Becoming-Imperceptible: Notes on 'The Woman Who Wanted to Disappear'

I.

The last piece of fictional writing by D. H. Lawrence was an untitled fragment of text scribbled in a notebook during the final year of his life and unpublished until 2005, when it was transcribed and added as an appendix to the Cambridge edition of The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories.  

In the story - called by the Cambridge editors 'The Woman Who Wanted to Disappear' - an unnamed woman announces to her husband that she would like to vanish for a year and intends to leave him and her two young children the following day, taking only a small suitcase with her. She makes it clear that she wants no one to come sniffing after her when she's gone, whatever the circumstances.  

Seeing as she has already made arrangements with her lawyer and the bank - and knowing that it would be pointless objecting to her planned disappearance - the husband, Henry, says nothing and simply marks the date of her anticipated reappearance the following year in red pencil on the calendar. 

It wasn't so much that she wanted to get away from him and the children; rather, she wanted to get completely away from herself and find a place in which she might feel at peace - and also of some use to somebody else, for her own superfluity was troubling to her: 

"If only she could get away from herself, and be different, somehow! Oh, be different! come to rest somewhere! She could never come to rest, never for a second." 

And so, this wealthy, restless woman departs and, after a brief stay in an expensive mountain top hotel, she buys a car and drives into the surrounding dark forest:  

"It reminded her of her childhood - but it was not a disappearance. Hundreds of cars were on the road, and all the hotels were rather full. A mistake, really, to start romantically disappearing at the end of July, when everywhere is overcrowded. Somehow she didn't want to disappear into a crowd, though that is supposed to be the easiest thing to disappear into. She wanted to disappear into some rare and magical place where she could become her own rare and magical self - her true self, that nobody knew, least of all she herself."

I suppose many people have felt this way; have desperately sought out some kind of rare and magical place in which they might both disappear and become who they are. But, of course, to discover some kind of immanent utopia involves leaving the main road and abandoning the safety of one's vehicle and that requires a certain reckless courage that is increasingly rare today.  

II. 

Although - as far as I recall - they don't talk of disappearing as such, Deleuze and Guattari do suggest that the ultimate aim of all becoming is becoming-imperceptible, i.e. to reach the point at which individuals can no longer be identified in human terms, but only acknowledged as a chaos of non-subjectified effects (or what Lawrence terms vibrations). 

In other words, this is to recognise that our haecceity is entirely composed at a molecular level of impersonal elements and can only be mapped in schizoanalytic terms of "longitude and latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses between unformed particles".  

Becoming-imperceptible marks an evanescence of the self. It means arriving at that fourth dimensional space that is now/here, rather than no/where, described by Lawrence in an essay on love as "the realm of calm delight [...] the other-kingdom of bliss". It is here we accomplish our perfection, even as we stage our disappearance.  

See:

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Woman Who Wanted to Disappear', The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Appendix V, pp. 251-55.  

D. H. Lawrence, 'Love', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 9. 

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The Athlone Press, 1996), p. 262.