On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature

[Dave Monroe]

>From Gilles Deleuze and Clare Parnet, Dialogues (Trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Columbia UP, 1977), Ch. 2, "On the
Superiority of Anglo-American Literature," pp. 36-76 ...

"To leave, to escape, is to trace a line....  The line of flight is a
deterritorialization.  The French do not understand this very well....
they think that fleeing means making an exit from the world, mysticism
or art,....  But to flee is not to renounce action ....  To fly is to
trace a line, lines, a whole cartography.  One only discovers worlds
through a long, broken flight.  Anglo-American literature constantly
shows these ruptures ...." (p. 36)

"American literature operates according to geographical lines: the
flight towards the West, the discovery that the true East is in the
West, the sense of the frontiers as something to cross, to push back,
to go beyond...." (p. 37)

   "To flee is not exactly to travel, or even to move....  flights can
happen on the spot, in motionless travel.  Toynbee shows that nomads
in the strict, geographical sense are neither migrants nor travellers,
but, on the contrary, those who do not move, those who cling to the
steppe, who are immobile with big strides, following a line of flight
on the spot ..." (pp. 37-8)

"There is always a way of reterritorializing oneself in the voyage: it
is always one's father or mother (or worse) that one finds again on
the voyage." (p. 38)

"In fleeing the eternal mother-father, will we not rediscover all the
Oedipal structures on the line of flight?  In fleeing fascism, we
rediscover fascist coagulations on the line of flight.  In fleeing
everything, how can we avoid reconstituting both our country of origin
and our formations of power, our intoxicants, our psychoanalyses and
our mummies and daddies?  How can one avoid the line of flight's
becoming identical with a pure and simple movement of self destruction
..." (p. 38)

"The English and the Americans do not have the same way of beginning
again as the French.  French beginning again is the tabula rasa, the
search for a primary certainty as a point of origin, always the point
of anchor.  The other way of beginning again, on the other hand, is to
take up the interrupted line, to join a segment to the broken line
....  It is never the beginning or the end that are interesting; the
beginning and the end are points.  What is interesting is the middle.
The English zero is always in the middle.  Bottlenecks are always in
the middle.  Being in the middle of a line is the most uncomfortable
position.  One begins again through the middle The French think in
terms of trees too much: the tree of knowledge, points of
arborescence, the alpha and omega, the roots and the pinnacle.  Trees
are the opposite of grass.  Not only does grass grow in the middle of
things but it grows itself through the middle.  This is the English or
American problem.  Grass has its line of flight and does not take root
..." (p. 39)

   "Take as an extreme example the case of Thomas Hardy: his
characters are not people or subjects, they are collections of
intensive sensations ..." (pp. 39-40)

   "A flight is a sort of delirium.  To be delirious [delirer] is
exactly to go off the rails (as in deconner--to say absurd things,
etc.).  There is something demonaical or demonic in a line of flight.
Demons are different from gods, because gods have fixed attributes,
properties and functions, territories and codes: they have to do with
rails, boundaries and surveys.  What demons do is jump across
intervals, and from one interval to another.  'Which demon has leapt
the longest leap?' asks Oedipus." (p. 40)

"There is always betrayal in a line of flight....  We betray the fixed
powers which try to hold us back .... The movement of betrayal has
been defined as a double turning-away: man turns his face away from
God, who also turns his face away from man...." (p. 40)

   "It is possible that writing has an intrinsic relationship with
lines of flight...." (p. 41)

"... a writer cannot wish to be 'known', recognized....  Writing has
no other end than to lose one's face ....  To be unknown at last, as
are very few people, is to betray.  It is very difficult not to be
known at all, even by one's landlady or in one's neighborhood ....  At
the end of Tender is the Night, the hero literally dissipates himself
geographically...." (p. 45)

"... the face ... is a social production ....  Our societies need to
produce the face....  Miller's problem (like Lawrence's): how to
unmake the face....  How to become imperceptible?" (pp. 45-6)

"The great secret is when you no longer have anything to hide, and
thus when no one can grasp you." (p. 46)

http://www.cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14134-5/dialogues-ii

http://books.google.com/books?id=8GJlkhNCcy8C