A Shoal of Women

By Signe Lindskov Hansen
The seducer is an old favourite as a literary figure: Don Juan, Casanova, and, not least, Søren Kierkegaard’s legendary Johannes the Seducer, whose ‘diary’ we can read in Either-Or, his masterpiece of 1843. Kierkegaard’s seducer is an aesthetic, who takes pleasure not merely from the seduction but also from his interesting consciousness of it – and as such he disappears into a cabinet of mirrors in his reflections about his Cordelia, himself and the inflated and quivering tension between hunter and prey.
    
In Priapus (‘Priapus’), a novel by the Danish-American writer, Mathilde Walter Clark, which is given the far from modest sub-title ‘a novel of seduction’, the pressure has already escaped the balloon in the first few pages. One afternoon the seducer, the New York photographer, Priapus Cloakfire, returns home to his wife, the successful writer, Faye, who is sitting with her back to him, naked, writing, with a view across the sea. But he is not in a position to love her unconditionally. A distance exists between them. And without talking to her, he takes his leave, out into town, where the first woman he meets is called Cordelia – a transparent reference to the parchment-like victim of seduction in Kierkegaard.

The language flows easily in the writing of Mathilde Walter Clark, who has studied philosophy at Roskilde and New York Universities and who is known in Denmark as a columnist. Seen with the bifocal and critical eyes of a woman, Walter Clark allows her seducer to be put to the test as a morally responsible husband, but the attempt to negotiate the field of ethics fails. Priapus becomes neither a Don Juan, a Casanova nor a Johannes Seducer, for the narrative voice has a pronounced feminine tone, which teases, prods, spits, throwing comments and ironies at the main character. His power and masculinity wither when he moves out of the organic shoal of women. As he moves away from the melée of women, who may have names but nevertheless lack identity, and approaches the woman, he fades. The light of day does not befit a dandy.

Priapus is an existential novel of satire, a tragic-comical narrative about sexuality and the poles of love, which deals as much with physical attraction and repulsion as with emotional union and failure. And in this way, with a critical twinkle in her eye, Walter Clark is making a comment about topsy-turvy contemporary delusions of the perfect relationship, the sublime sex life and the meditative balance of body and soul. Dream on! ‘Marry, you will regret it; don’t marry, you will regret that, too; to marry or not to marry, you will regret both of them,’ as Kierkegaard writes in Diapsalmata. What characterises Priapus is precisely that emotional capriciousness and that ambivalent surrender.

Translated by John Mason

Dansk version