Moderato Cantabile III

“Anne Desbaresdes did not go in, but paused at the door of the café. Chauvin came over to her. When he reached her she turned towards the Boulevard da la Mer… Chauvin raised his head towards the dark blue sky, which was still faintly lighted, and moved closer. She did not move back (99).” I think this foreshadows the end of their relationship. Anne has never hesitated before entering the café. She has needed to drink wine upon entering the room; she has always gone in without Chauvin coming to the door to get her. Before this moment it seemed like Anne craved his attention and seemed to be more herself whenever he moves closer to her—she would move in closer. In this instance it seems like Anne is trying to create a distance between her and Chauvin.

“When he told her to leave she always obeyed. She slept under the trees, or in the fields, like… When he called her she came back. And when he told her to go, she left. To obey him like that was her way of hoping. And even when she reached the threshold she waited for him to tell her to come in (104).” This quote is talking about the dead woman and the man who killed her. I thought that this could also be applied to Chauvin and Anne. Anne stood at the threshold of the café until Chauvin met her and led her to the table. Within a few paragraphs of this revelation, Chauvin says “‘I’d like you to leave’… Chauvin remained seated, overwhelmed, no longer aware of her (104).” This demonstrates a shift in their relationship. Before he was implying that he wanted Anne to stay longer so she remained. When he tells her to leave, she gets up, but doesn’t leave until her son leads her out of the building.

“‘She will never speak again,’ she said. ‘Of course she will. Suddenly one day, one beautiful morning, she’ll meet someone she knows and won’t be able to avoid saying good morning. Or she’ll hear a child singing, it will be a lovely day and she’ll remark how lovely it is. It will begin again.’ ‘No’ (116).” This except follows a conversation Anne and Chauvin were having about the dead woman. This is interesting because it seems like Anne was still talking about the dead woman and Chauvin begins to speak about Anne. Not only is he telling her their relationship is over, he is telling her that she’s going to go through this same situation again. He’s telling her that she isn’t happy and this is the only way she knows to try to be happy. Anne isn’t thrilled at his declaration, but he doesn’t pay attention to her any longer.

Moderato Cantabile II

“Again they walked along the Boulevard de la Mer towards the breakwater. The child was quick to understand, and was not overly surprised. ‘It’s such a long way,’ he complained—then he resigned himself, and hummed a tune (77).” This demonstrates the idea that the child knows his mother better than anyone else. He realizes that she is going back to see the man again, but also realizes that he can’t do anything about it. He has no choice in this situation so he decides to make the best of it. Although he doesn’t want her to go back, he likes the water and is content to remain outside where he can avoid the awkwardness of their meetings.

“The child was in their wake. He ran to his mother, took her by the hand, and led her resolutely away. She followed him (91).” The closeness of child to his mother is clear in this quote. I think that since the beginning the child has been acting as an adult of sorts. He is verbal about not wanting to learn the piano, where as the teacher gives the impression that her other students go through the lessons without incident, whether they want to be there or not. In this situation he is claiming responsibility for making sure his mother makes it home safely. This quote almost makes it seem like this situation has occurred before.

“He ordered the wine. They drank it together avidly, but this time nothing made Anne Desbaresdes drink except her nascent desire to become intoxicated from the wine (86).” This passage makes me think that Anne realizes that what she is doing is wrong, at least on some level. It used to be that she needed the wine to steady her nerves, but now she just wants to be drunk. It seems that the only way for her to meet with Chauvin is if she has been drinking. Clearly she isn’t comfortable without the aid of alcohol.

Moderato Cantabile I

Moderato cantabile opens with a piano lesson. The teacher, a child, and Anne, his mother, are present at the lesson. This opening was interesting. When I began reading it seemed that the teacher was an authoritarian, very harsh in her words. Many times in the text, the child was referred to as an “object” sitting at the piano. As the story progresses, it is evident that she cares for him and wishes that he would work harder in lessons because he is talented. I think that her harshness is meant to appease Anne and make her realize how talented the teacher really is. Throughout the reading the child is unresponsive to his surroundings and the actions of other people. The most he does is announce that he doesn’t want to learn to play the piano and ask his mother why they are in the area where the lady was murdered. He appears to be very timid and doesn’t say or do much. Anne is the character explored the most. She seems to be fascinated that the woman was killed, going so far as to visit the bar where it happened and ask about it. When she is speaking to the man it seems as though it could be the beginning of an affair. This idea is further established when the man and the patronne are speaking of her and the patronne tells him Anne’s schedule—that she brings her son to piano lessons “once a week, on Fridays (76)” and that “she’s often out for a walk with her little boy (76).”

When the scream appeared in the first chapter, it appeared to echo the frustration that Anne and the teacher felt concerning the child’s piano lesson. The scream comes from a woman. It isn’t immediately clear that she has been murdered; just that she is in trouble of some sort. It becomes obvious that she was murdered when all the commotion begins, and the police are summoned. The next day Anne goes to the bar to learn more of the murder. While talking to a man that was at the bar during the murder she asks if “it was almost inevitable (75)?” The man replies that he thinks “he aimed at her heart, just as she asked him to (75).” It seems to me that the woman was likely fighting with her lover and made an over exaggerated statement to invoke his sympathy and understanding, but instead caused him more anger, to the point where he acted on her statement.

Under the Sand

In the film the traumatic event occurs when Jean disappears during his swim at the beach. I think it was presented this way in order for it not to be clear. Anything could have happened. Jean could have drowned. He could have gone too far out and been carried away by the current, only to be rescued and brought to another place. Another option is what his mother told Marie, that he got bored, faked his own death, and ran. If this event wasn’t so ambiguous Marie’s position concerning him wouldn’t have been so interesting.

After this event, Marie doesn’t process what happened. She’s in denial that anything happened to him. She told her close friends and family what happened to Jean, but no one else. When she talks to people about Jean, she makes vague references to him traveling a lot for work. Whenever her friend Amanda tries to ask her about how she’d doing and handling everything, Marie acts as though she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. During one of her classes, Marie notices that one of her students helped in the search for Jean and loses her concentration. When she encounters him later, she tells him that she doesn’t know what he is talking about and that she has never been to beach. The biggest advancement she makes towards his disappearance is when she looks through his desk at home. She goes through everything and finds out that he was on depression medications. She begins to worry that he may have killed himself and needs reassurance from Amanda and his mother that he didn’t.

Marie refuses to accept that Jean’s body is in the morgue because she can’t properly identify it. The medical examiner said that the body was in an advanced state of decomposition, making the body unrecognizable. Even though the police recovered a watch and swim trunks that fit the description Marie can deny that they are his. They could belong to any person and the unrecognizable body could be anyone. Marie has had delusions that Jean is at home with her ever since she returned from the summer house. The body and personal items that they’ve shown her aren’t enough to make her believe differently.

At the end of the film I thought that Marie was going to kill herself in the same manner as Virginia Woolf. She had expressed earlier in the film that she thought it was a beautiful and poetic way to die.

"Dora" II

I don’t think that Freud intentionally blends fact and fiction together. It seems more like he gets an idea into his head about the reasoning behind some aspect of her dream and twists it until he can figure out how to make it fit into his analysis. In the reading for today he makes the explanations difficult to understand. Part of this is because his ideas are much further outside what is obvious. He attempts to convince the reader that “the antithesis of ‘water’ and ‘fire’ must be at the bottom” of her dream. He spends most of section 3 talking about how they relate and what links them together in the physical world and in Dora’s dream.

One way in which he accomplishes this is through transference. It seems like Freud likes to inform her that what she says isn’t what she means. In the first section he managed to find ways to tell Dora that she was in love with her father, Herr K and Frau K. Her childhood love for her father transferred to Herr K when her father started spending time Frau K. This love then transferred to Frau K because Dora was repressing her love for Herr K.

I think that his dream analyses would be more validated if he only discussed one meaning that results from analyzing the dream. In certain parts it seems as though he is leading Dora to give him answers he wants to hear. He questions her about the jewel case because he thinks that it’s important that in the dream it is a jewel case and not jewelry. I think he overemphasized this. If there was a fire in the house why would someone try to grab individual pieces of jewelry rather than whatever was kept in the jewel case? It makes sense. He also doesn’t explain the analysis in a way that’s easy to understand. The explanation with the fire and water isn’t as straight forward as it could have been. When I had finished reading this I didn’t completely agree with his ideas.