PIPER MURRAY

 

"WHAT'S WRITTEN ABOVE THE SCORE":  THE POWER OF MOOD IN DURAS'S MODERATO CANTABILE

ACCORDING TO LAWRENCE GROSSBERG, one of the ways we become aware of changes in the dominant ideology is, quite simply, by recognizing that "something ‘feels’ different" (275). Affect, Grossberg suggests, deserves our critical attention, because, whether we "know" it or not, it already functions as one of the forms that our critical awareness takes. By claiming for affect and emotion the kind of social and epistemological status that has historically been reserved for ideas, Grossberg joins a growing body of critical work aimed at establishing what Alison Jaggar might call a kind of "feedback loop" between "our emotional constitution and our theorizing" (163)—between, that is, our subjective experience and the ideas and beliefs we count as knowledge about the world. Yet, in spite of this growing interest in analyzing emotion as always—but never entirely—ideologically determined, there remain some feelings, or rather some "structures" that feelings often take, that seem to elude our most critical attention.

In this essay, I argue that one of these seemingly "less social" structures of feeling is the affective experience we know as mood. Because it is usually understood as a temporary state of being, and as a self-contained one at that, mood seems to resist the kind of political and cultural reading that individual emotions call for. Yet, I argue that it is precisely for this reason, for the fact that mood is always already defined as a deviation from some more "normal" way of feeling, that the subject of mood begs for just such a reading. With this tension in mind, I begin my discussion with a brief survey of some of the most common places, from everyday discourse to psychologies of "mood management," where we find the experience of mood already defined for us as an asocial space. From there, I try to imagine an alternative understanding of mood, one that tries to account for its nature as at once a deeply personal and private experience and as a culturally determined and determining phenomenon. Toward that end, I turn from the psychology and sociology of mood to a discussion of Marguerite Duras’ Moderato Cantabile, a novel which, as its title suggests, is in many ways as much "about" mood as the clinical discourses that provide the focus of the first part of my essay. More specifically, I explore how this novel, by at once defamiliarizing and immersing us in the habitual ways we understand mood, potentially enables us to rethink, and to think through, the social and political place of mood.