The Frame

On Marguerite Duras, a paraphrase

Something I heard in class tonight, paraphrasing my prof.,  Francois Camoin:

‘It’s like when someone tells you about a dream they just had. It’s the most boring thing someone could possibly say. They go on telling you about how their dad was a dog, but he could speak, etc. But it wasn’t your dream so you don’t know what those things mean. You want to tell them to stop talking. The problem is that they take out all of the mystery and the ambiguity, but those are what make it interesting—interesting, unless it isn’t your dream, of course.

What makes Duras so great is that she makes it your dream. She maintains those mysteries, the complexities.’

Now reading: Marguerite Duras The War

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?)

Words and Facts in Duras' The Ravishing of Lol Stein

1.

One of the most interesting pages, for me, in The Ravishing of Lol Stein is page 106. On this page, Jack and Lol speak for the first time in privacy, and Lol reveals herself to have watched Jack and Tatiana make love. Lol, describing the scene between Jack and Tatiana, states that “Tatiana was naked beneath her dark hair.” This sentence affects Jack profoundly. He describes it “explod[ing],” and “blow[ing] the meaning apart.” He describes himself as “no longer understanding that it means nothing.”

I am interested in Jack’s reaction to this sentence because in some ways it resembles my own reaction to this novel. At times while reading the novel, I “failed to understand” the sentences—specifically the sentences where Tatiana or Lol seemed to suddenly appear in Jack’s presence, even though these appearances do not make logical sense within the novel. Such sentences “blow the meaning apart,” on a logical level, but also suggest something profound: that a linear narrative cannot capture memory, identity or reality.

I find it interesting how the articulation of Tatiana’s nakedness seems to change the “fact” of her nakedness. Jack is taken aback by the “intensity of the sentence,” not by the intensity of the fact. The words have the effect of “transform[ing]” the fact; the words place Tatiana “between Lol Stein and [Jack].” Somehow the words have altered the fact, as Jack describes, “the fact no longer contains the fact.”

Before I write something stupid (if I haven’t done so already), I need to admit that I don’t know what to make of this last line. Like Jack, I find this sentence “impossible to make any sense whatsoever out of it.” If I had to, I would guess that he is getting at the point that words fail to capture meaning; words do not function as neat and tidy signifiers, but become their own “facts.” Lol is not merely describing Tatiana naked, but bringing her “between” them; by describing Tatiana naked, Lol has initiated a new relationship between the three of them. If Jack is suggesting that words are not merely signifiers but their own facts, that would explain the baffling sentences throughout the novel; I am expecting them to signify something, to be representational, but they are merely facts in themselves that may not fit neatly with the other facts.