“Seducing Attention. The (Extra)Ordinary in Some Contemporary British Novels.”

In this paper, I use Baudrillard's concept of seduction to read some novels written by Will Self, Nicola Barker, John Lanchester and Ali Smith. These novelists repeatedly employ seductive elements, often making them pivots of their plots. The range of their seduction-based narrative components is quite wide: there are seductresses and seducers, challenges and ritualised actions, figures of palpable absence and images of the process of disappearance, absurd and empty signs, accidents misread for intentional acts, and characters/objects that constantly elude both readers and the inhabitants of the fictional world. However, the frequent use of seductive elements in these novels often has quite adverse effects as readers' overstimulated attention wavers and is finally lost. The excessive reliance on seduction transforms seduction into a regulated, taken for granted, trivial game with no real stakes, a disenchanted strategy in which the reader's reaction is foreseen, calculated and checked in advance. In this paper I concentrate on the problem of characters' and readers' attention attracted and anaesthetised by the “defiant” and “diffuse” aspects of seduction, as present in Self's Cock and Bull (1992), Barker's Behindlings (2002) and Clear (2004), Smith's Hotel World (2001) and The Accidental (2005), Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure (1996).