Not "novel of ideas" but what was blowing in the Wind

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

On Mon, Dec 14, 2015 at 6:41 PM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>     I like the thread that considers how America produced a different
>     fiction from Europe.
>
>

"Fortunately Ralph Wayvone's library happened to include a copy of the 
indispensable /Italian Wedding Fake Book/, by Deleuze & Guattari, which 
Gelsomina, the bride, to protect her wedding from such possible unlucky 
omens as blood on the wedding cake, had the presence of mind to slip 
indoors and bring back out to Billy Barf's attention." (Vineland, p. 97)

 From Ronald Bogue: On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature, 
Deleuze Studies. Volume 7, Issue 3, pp. 302-318, August 2013.

 > ... In the course of his career, Deleuze makes reference to 
thirty-eight American writers, most merely in passing. H. P. Lovecraft 
and Henry Miller are quoted several times in the two volumes of 
/Capitalism and Schizophrenia/, while James's ‘In the Cage’ and 
Fitzgerald's ‘The Crack-Up’ are given close, if compact, readings in 
Plateau Eight of /A Thousand Plateaus/. Deleuze includes a penetrating, 
brief essay on Whitman in /Essays Critical and Clinical/. But for 
Deleuze it is Melville who is the most important – indeed, one might 
say, the quintessential – American writer. Melville's pre-eminence is 
perhaps not immediately apparent in /Dialogues/, but it is worth 
observing that Deleuze begins his meditation on Anglo-American 
literature by making reference to D. H. Lawrence's salute to Melville's 
genius. Section Two's opening words are, ‘To leave, to escape, is to 
trace a line. The highest aim of literature, according to Lawrence, is 
‘To get away. To get away, out! […] To cross a horizon into another life 
[…] So [Melville] finds himself in the middle of the Pacific. Truly over 
a horizon’’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2002: 36; translation modified). 
Melville's primary function in /Dialogues/ is to provide an example of 
becoming-animal, specifically in the figure of Ahab in his 
becoming-whale. (We might note that Ahab's becoming-whale is referenced 
seven times in the becomings plateau of /A Thousand Plateaus/, four 
times as an illustration of percepts and affects in /What Is 
Philosophy?/, and once in /Negotiations/ in relation to Foucault's 
thought as a process of ‘crossing the line’ to the ‘Outside’ [Deleuze 
1995: 111].) It is Ahab's becoming-whale that draws him into a line 
leading beyond the horizon, toward an open Outside. It is also through 
Ahab's becoming-whale that Deleuze brings together the themes of 
betrayal, choice and the demonic in /Dialogues/, in that Ahab's crime is 
that ‘of having chosen Moby-Dick, the white whale, instead of obeying 
the law of the group of fishermen, according to which all whales are fit 
to hunt. In that lies Ahab's demonic element, his treason, his 
relationship with Leviathan – this choice of object which engages him in 
a becoming-whale himself’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2002: 42).

Melville's full significance for Deleuze, however, is only revealed in 
‘Bartleby; or, The Formula’, one of Deleuze's finest pieces of literary 
criticism. Here, Deleuze reiterates /Dialogue/'s points about Ahab's 
becoming-whale and Melville's enduring effort to trace a line beyond the 
horizon to an Outside, but he also connects Melville to the themes of 
minor literature – the deterritorialisation of language, the immediate 
engagement of the social and political, the activation of collective 
assemblages of enunciation – while delineating in Melville an American 
political ideal based on pragmatism, democracy and sympathy. In 
/Dialogues/, minor literature's deterritorialisation of language is 
treated in terms of making language stutter, but Deleuze offers no 
concrete literary instances of this practice. Instead, he concentrates 
on the English language itself as both a repressive force of global 
homogenisation and a medium open to multiple internal deformations. 
These characteristics he finds especially true of American English. ‘The 
American language’, he says,

bases its despotic official pretensions, its majoritarian claim to 
hegemony, only on its extraordinary capacity for being twisted and 
shattered and for secretly putting itself in the service of minorities 
who work it from inside, involuntarily, unofficially, nibbling away at 
that hegemony as it extends itself: the reverse of power. (Deleuze and 
Parnet: 58)

In the essay ‘Bartleby’, unlike /Dialogues/, Deleuze offers a specific 
instance of stuttering in literature – Bartleby's ‘I prefer not to’ –  
and submits it to an exhaustive analysis. Bartleby's ‘formula’ is an 
essence of stammering, a simple, short phrase whose iteration induces a 
cascade of deterritorialisations. Bartleby himself belongs to no ethnic 
minority, but his deployment of his formula is paradigmatic of minor 
literature's deterritorialising usage of language.

In ‘Bartleby’, then, Melville shows himself to be an exemplary 
practitioner of minor literature's deterritorialisation of language, but 
Melville's treatment of Bartleby, Deleuze shows, is connected to broader 
themes that echo throughout Melville's works. In Chapter 44 of /The 
Confidence-Man/, Melville reflects on characters in fiction, 
differentiating ‘new, singular, striking, odd, eccentric, and all sorts 
of entertaining and instructive characters’ from what he calls 
‘originals’. The original character, says Melville,

is like a revolving Drummond light, raying away from itself all round it 
 – everything is lit by it, everything starts up to it (mark how it is 
with Hamlet), so that, in certain minds, there follows upon the adequate 
conception of such a character, an effect, in its way, akin to that 
which in Genesis attends upon the beginning of things. (Melville 1964: 261)

No work of fiction may contain more than one Original, according to 
Melville (though Deleuze finds two in /Billy Budd/). Deleuze identifies 
two types of Originals in Melville: monomaniacs (Ahab in /Moby-Dick/, 
Claggart in /Billy Budd/, Babo in ‘Benito Cereno’) and hypochondriacs 
(Cereno and Billy Budd, but ‘above all Bartleby’ [Deleuze 1997: 80]). 
These two types, ‘/monomaniacs/ and /hypochondriacs/, demons and angels, 
torturers and victims, the Swift and the Slow, the Thundering and the 
Petrified’ (78–9), belong to a ‘terrible supersensible Primary Nature, 
original and oceanic, which, knowing no Law, pursues its own irrational 
aim through them’ (79). By contrast, non-Originals, that is, ordinary 
humans, belong to sensible, rational Secondary Nature of Law. The 
‘biggest problem haunting Melville's oeuvre’, says Deleuze, ‘no doubt 
[…] lies in reconciling the two originals, /but thereby also in 
reconciling the original with secondary humanity/, the inhuman with the 
human’ (84).

Melville envisions that reconciliation in the annihilation of all father 
figures and the creation of a society of blood brothers and blood 
sisters. ‘The American is one who is freed from the English paternal 
function’, says Deleuze, and in founding a new world society, the 
American vocation ‘was not to reconstitute an ‘old State secret,’ a 
nation, a family, a heritage, or a father’, but ‘to constitute a 
universe, a society of brothers, a federation of men and goods, a 
community of anarchist individuals’  (Deleuze 1997: 85). Deleuze links 
the formation of such a universe to American pragmatism, which he 
regards as less a ‘summary philosophical theory fabricated by Americans’ 
than ‘an attempt to transform the world, to think a new world or new man 
insofar as /they create themselves/’ (86). (In this regard, Deleuze 
views Melville as a pragmatist /avant la lettre./) Pragmatism affirms 
the world as ‘/in process, an archipelago/’ (86), and the social order 
it advocates is one of ‘islands and straits, immobile points and sinuous 
lines’ (86). Deleuze likens this order to a wall of stacked stones with 
no mortar, ‘a wall of uncemented stones, where every element has a value 
in itself but also in relation to others’ (86). This order is ‘an 
infinite patchwork with multiple joinings’, ‘a Harlequin's coat’ (86). 
And what holds it together is trust, hope and belief – not belief in a 
world to come, but belief in this world and its possibilities.

In pursuing a politics of the archipelago and belief in this world, 
American pragmatism faces a dual problem: that of overcoming all the 
particular differences among individuals that breed mistrust, but 
without succumbing to a fusion of souls in a grand Whole of philanthropy 
and charity. The solution is to counter particularities with 
singularities, and to replace charity with sympathy. Singularities are 
becomings, apersonal intensities that retain specificity without taking 
on a conventional identity. In their becomings, men and women discover 
what Melville calls a ‘democratic dignity’, a radical equality of human 
beings without regard to their particularities, yet one that recognises 
each person's singularities. Such becomings, as social phenomena, give 
rise to collective intensities, which Deleuze identifies with ‘sympathy’ 
as opposed to ‘charity’. Here Deleuze is following Lawrence in his 
reading of Whitman and Melville as advocates of what Lawrence describes 
as ‘all the subtle sympathizings of the incalculable soul, from the 
bitterest hate to passionate love’ (quoted in Deleuze 1997: 87). Both 
singularities and sympathy are produced only when the individual

takes to the open road (or the open sea) with its body, when it leads a 
life without seeking salvation, when it embarks upon its incarnate 
voyage, without any particular aim, and then encounters other voyagers, 
whom it recognizes by their sound. (Deleuze 1997: 87)

The open road is an American morality of sympathy, one ‘with no other 
aim’ than the journey, ‘open to all contacts, never trying to save other 
souls, […] with freedom as its sole accomplishment, always ready to free 
itself so as to complete itself’ (Deleuze 1997: 87).

/II.The Specificity of American Literature/

In treating Melville as the paradigmatic American writer, Deleuze is 
able to differentiate American from English literature in his Bartleby 
essay, though the distinction he draws is somewhat problematic. 
Melville's Original characters are inexplicable, like life itself, and 
hence beyond rationality. ‘The founding act of the American novel,’ says 
Deleuze, ‘like that of the Russian novel, was to take the novel far from 
the order of reasons’ (Deleuze 1997: 81). Surprisingly, however, Deleuze 
contrasts the American and Russian novel in this regard with ‘the 
English novel, and even more so the French novel’ (81). Deleuze also 
attributes the patchwork ideal of American democracy, central to the 
American literary project, to Americans, who, says Deleuze, ‘invented 
patchwork, just as the Swiss are said to have invented the cuckoo clock’ 
(87), even though in /Dialogues/ he describes English empiricism as ‘a 
Harlequin's jacket or patchwork’ (Deleuze and Parnet: 55). Yet these 
contradictions aside, which I regard as rhetorical strategies rather 
than definitive reassessments of English literature, other elements of 
Deleuze's analysis remain that may help us determine the specificity of 
American literature as Deleuze sees it. Deleuze is right to stress in 
Melville and American pragmatism the centrality of action, process, 
belief and community. American pragmatism builds on British empiricism, 
but as Gérard Deledalle notes, in a book cited by Deleuze, the 
experimentation of pragmatism, unlike British empiricism, is focused on 
‘the spirit of the laboratory’, as Pierce expressed it, on science as 
method and on the collective enterprise of doing science. The stress on 
method entails a focus on actions and verifiable consequences, as well 
as on beliefs – as constituents of habits, as unavoidable in the 
formulation of hypotheses, and as confirmed or modified through 
experimentation. Scientific inquiry, being an open-ended activity, 
envisions knowledge as process, and pragmatists situate this process 
within a world itself in the process of evolution. And science's 
collective dimension leads pragmatists to a general theory of action and 
inquiry as social activities, and eventually to Royce's ideal ‘Community 
of Interpretation’ and Dewey's democratic ideal. Deleuze's focus on 
Melville and Whitman's sympathy, although not a theme in pragmatism, 
also helps differentiate English from American sensibilities. As Deleuze 
shows in his first book on Hume, sympathy figures prominently in Hume's 
social theory, as that which allows individuals to go beyond themselves 
to form larger communities. But Hume grounds his social theory in 
private property, whereas Melville's sympathy is part of a ‘democratic 
dignity’ that knows no distinctions of property. Sympathy regards the 
human as such, /homo tantum/, and in this regard, Deleuze argues, 
Melville's democratic ideal is the counterpart of the Russian communist 
ideal, Melville's ideal being envisioned as a universal community of 
immigrants, the Russian ideal as a universal community of workers. In 
sum, then, both English and American literature pursue lines of flight, 
deterritorialise language and form patchwork assemblages, but American 
literature stresses more fully action and process, and it alone 
articulates ideals of democratic sympathy, belief in this world, a 
universal community of immigrants and a camaraderie of the open road ... <

http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/dls.2013.0113

Does anybody know whether Deleuze read Pynchon?

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