Paroles gelées

Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, Marguerite Duras’s 1964 novel, tells the tale of Lol V. Stein, a young woman whose fiancé leaves her for another, older woman during a dance, never to return. The character remains shrouded in ambiguity throughout the novel, as another character, Jacques Hold, recounts her tale through a narrative structure interspersed with doubt, multiplicity, and fragmentation. Through a textual genetic comparison of the manuscripts from the novel with the final, published text, this paper argues that the main, eponymous, female character, “Lol”, represents an allegory of the subtractive writing process by which she is created. Simultaneous elements of creation and destruction within the character seem to echo themes of genesis and apocalypse both in the diegesis and meta-textually, suggesting the author’s preoccupation with creating ambiguity in the text. Lol’s presence and absence signals the interactions between the text and the reader, who experiences the lack of details in Lol’s character and description both through the laconic image that the narrator creates and destroys, and the fragmentary experience of the ever-elusive text.