Moderately and melodiously: Of music education in Marguerite Duras’s Moderato Cantabile

Abstract

And hence the standoff between a piano teacher and a child starts the narrative of Marguerite Duras’s Moderato Cantabile (1958) which is apparently about instigation, quick development, and bitter failing of a transgressive passion between Anne Desbaresdes (the child’s mother and a woman of high status in bourgeois society) and Chauvin, a working class man who used to work for Anne’s husband. Central to the plot as this unconsummated affair is, it is not what commences the tale Duras tells us. Rather, the reader who steps in Duras’s fictional world engages in reading another account, that of Anne’s unnamed son, her “youthful Dionysus” (Welcher 372), in his music class. Anne’s preoccupation with her son dominates the plot, hence pointing to the boy’s role as “a foregound figure, pivotal to the plot” (Welcher 371). The child is the only one with whom Anne has been able “to experience other modes of being-immediate, unlimited, connected” (Hirsch 72). She has thrived “by communicating with him silently and harmoniously, by understanding him without reason and without words” (Hirsch 72). Social exigencies, however, dictate that the child should inevitably move toward individuation, no matter how painful this experience might be for the mother and child. Approaching the novel from a Bourdieusian perspective, we attempt to shed light on the premises on which this separation is founded by discussing how Duras has built her novelistic commentary on the bourgeois society and its methods for development of character and personality. Agreeing that “[t]he music lessons and atmosphere