel.
All four novels are dominated, though to a different extent, by the human voice. The Square is almost entirely a dialogue; in Moderato Cantabile the dialogue—picked up, repeated, broken, ambiguous—dominates the narrative flow; less prominent in Ten-thirty on a Summer Night and Mr. Anaesmas, the successive sequences of words spoken are none the less climactic. The words spoken are punctuated by the changing play of light and shadow: the shifting patterns of scenery glimpsed at different moments, in different lights. Light and shadow mark the slowly moving, steady pattern of outer time, in contrast to the long-drawn-out moments of suspense, the sudden speeded-up moments of awareness that give its tempo to the characters’ inner life. Recurrence, leitmotiv, tempo are the stylistic devices whereby Marguerite Duras establishes the continuous yet shifting patterns of her stories. The dialogue moves freely between mere comment on the outer surface of things and the expression of inner moods and aspiration, usually voiceless. Certainly, it is not Marguerite Duras’s intention to give us a plausible reconstruction of characteristic speech patterns, but rather, through carefully patterned speech, to bring to light inner unexpressed tensions, hopes, modes of being as felt by specific individuals. An unexpected remark, an unfinished sentence, an apparent non sequitur are often the key to the emotion from which it draws its cogency, a key to the inner event in the making which it is the novelist’s intention to track down, disclose, and make clear.
Very little is necessary to start her stories moving. The story of Mr. Andesmas was born, Marguerite Duras indicates, of a few “words overheard”: “I have just bought a house. A very beautiful spot. Almost like Greece. The trees around the house belong to me. One of them is enormous and, in summer, will give so much shade that I’ll never suffer from the heat. I am going to build a terrace. From that terrace at night you’ll be able to see the lights of G.” Simple words overheard, from which it would seem was born the massive figure of seventy-eight-year-old Mr. Andesmas, seated in his creaking wicker chair overlooking the sea. “Words overheard”: for example the name of Rodrigo Paestra repeated by an entire town, or, more incongruously in another case, a rending scream attacking the placid peace of French provincial life, are sufficient to project two of Duras’s most pathetic characters, Maria and Anne, out of middle-class banality into a strangely macabre adventure.
Marguerite Duras is endowed with the novelist’s gift to pursue, track down, and develop the fictional potentialities of the most simple situations, and she generously shares that gift with the characters that dominate her imagination: Anne will live vicariously the passion of another woman; Maria will almost literally, from the intensity of her involvement in his story, bring Rodrigo Paestra to life before she drives him to his death; and Mr. Andesmas, for a short while, will be so obsessed by the presence of Michel Arc’s dark-haired wife that he will forget his own obsessive preoccupation with his golden-haired daughter Valérie.
Each novel concentrates on one central relationship that gives it its dramatic cogency, but it is not an isolated relationship, for implacably it draws all other relationships into its orbit, modulating them as it were. In each case, the inner and outer fluctuations of the dominant relationship draw together or tear apart the two people involved, as in a pas de deux. Dancing, like music, is a fundamental Duras theme: the maid and the salesman, Anne and Chauvin, Maria and Pierre, Mr. Andesmas and Michel Arc’s wife are all partners in rhythmical motion. But each movement involves the entire person, the entire inner fabric of the maid’s or the salesman’s life; Anne’s relation to her son, to her world; the relation of Pierre, Maria’s husband, with Claire; the relation of Valérie, Mr. Andesmas’s daughter, with Michel Arc. “He” and “she,” timidly approaching each other as in The Square; haunted by an impossible desire in Moderato Cantabile; torn apart by nascent sexual attraction in Ten-thirty on a Summer Night; confronting the end of an exclusive possession in Mr. Andesmas. Within the limitations of the narrative forms she has developed, Marguerite Duras deals in stark, basic human emotions—desire, dread, suspense, solitude, happiness, as they pertain to the one basic “ocean” of feeling for others, which is love. It is the hope, the possibility of love that the dialogue of The Square uncovers, the saving grace for two inconsequential lives. In the bar, in the small town, Anne Desbaresdes discovers the destructive, intoxicating desire to love unto death, a desire thwarted, but not before it has devastated her life. The rescue and death of Rodrigo Paestra are connected to Maria’s discovery, at ten-thirty on a summer night, of the silhouettes of Pierre and Claire in each other’s arms. What seventy-eight-year-old Mr. Andesmas discovers is “the knowledge” of his love for his eighteen-year-old daughter Valérie, and that he must relinquish her to Michel Arc.
Love, the fierceness of love, the happiness, the pain, the compelling and destructive power of love is Marguerite Duras’s essential theme, and not, as is too often stressed, solitude. Of all human bonds, none is more subtly described than the bond between parent and child. In all four stories, the child appears, untouched by the adult world, which only Valérie is about to enter. The child playing in the park, although not theirs, is benignly looked upon by maid and salesman; the first scene of Moderato Cantabile is a small gem of humor and delight—the delight of Anne in her rebellious little boy. We see Judith, happily skipping in the muddy stream of water alongside her mother, who is befuddled by alcohol; Valérie, at fifteen, caught in the glow of sunlight as she stuffs candy in her mouth. By their presence, these children illuminate the stories, somehow saving even Anne and Maria—the two women destroyed, doubly, by thwarted love and alcohol—from the macabre.
The sixth of Marguerite Duras’s novels, The Square (1955) is the first in which she experimented with a new stylized form of storytelling which, without being analytical, would bring to light certain fundamental patterns of human feeling. In the fifties, as Nathalie Sarraute ironically observed in her essay An Age of Suspicion, no sophisticated French novelist could pronounce the word “psychology” without blushing. The novel of psychological analysis, long held in high esteem in France, was considered played out. The American “behaviorist” novel, so popular in the forties, had yielded all it could; the existentialist novel, as practiced by the post-Sartrean writers, was weighted down by outworn techniques and earnest stereotypes. The fifties brought in the highly articulate “new”