Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein Reading Order

Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (The Ravishing of Lol Stein, 1964) by Marguerite Duras is the most psychologically complex of her major novels and the work that Lacan described as demonstrating a more profound understanding of the structure of desire than psychoanalysis had been able to formulate. Lol V. Stein is a woman from the provincial town of S. Tahla who, at nineteen, watched at a ball as her fiancé Michael Richardson abandoned her in favour of another woman, Anne-Marie Stretter. This event — which Lol experiences as a kind of rapture, an annihilation of the self that is simultaneously traumatic and ecstatic — is the novel's fixed point around which everything else revolves. Ten years later, married and living in another town, Lol returns to S. Tahla and begins to stalk Jack Hold, a man who is the lover of her childhood friend Tatiana Karl, watching them from the rye field behind a hotel where they conduct their affair. The novel is narrated by Jack Hold, who is also partially a character of Lol's own construction — his narrative is unreliable in ways that the reader gradually begins to perceive, and the question of who is ravishing whom, who is watching whom, and who is being destroyed by whose desire is left permanently open. The novel is Duras's most complete exploration of what she calls the 'hole' that desire creates in the self — the gap between the subject and the experience that cannot be filled.