“The Ravishing of Lol Stein” by Marguerite Duras (pseudonym): Protagonist has issues of identity, memory, lying, seen in multiple personality.

The title character is a married woman with three children whose family moves back to the city where, ten years before, she had been suddenly and publicly jilted by her fiancé.

She has been living a more or less normal life these past ten years, but is said to have been mentally ill ten years ago as a result of that traumatic experience. People sometimes worry that she is not completely well.

The diagnosis and treatment (if any) of her past mental illness are never specified. To a large extent, the novel is the story of Lol’s symptoms.

“Lol…gave the impression of…putting up with a person she knew she was supposed to be but whom she forgot about at the slightest occasion…part of her seemed always to be evading you…” (1, p. 3).

“No matter where she is, it is as though Lol is there for the first time” (1, p. 33). Sometimes she remembers, sometimes she doesn’t, probably depending on which personality is in control.

The back cover of the novel indirectly refers to the fact that Lol repeatedly stations herself outside a hotel where she can see two lovers in a window, calling her “a voyeur.” But the narrator, who is one of the two lovers in the window, and who later is in a relationship with Lol, has this interpretation: “The idea of what she is doing never crosses her mind…she is there without the faintest idea of being there, that, if she were asked, she would simply say that she was resting” (1, p. 53). That is, she probably has or has not, this or that motive, depending on which personality is in control.

Tatiana says that Lol “seemed only to have the vaguest recollection, virtually no memory at all, of their school days together” (1, p. 69). But other times Lol does remember things, probably depending on which personality is in control.

Presumably, Lol had a nervous breakdown as a result of being jilted by her fiancé at a ball ten years ago, but “Tatiana did not believe that Lol Stein’s insanity could be traced back solely to that ball, she traced its origins back further, further in Lol’s life, back to her youth…” (1, p. 71). Multiple personality begins in childhood.

About that supposedly traumatic jilt ten years ago, Lol asks, “Did I suffer? Tell me, Tatiana, I’ve never really known” (1, p. 90). However, on another occasion, Lol implies that being jilted was not traumatic, because, “from the first moment that woman walked into the the room, I ceased to love my fiancé” (1, p. 126). Although Lol’s behavior had evidently been quite disturbed at the time, what she remembers or how it affected her probably differed among her various personalities.

The narrator wonders if there are “twenty women all bearing the name of Lol?” (1, pp. 95-96).

The narrator says, “I have the feeling that I am witnessing with my own eyes some personal and capital manner of lying, an immense yet strictly limited field of lies” like she is living “in a dream so compelling that it has escaped her, and she is unaware she ever had it” (1, pp. 96-97). Search “lying” in this blog. It is a recurrent issue in multiple personality, because each personality has its own memories and view of reality, so that people who do not know about the multiple personality think that the person is simply lying.

Lol makes third-person self-reference: “Lol has always returned home safe and sound…” (1, p. 126). Presumably, an alternate personality not named Lol is talking about Lol.

Although Lol has been in a developing and close relationship with the narrator, he says that recently “She doesn’t recognize me, hasn’t the faintest idea who I am any more” (1, p. 178). Some personalities know him or like him, but others do not.

Comment

Lol is not described as abusing drugs or alcohol, or as having brain disease, so her memory and identity problems are probably attributable to multiple personality (clinical version, with distress and dysfunction). No other psychological condition has these kinds of memory and identity problems.

1. Marguerite Duras. The Ravishing of Lol Stein. Translated from the French by Richard Seaver. New York, Pantheon Books, 1964/66.