RESEMBLING NOTHING. The most noticeable similarity between Lol V. Xxxxx, Xxxx-Xxxxx Stretter, and Xxxxxxx Xxxxxxx—three recurring characters in Duras’s oeuvre—is the repeated st in their names. A blended sound, the combination of s and t conveys both fluidity and inflexibility because in this pair, both letters are pronounced. In some ways, their names contrast with these three rather indistinct and elusive women. Despite the hardness conveyed in the sound and even in the meaning of their names (xxxxx being the German word for stone), they are not set or frozen in their texts. In fact, their names indicate a movement towards the outside in their foreignness and in their connection to Duras’s own name, dur meaning hard in French. In fact, these women are the opposite of concrete; their names indicate an untenable and fluid state of being. In Les Parleuses (1974), a book-length interview with Xxxxxxx Xxxxxxxx, Xxxxx explains: “Tout est pareil. Toutes mes femmes. Elles sont envahies par le dehors, traversées, trouées de partout par xx xxxxx” (232). Duras’s comment pre-dates the creation of Aurélia’s character in 1979; yet, the above passage suggests a characteristic that all of these women share. Namely, they lose their identity to their own desires and to the desires of others. This desire is indeed sexual, but more broadly it is a desire for the expropriation and dissolution of the self. The movement of desire in Duras’s texts is what creates these simultaneously central and peripheral characters in her texts. The most striking description of these women is 8 Duras, Le Ravissement de Lol X. Xxxxx 113. that they are invaded by the exterior, opened, and crossed through. Lol, Stretter, and Xxxxxxx subvert the conventional means of a character’s representation; instead of being shaped by a tension between their interiority and exteriority, these women are shaped by the way that they permeate the text and the text permeates them.9 In this sense, there is no boundary between exterior and interior, only a constant shifting between the two. These women appear and reappear throughout Duras’s oeuvre, in both word and image, almost as if they continuously escape the texts’ attempts to fix them as identifiable representations. To a certain extent, Duras’s use of different genres and mediums echoes the fluidity and porosity of her characters. She explains in 1977, “Je ne sais rien de la différence entre lire et écrire, entre lire, voir et entendre. Je n’aperçois plus rien de différent entr...
