ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the striking intertextual dimension of Duras’s writing and explores its hermeneutic implications primarily in the novel and, more briefly, in the novel’s cinematographic adaptation. It discusses how Duras’s Moderato cantabile incorporates and transforms key elements of the Tristan story. The chapter addresses how the film version fails to translate effectively Duras’s powerful restaging of human love and suffering inscribed within this pervasive mythic paradigm. Marguerite Duras attained widespread acclaim and public attention in 1960 as a result of her famous film collaboration with Alain Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour. Rooted in ancient Celtic mythology, the Tristan myth as assimilated into modern Western culture absorbed the surviving narrative verse fragments and authorial points of view of several French and German literary versions from the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Tropes associated with this myth can likewise be uncovered in both the thematic and structural composition strategies of Moderato cantabile.
