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Introduction Fiction and the Poetics of Flirtation [S]he had not, then, eloped in order to be married to Mr. Stephen Guest—at all events, Mr. Stephen Guest had not married her—which came to the same thing, so far as her culpability was concerned. We judge others according to results; how else?—not knowing the processes by which results are arrived at. —George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860) Was it love, she wondered, or a mere fortuitous combination of happy thoughts and sensations? —Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905) taxonomies, archetypes, myths “All the great European love stories take place in an extra-coital setting,” observes the narrator of Milan Kundera’s novel Immortality (1991), noting the stories of Madame de Lafayette’s Princess of Clèves, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul and Virginia, Eugène Fromentin’s Dominique, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Knut Hamsun’s Victoria, Romain Rolland’s Peter and Luce, and Nastassia Fillipovna’s unrequited love for Prince Myshkin in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Concludes Kundera’s speaker: “The love of Anna Karenina and Vronski ended with their first sexual encounter , after which it became nothing but a story of its own disintegration .”1 As Immortality implies, it was not the rebellious nature of Anna and Vronski’s love that dooms this couple but the notion that the consummation of their desires might placate their anguish. This is why, for Kundera’s mournful speaker, immortality does not adhere to romantic passion per se but rather to passion’s calculated postponement. What Kundera’s novel in part addresses is one of the great, often noted paradoxes of realist fiction, which is that its task has been simultaneously to encourage and expose the illusion that desire is attainable. To the extent that desire feeds on illusions, it is isomorphic with the enterprise of fiction itself, in which the satisfaction of characters must be deferred, as their fantasies of love are sustained, in order for narrativity to occur. The most articulate exponent of this view is Peter Brooks, who explains that this seemingly irreconcilable “double logic” is the “peculiar work of understanding that narrative is required to perform.” For Brooks, it is the modern detective story, in which the plot of the inquest of a crime is made necessary by the crime itself, that most overtly displays this special logic.2 Writing of the novel of realism, Leo Bersani has defined desire in analogous terms as a “hallucinated satisfaction in the absence of the source of satisfaction,” a definition that strikes at the heart of the necessarily delusional nature of erotic desire as well as the experience of reading a work of fiction.3 There are, nonetheless, as many forms of desire as there are novels to narrate them, and it is fair to ask what happens when desire is not “repressed ” or “hallucinated” but deliberately deferred (although not denied) as it is self-consciously and playfully managed. What occurs when desire refuses to follow the libidinal model, which is to say, a paradigm stressing the hydraulics of repression and liberation? What happens when eros is neither completely submerged nor fully expressed but suspended in a series of deferrals? The activity that most successfully fosters this dynamic is what I have chosen to term flirtation. An acknowledgment of the dangers of romantic ardor, flirtatious eros is a recognition that untrammeled and hallucinatory, desire frustrates reason and creates havoc. Desire, particularly as opposed to romantic love, has been the subject of intense, widespread critical scrutiny in the last twenty years in the works of postmodern Continental theorists and those writing in an Anglo-American context. Roland Barthes’s strict distinction between desire as opposed to romantic love has been extremely influential. Thus Robert Polhemus, implicitly expanding on Barthes’s distinction, has used the term “erotic faith” to describe romantic love, noting that throughout European culture narratives of love have served to imagine “forms of faith that would augment or substitute for orthodox religious visions.”4 Critics addressing the strictly formal dimensions of literary texts, as well as theorists seeking a more politically pronounced emphasis on how fiction operates in a matrix of cultural determinants, have turned to desire as a crucial locus of meaning. René Girard’s exploration of “triangular desire”; Barthes’s intensely personal endorsement of “bliss” and “pleasure”; the hymeneal “dissemination” evoked by Jacques Derrida; Julia Kristeva’s semiotic, signifying stress on process; Leo Bersani’s focus...

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