Dalloway." The precise difference to how I think seduction should be read, based on these two theoretical texts, drives me to the private if not the totally secluded space of an incontestable interior. That is not a space of agency, of will, or of desire, and therefore is a space in which there is not only no recourse for resistance but also no need for resistance. The activity in this space is the duel, per Baudrillard in Seduction and the space is that of Roland Barthe's A Lover's Discourse.
It is one thing to say that the car in Mrs. Dalloway is a screen, a mirror; it is another thing to say that it absorbs, and something quite different to say that it seduces. The mirror absorbs, yes, but Baudrillard writes, "'I'll be your mirror' does not signify 'I'll be your reflection' but 'I'll be your deception. To seduce is to die as reality and reconstitute oneself as illusion... Narcissus too loses himself in his own illusory image; that is why he turns from his truth, and by his example turns others from their truth - and so becomes a model of love" (69). We forget too easily that seduction has nothing to do with the Good, as the reading Hagen suggests positions Woolf's images of human/technology relationships seducing one another "toward a potential and powerful
resistance" on the part of the (seduced) human agency (549). The whole point of seduction, if there is a "point" is that resistance is suspended - Narcissus does not resist the spectacle in the pool but is wholly deceived by it. Guy Dubord would have us resist this Society of the Spectacle, T - O - F- E, or at least sound the image which "creates a condition of possibility from which one can respond creatively and ethically to changed and changing worlds—" (Hagen, 549). Seduction, for me, bears little attachments to ethics of any sort, which depends on discerning a truth of the image even if with an experimental method as Hagen reads in Woolf. Not that it is a bad idea at all, I just am dissatisfied in calling it "seduction," and I think it is on other grounds that Woolf breaks onto seduction in Mrs. Dalloway.
What I am calling seduction, what I see in Baudrillard, is deceptive but not in the way T-O-F-E is deceptive in the society of the spectacle, which absorbs our subjectivity and threatens to efface them. Yet at the same time seduction does not create a complex of subjectivity (which still necessitates a truth) through the act of absorption (as in the image of the car) and therefore does not play its hand from a lack or a desire which the crowds possess. Seduction is not desire to control or even the desire to deceive, it is the surface of illusion that deceives based in fascination (which cannot be confused with desire). "What does the car want?" - a useful question in its own right, but an irrelevant question if we want to think of seduction.
The passage that motivates me to explore an other possibility for Woolf and seduction more closely aligned with Baudrillard's writing is the duel carried out between Clarissa Dalloway and Peter Walsh. Seduction has everything to do with duel/dual relations, one and another seducing and being seduced, but not in the registers of desire but the registers of a game (the duel). Move and counter move reversing the conversation. Ironic turning of the subject and increase of the stakes of the game. Woolf might characterize this encounter as a duel in the image of the pen knife. Its sudden initiation is predicated on a wager: "she will see me" as Peter challenges Clarissa to see him. The initiation is the beginning of a duel in which both players wager themselves (their reputation, their desires, their past...) and continue upping the ante with each challenge. This is a seductive duel because it turns each character away from their "truth" in that Clarissa's "real" desires for Peter disappear in the course of challenging Peter throughout the conversation. In seduction one does not reveal one's true feelings (nor would an image do so), but rather sacrifices desire in the contest of desire. Peter "proves" his ardent love for the wife of the army major but the truth of which is never the goal. His goal is to out wager Clarissa, to defeat her in a battle of love - Narcissus and image-Narcissus trading glances, amplifying fascination, until one falls into the other. Woolf shows that in this engagement between Clarissa and Peter, despite Peter's "vulgar" victory, it ends in disappearance.
This is, I think, what Woolf might see as the "space" of seduction. Clarissa might say at the end of her conversation "I am engulfed" (Barthes, 11). "[A]ll in a clap it came over her, If I had married him, this gaiety would have been mine all day! / It was all over for her" (Woolf, 46). She responds to Peter's challenge by disappearing (ultimately a "victory" since Peter cannot reciprocate the challenge given by Clarissa). Woolf introduces a reminiscence on Leith Hill where in Clarissa disappears as the lover disappears: "the lover is not to be reduced to a simple symptomal subject, but rather that we hear in his voice what is 'unreal,' i.e. intractable' (Barthes, 3). Her unreality at this point, ultimately and irreducibly interior, occurs on the private site, "the site of someone speaking within himself, amorously..." (3). This retreat is "retreat" into an unreality of memory as an amorous discourse with oneself. Woolf chooses this place, Leith Hill, to highlight both the "lover's discourse" which Clarissa is seduced in to as well as the seductive duel which seduced her into this discourse outside discourse.
Leith Hill is the the site of a battle (8th century?), and this connection with English history would no doubt resonate with the back and forth, the exposed weapon, the military association with India. The location might serve as a vehicle for Clarissa's lover's discourse within seduction as a duel. Why else might she be reminded of Leith Hill specifically? The view, of course, is perhaps the most obvious reason from a modern perspective. Leith Hill overlooks a vast Surrey landscape from an uncommon height for Southern England. The perspective is removed, "how distant the view had looked," and therefore a perfect image of the lover's discourse already within the lover's discourse of memory. Yet the perspective from Leith Hill also suggests that Clarissa's thoughts are ranging, or better yet, a drift, set a drift by the exchange with Peter, now alone up in the tower of memory overlooking her past, while still present in the room with Peter. A third possibility for Leith Hill could be that it is also the grave of its owner, his empty residence containing "the dust of fallen plaster and the litter of birds' nests..." The association with death and disappearance further reinforces the idea of Clarissa's removal in response to Peter's challenge(s) but also the figures of space in respect to the lover's discourse, which has no object any longer, which has disappeared from its object like Clarissa who is, she thinks, forever alone.
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| View to the East (?) from Leith Hill, 2003 |
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