Agency in Duras' The Ravishing of Lol Stein
2.
In class we talked about how in Modernist texts, thoughts do not carry the same privileged status that they carried in previous works. This is because Modernism treats thoughts not as voluntary actions, but things that merely happen. In Modernist texts, characters do not think and then act, but rather think and act. Thought and action are not necessarily linked. Perceiving thought and action this way leads to a revised understanding of agency as well. Acknowledging this tenuous relationship between thought and action, Modernist works portray agency as a problematic concept, and often suggest that agency is an illusion.
I found this class discussion helpful in my understanding of The Ravishing of Lol Stein. While reading the novel, I wondered about Lol’s passiveness in marrying John Beford, for example. At one point in the novel, Lol explains that she felt she “never had a chance to choose [her] life.” Just as the novel describes thoughts as things that happen, Lol’s life seems to be something that happened to her.
Our discussion in class did not, however, illuminate another question I had been thinking about: why Jack describes love as a form of “possess[ion]” (82), and “control” (97). Jack equates having an affair with Lol to becoming “bent to her will” and “consumed” (97). He also talks about wanting to “possess [Tatiana] completely” (82). Making love appears to consist of taking or offering one’s agency to another. How does this conception of love relate to our discussion of agency? (I understand that this is supposed to be a weekly essay, not question, but how does one write anything pertaining to Duras that doesn’t end in a question mark?)
