Four Novels Read Free

writers, was weighted down by outworn techniques and earnest stereotypes. The fifties brought in the highly articulate “new” novelists, all experimentally inclined. With The Square, Marguerite Duras took front rank among these new novelists. Yet, in a sense, it was with the human psyche exclusively that Marguerite Duras was concerned, with the psychological event. In her hands, the chance encounter of a girl and a man who, socially, think of themselves as “the lowest of the low,” becomes a kind of paradigm of one of the basic polarities in human experience. The dialogue form she adopted to deal with the encounter—the basic ingredient of all “romances”—recalls the stylized work of the English novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, and was particularly well-suited to Duras’s theme. The Square tends toward equilibrium, stasis, and the complete, carefully spoken paragraphs give the requisite impression of weight and balance.
    In the exchange of words, the girl and the man disclose, through the scrutiny of their own individual positions, two ways of coping with one’s position in life, two approaches to life. Immersed at first in solitude, the two speakers win their way into a differently organized sensibility, complementary to their own. Each, responding to the other’s reality, speaks the words appropriate to a fundamental role, as woman, as man. The biological and the emotional are fused, as are the individual and the basically human. The girl’s stubborn, reiterated hope—thata man will choose her to be his wife—is the simple transcription of her grasp of what will give her fulfillment. Not that her life, in its outer harsh pattern, will necessarily change. Marguerite Duras does not deal in the glossy myths of the commercially advertised “happy couple.” But the girl on the park bench knows that it is in her relation to a man that she will pass from her state as maid, as instrument or object, to her status as an individual person, free within her own sphere of existence. As for the man, his semi-understanding of her desperate need and hope is a first step out of insignificance toward a human responsibility and involvement.
    In the facts that the dialogue quietly brings to light there is no sugar-coating, no deprecation of or recoil from truth. The sordid outer limitations of the girl’s position, the insignificance of the man’s occupations are clearly stated. Yet the words hope, beauty, happiness, unhappiness, and, more persistently, “understanding” are woven into the fabric of their language without sentimentality or emotional fakery. The dialogue—like the dance so dear to the girl—is esthetically designed in terms of approach, retreat, pause, re-engagement as the two partners reach within themselves, as each opens the way toward the other. The attitudes they describe seem at first to exclude any possible involvement. The girl’s passionate refusal to come to terms with her situation is, in fact, a form of heightened dramatic suspense. The man’s indifference, solitude, and detachment is accompanied by a poetic receptivity to the present—to a gleam of sunlight in a public garden, to a passing conversation on a park bench. Hence the tension in the dialogue, its urgency, and the sense that, at the end, perhaps fleetingly, perhaps more durably—the conclusion is uncertain—an event has taken place. Between the girl and the man there has been a measure of understanding, an exchange of truth, unambiguous, untainted by self-pity, recrimination, or sentimentality. Each has approached the other with integrity. The quasi-ceremonial patterning of the dialogue in The Square creates a sense of the dignity inherent in the encounter and the exchange.
    In form and mood, Moderato Cantabile (1958) is quite different from The Square, more fluid and musical, and apparently less coherent in its development. Again the situation chosen is basic in romance, but in this instance it has a macabre melodramatic appeal: