The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras

First published:Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, 1964 (English translation, 1966)

Type of work: Antistory

Time of work: The 1950’s and early 1960’s

Locale: The resort towns of South Tahla and Town Beach

Principal Characters:

• Lol Valerie Stein, a young woman who has suffered a rejection by her fiance
• Tatiana Karl, Lol’s best friend during her school years
• Dr. Peter Breugner, Tatiana’s husband
• Michael Richardson, Lol’s fiance
• John Bedford, Lol’s husband, a musician
• Jack Hold, a friend of the Breugners, the narrator of the novel
• Anne-Marie Stretter, the wife of the French consul to Calcutta

The Novel

The plot of The Ravishing of Lol Stein focuses almost entirely on the passions of the central characters and on the narrator’s attempts to understand the history of the enigmatic Lol. Stripped of climax and denouement, the story elevates memory and sexual tension over physical action.

Lol Stein, a reserved young woman, is engaged to Michael Richardson, a well-to-do young man. At a ball, he abandons Lol for a mysterious older woman, named Anne-Marie Stretter, with whom he dances all night, and with whom he finally leaves. Lol’s friend Tatiana Karl tries to comfort her, but Lol is so shocked at this rejection that she faints and her mother has to come retrieve her. Michael later leaves for India with Anne-Marie, and Lol goes through a period of extreme depression. One day, while on a walk, she meets John Bedford, who is intrigued by her withdrawn behavior. He falls in love with her and proposes; she accepts and they move to Uxbridge.

After ten years of a relatively uneventful life, they move back to South Tahla. Lol spends most of her time setting up her house, much as she had at Uxbridge, but she begins to go out on long, meandering walks. The narrator says that he sometimes follows her on these walks, without her knowing it. While walking, Lol apparently reminisces about her tragic experience at the ball. One day she sees a pair of lovers pass and seems to recognize the woman. Later, she follows the man; he meets the woman, who turns out to be her old friend Tatiana, and the couple goes to a hotel (which Lol and Michael had frequented). Lol stays outside in a field, spying on the figures until after dark. Eventually, Lol decides to visit Tatiana, pretending not to have seen her earlier; at Tatiana’s house, she also meets Tatiana’s husband, Dr. Peter Breugner, and the man who is Tatiana’s lover, Jack Hold. At this point, the narrator reveals that he is Jack, and the reader realizes that all along the narrator has been aware of Lol.

Later, Jack and Lol declare their mutual desire, and Jack says that he will leave Tatiana. Lol wants him to keep meeting Tatiana, however, so that she can spy on the two of them as she had earlier. The attraction between Lol and Jack intensifies, but they do not consummate their love and Jack continues to meet Tatiana while Lol watches. Although he is still drawn to Tatiana, Jack begins to tire of her, and Tatiana suspects that Jack is in love with Lol, a suspicion that he manages to allay. Then one day Lol asks Jack to accompany her on a trip to Town Beach to relive the loss of her fiance. The journey there heightens their intimacy, and finally Lol and Jack visit the ballroom where the initial catastrophe occurred. Lol faces the past and overcomes her fear of the place. Realizing that it is too late to return to South Tahla, Lol and Jack decide to stay in Town Beach, and, in a hotel room, the couple finally make love. The next day, however, Jack has scheduled a rendezvous with Tatiana, and Lol insists that he keep the appointment. Tired from the journey, Lol falls asleep in the field outside the hotel.

The Characters

Although its central character is clearly Lol Stein, the novel channels the story through Jack Hold and thus filters all details and perceptions through his obsession with Lol. Unlike the omniscient narrator of most realistic fiction, Jack cannot penetrate Lol’s mind, and so he must rely on information from Tatiana, Lol’s recollections, and his own observations. He attempts to piece together all these perspectives, rejecting everything that he believes to be biased or inaccurate. He uses the present tense frequently, presenting events as they occur, with little reflection or commentary. As a result of its perspective, then, the novel tends to depict its characters reticently, with little concern for a careful detailing of motives. In general, the main characters do not seem unmotivated or arbitrary; rather, the reader must deduce the motives from the minimal information supplied.

Lol herself is at various times distant, cool, passionate, unpredictable, and tragic. Practically nothing is known of her childhood; nothing prepares the reader for Lol’s extreme depression and withdrawal when Michael Richardson has left her for another woman. Their romance is presented in matter-of-fact terms, as is Lol’s paralysis during the dance, followed by her screaming fit when her mother attempts to make her leave. Lol’s subsequent madness, her meeting with John Bedford, and her marriage are also described undramatically, and the narrator glides over her ten years of married life in Uxbridge. Lol appears to have returned to normal, though she has a tendency to impose an extreme order on her life as a compensation for her lost passion and as an escape from her suffering. When Lol spies Tatiana after ten years of absence from her birthplace, however, she begins to relive and to try to control her past by following Tatiana’s lover. For Lol, Jack seems to represent the chance to relive her affair vicariously. Lol substitutes Tatiana for herself and directs Jack to meet Tatiana so that Lol can watch their lovemaking. As a voyeur, Lol can experience passion without rejection or pain. Her return to Town Beach and the consummation of her love for Jack might mark a progress away from her fixation on the past, but the next day she expects Jack to keep his appointment with Tatiana so that she can watch from her position of security. The novel ends without a definite resolution or any indication of Lol’s independence from the past.

Equally enigmatic is the narrator, Jack Hold. His love for Lol seems genuine, yet at the same time, he continues to be attracted to Tatiana, occasionally with added fervor knowing that Lol is watching. In fact, he obeys Lol’s instructions faithfully, with no hope that he will ever be rewarded; after he has finally made love to Lol, he is happy but hardly more intimate with her. Like Lol, he is still burdened with understanding the past by his obsession with gathering and interpreting correctly her story, her life.

Tatiana Karl and the other minor characters seldom rise above types. Tatiana exemplifies a woman drawn into a relationship that offers no ultimate satisfaction, but she is also a woman jealously holding onto that relationship. The betrayed husbands, John Bedford and Peter Breugner, are shown to be somewhat complacent; Bedford is treated rather sympathetically, but the reader learns little of either man’s inner lives, such as how Bedford has reacted to his wife’s threat to leave him. Most enigmatic of all, perhaps, is Anne-Marie Stretter, the older woman with a mysterious power over Michael. She and Lol Stein appear in other works by Marguerite Duras, including Le Vice-consul (1966; The Vice-Consul, 1968). Duras has commented that the works involving Lol and Anne-Marie are open in that she is still writing their stories and allowing their characters to evolve. The lack of a formal ending for The Ravishing of Lol Stein and the novel’s refusal to categorize and analyze all the motives of its central characters maintain this openness and freedom.

Critical Context

In its lack of violence or crime, the plot of The Ravishing of Lol Stein differs from the plots of other Duras novels. The novel is typical, however, in its focus on love and memory. As noted above, several of Duras’ other works, including the novel The Vice-Consul and the play India Song: Texte-theatre-film (1973; English translation, 1976), develop in more detail some of the characters from The Ravishing of Lol Stein, particularly Ann-Marie Stretter and what happened after she went to Calcutta with Michael Richardson. These recurring characters are not limited to the time frame of a single book but exist in time, subject to change.

In addition to her concern with the themes of memory and love, Duras shares the interest of other writers of the New Novel in breaking down the boundaries of the traditional novel, especially the requirements for characters with a stable, fixed identity; plots with a clearly delineated chronology; and a consistent point of view, often embodied in an omniscient, godlike narrator. At the same time, Duras infuses her novels with a strongly felt passion and a frequently erotic tension. In The Ravishing of Lol Stein, the narrator’s quest for understanding the truth of Lol’s history finds no single satisfactory explanation, paralleling his obsessive attraction to her and her obsession with dominating the past, which fails to lead to any final erotic release. Duras’ novels, like their characters, are impelled onward in time, and memory, with all of its gaps and misreadings of the past, is ever seeking to impose a shape on that flow. In its unrelenting analysis of memory and passion and in its honesty and rigor of form, the work of Marguerite Duras constitutes a unique and significant achievement in twentieth century fiction.

Bibliography

Cismaru, Alfred. Marguerite Duras, 1971.

Kristeva, Julia. “The Pain of Sorrow in the Modern World: The Works of Marguerite Duras,” in PMLA. CII, no. 2 (1987), pp. 138-152.

Murphy, Carol J. Alienation and Absence in the Novels of Marguerite Duras, 1982.

Schulz-Jander, Eva-Maria. “Marguerite Duras’ Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein: A Woman’s Long Search for Absence,” in Symposium. XL (Fall, 1986), pp. 223-233.

Willis, Sharon. Marguerite Duras: Writing on the Body, 1987.