Seductions in Narrative: Subjectivity and Desire in the Works of ...

The political implications of such a feeling should not be dismissed; after all, once Lancelot becomes nameless and therefore status-less through the effects of desire, it is presumed that an alternative location where his romance with Guinevere can be carried out might be produced, but that is another story.

If one thing remains certain about Lancelot’s desire, it is that it is not repressed. Contrary to what is traditionally believed, Foucault reminds us that “one should not think that desire is repressed, for the simple reason that the law is what constitutes both desire and the lack on which it is predicated” (History 81). Therefore, desire may be explored “behind the back of the Enlightenment…not in secret, but in a region which can remain unacknowledged in the hard, rational, analytical world” (Belsey, Desire 11). For Lancelot, this region could probably be envisaged away from Camelot; for others, narrative fiction remains the supreme location to explore and articulate desire, and Psychoanalysis stands as the theory to address the question of desire while leaving its truth “radically in question” (Belsey, Desire 42).

Both Heroes and Villains and Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit are examples of locations where the desire of the protagonists can be inscribed and articulated. Marianne, the protagonist of Carter’s text, imagines a brave new world where her projection of desire can be effected in the figure of the outlandish demon lover, Jewel. Jeanette, the protagonist of Winterson’s tale, busies herself with daily escapes from a grim reality by constructing an alternative location of fantasy and fairy tale where her desire is articulated and celebrated. The two texts, however, leave the truth of desire “radically in question” (Belsey, Desire 42) by refusing to reach conclusions as to the presumed final effects that desire may have on the subject. The lack of closure of the two texts, their “undecidability” (Belsey, Desire 14), sustains in turn the desire of the reader.

The speechlessness of desire is caused, according to Lacan, by its location in the unconscious and its relation to a lack. A perpetual metonym, desire can only be articulated through the substitutions and permutations by which the unconscious is organised, but it can never be made completely present. The presence/absence of desire is articulated through the intricate process inaugurated by seduction: