Deleuze and American Literature: Affect and Virtuality in Faulkner, Wharton, Ellison, and McCarthy

Deleuze and American Literature Previous Publications by the Author Articles “Riders of the Virtual Sage: Zane Grey, ...

Author: Alan Bourassa

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Deleuze and American Literature

Previous Publications by the Author Articles “Riders of the Virtual Sage: Zane Grey, Cormac McCarthy and the Transformation of the Popular Western.” Criticism 48.4 (Fall 2006). “Wharton’s Aesthetics and the Ethics of Affect.” CLA Journal 50.1 (2006). “Affect, History and Race in Ellison’s Invisible Man.” CLCWeb 8.2 ( June 2006) http:// clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb06-2/bourassa06.html. “Robert Bly’s ‘The Teeth Mother Naked at Last.’ ” A Companion to 20th Century American Poetry, ed. Burt Kimmelman (2005). “Derek Walcott.” A Companion to 20th Century American Poetry, ed. Burt Kimmelman (2005). “Literature, Language and the Nonhuman.” A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari from Routledge Press (2002). “Tracking the Dialectic: Theodor Adorno and Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature: Literature and Film—Models of Adaptation 23.3 (March 1996): 725–737. “Blanchot and Freud: The Step/Not Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” SubStance 78 (Spring 1995): 105–120.

Poetry “Spending the Night.” Southern Poetry Review (Summer 1997). “Pentecost Service 1987,” “Poem for my Uncle,” “The Rain Boys,” “Landscape,” Grain (Spring 1991). “Christmas 1987,” “It Ain’t for Sissies,” “The Other Body.” Other Voices (Fall 1990). “Small Towns.” Germination (Fall 1987). “A Medieval Nobleman,” “Hearing of Nakasone’s Apology,” “Thinking of White Magic.” Quarry (September 1987). “A Critique,” “The Torturer.” The Antigonish Review 66–67 (1986).

Deleuze and American Literature Affect and Virtuality in Faulkner, Wharton, Ellison, and McCarthy Alan Bourassa

DELEUZE AND AMERICAN LITERATURE

Copyright © Alan Bourassa, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–61656–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bourassa, Alan. Deleuze and American literature : affect and virtuality in Faulkner, Wharton, Ellison, and McCarthy / Alan Bourassa. p. cm. ISBN 0–230–61656–9 (alk. paper) 1. American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Characters and characteristics in literature. 3. Human beings in literature. 4. Humanity in literature. 5. Deleuze, Gilles, 1925–1995— Criticism and interpretation. 6. Faulkner, William, 1897–1962— Criticism and interpretation. 7. Wharton, Edith, 1862–1937—Criticism and interpretation. 8. Ellison, Ralph—Criticism and interpretation. 9. McCarthy, Cormac, 1933—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PS374.C43B68 2009 813⬘.50935—dc22

2009004857

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: October 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For My Mother Who said, “We will find a way.”

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CON T E N T S

Preface

ix

One

Literature, Character, and the Human

Two

Wharton’s Aesthetics and the Ethics of Affect

1 41

Three Invisible Man: Affect, History, Race

59

Four

Cormac McCarthy and the Event of the Human

75

Five

The Moral Singularity: Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

117

Six

Absalom, Absalom! Time and the Virtual

137

Seven

Riders of the Virtual Sage: Zane Grey, Cormac McCarthy, and the Transformation of the Popular Western

169

Conclusion: The Ethic of the Nonhuman

193

Eight

Works Cited

201

Index

205


PR E FAC E

Every collector of books deals with the same question: “Did you read all of those?” And so we are forced to admit that our bookshelves are home to a tribe of partially read books. It is no shame, although I have been known to give in to temptation and answer my incredulous guests with “Yes, every single one. Twice.” The partially read monograph is just a book that has turned its most interesting face toward us and charmed us so completely with one of its stories that we, like happy children, say “Tell it again.” There are great books that have moved me, but also great chapters, and if one or two of the following chapters have the same effect on my reader, my book will be happy to find its place among the partially read texts. I will simply advise that it is important to read the first chapter, “Literature, Character, and the Human” before any of the subsequent chapters, each of which will deal with one American writer, and each of which will put together some of the theoretical framework necessary to make my argument. But the ideas elaborated in each separate chapter—virtuality, event, singularity, affect—are reworkings and expansions of the theory of the nonhuman laid out in the introduction. This is a book of reweavings and restatements. The concepts that give this study its particular animation insist on being spoken over again, on being set into new contexts and new fictional worlds. No one owns the continuing and insistent life of the concept and the writer who takes up with such unruly notions does so in the hope that they will lay claim to the future and that their unfoldings will soon leave him behind. I cannot imagine this book bereft of the voices of Gregg Horowitz and Brian Massumi, each of whom is unruly in his own way. And I cannot imagine possessing the energy to have finished it without the intellectual support and friendship of Kathleen McConnell, David Ingham, Elizabeth McKim, Andrea Schutz, Jim Gilbert-Walsh, Margaret Doody, Vereen Bell, Heather Garrett, and Karen Poirier, or without the love of my brother Bob and my sister Carole.


CH A P T E R

ON E


In literature the human reveals itself through language. Or rather, in literature, language creates the human. Literature is the intersection of language and the human. The human, which has its possibility in language, extracts from the possibilities of language to create literature. Literature extracts the human from language to give the human its own voice. The subtraction of literature from language, leaves us with all that is nonhuman. Language, literature and the human fight pitched battles of mutual capture, shifting alliances and attrition, punctuated by periods of peace or uneasy truce. Nowhere does the human seem more the cornerstone of literature than in the novel. If the novel is an escape, it is an escape into: meaning, sense, the human. Madame Bovary. Isabel Archer. Gatsby. Ahab. Hester Prynne. It is the great characters of the novel that we remember, and the emotions that spring from the human’s encounter with all that is outside of it. Greed, obsession, sin, regret, and pride assign a value to the humanity of fictional characters. Their triumphs are the human triumphs of understanding, reconciliation, creation; their defeats are equally human: despair, loneliness, loss. The novel, and criticism of the novel, stakes a claim to a definition of the human. But then again, who doesn’t make such a claim? The human may be a political designation, as in the Roman homo humanus

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as opposed to homo barbarus, designating as human that which belongs to a certain group, a certain nation. “We are human; all others are something else.” The definition of the human may as easily be a secular as a religious term. Man may be central in being the premiere creation of God, or his centrality may be an offshoot of the death of God. We may even leave the realm of the humanities and of the literary altogether. Medicine, genetics, even the theory of management, work from models of the human. There may, in fact, be no term used so portentously but with so little consensus as “human.” But there is one sense at least in which the claim to define the human is made most strongly in literature and criticism, and that is in the claim to everydayness. The human as it is lived day to day cannot be esoteric. It is in its most familiar, most mundane moments that it manifests itself most clearly. It is not under scientific scrutiny in the hospital or the laboratory, or in the claims of theology or cosmology that the human is to be found in its most dynamic and complex forms, but rather in its ambiguous movements, in its interaction with other humans, in those molecular connections by which it sets itself into larger structures, both social and political. And what kind of writing follows these movements, indeed depends upon them, as much as the novel? And “everydayness” does not necessarily designate only the most purely realistic novels, although certainly they have a greater claim on an everyday definition of the human than, say, Radcliff ’s The Mysteries of Udolpho or Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. But even the most fantastic romance, the most unlikely of magical realist stories, the most castle-filled, black-haired-villain-infested gothic novel depends upon a drawing of the human, a sketching that must always be done by a deft hand, in order to convince us that there is a story worth caring about to be told. Not only must the characterization be convincing, but the line of the story must make sense as a story. As E.M. Forster reminds us so succinctly: “ ‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief ’ is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it” (86). If we can identify a plot in a story, it makes, for us, a kind of human sense. “The queen died of grief ”—causality in the novel becomes colored by human emotion, motivation, desire (and yes, indeed, I am here talking about what we have termed more “realistic novels,” novels whose plotting is tied closely to cause and effect sequences). But the sense-making of plot goes beyond even the basic relationships of cause and effect. As John Gardner reminds young writers “The ‘mad’ story—surrealist, expressionist, or whatever—must be as carefully plotted as the story


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with causally related actions” (168). What Gardner insists on, of course, is that a story have a discernible meaning, that it follows some at least internal logic, and that it not be the result merely of “mad whimsy.” No novel, then, if it makes sense to the reader, if it operates by a set of understandable laws, can be said to fully escape meaning, meaning that always turns out to be human meaning (even if only the meaning that a reader discerns). But already I have glossed over several points that need to be clarified. I have said that the novel (and the criticism that learns its lessons from the novel) stakes a claim to a definition of the human. And I have implied that this claim centers mainly on issues of plotting and characterization. And I have used, so far very casually, several terms that are central to a novelistic definition of the human: emotion, meaning, desire. The human, as it emerges in the novel, can be seen as a conjunction of certain concepts, certain forces, certain tendencies. And if we can map out these concepts completely enough we may find ourselves with a description of the human that applies to most any novel we pick up, but especially to American novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first of these concepts is “emotion.” In characterization, emotion is an essential building block. In plotting, emotion can serve as an engine, or a gravitational point, pulling or driving the plot in myriad directions. But in what sense can we argue that emotion is human when humans are clearly not the only species that has feelings, that feels attachment, that fears, that suffers? Does not feeling link us to all of the sentient world? Is feeling not a kind of upsurge of energy to which all living beings are subject? Indeed, we will always have the problem of the humanness of emotion if, by emotion, we signify “feeling.” While emotional states can and do lead to feelings, they are themselves different from feelings. We can trace this difference as far back as Aristotle’s description of the emotions. Martha C. Nussbaum, in The Therapy of Desire, describes the emotions as “forms of intentional awareness: that is (since no ancient term corresponds precisely to these terms), they are forms of awareness directed at or about an object, in which the object figures as it is seen from the creature’s point of view” (80). Further, emotions, for Nussbaum, have two other defining features. They have “a very intimate relationship to beliefs, and can be modified by a modification of belief ” (80). And so “emotions may be appropriately assessed as rational or irrational, and also (independently) as true or false, depending on the character of the beliefs that are their basis or ground” (80–81). She gives us the example of the difference

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between “fright” (i.e., “being startled”) and “fear.” I may be a brave man and still be startled by the sudden approach of enemy soldiers. The fright, however, is more of a somatic response than an emotion. In order to have an emotion the brave man must make a judgment. He sees the enemy, is startled (meaning, for Aristotle, that one part of his being is moved more than others), but then judges that the enemy is not so frightening and faces them. If he judges, however, that they are indeed terrifying, his emotion will be different, having sprung from a different judgment (83–85). Two men, in other words, might have the same feeling—fright—but might come to different emotions from that feeling, one experiencing actual fear and the other determination, anger, or even joy. This logos—this faculty of reasonable judgment—is specifically human. But of course, as human as it may be to judge truly, it is just as human (and indeed a talent that humans possess uniquely) to judge wrongly. For Spinoza, as well, emotions are tied to states of belief or imagination (in Spinoza’s description, usually not reasonable). In his Ethics, Spinoza lays out the order of these emotions and the bases in belief from which they spring. His definitions of love and hate, for example, tie the emotions to states of belief. In the scholium of Proposition 13 in Book Three of the Ethics, Spinoza describes love and hate thus: “Love is merely ‘pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause,’ and hatred is merely ‘pain accompanied by the idea of an external cause’ ” (112). For Spinoza, this belief is not so much a matter of judgment as of imagination. One imagines a source of one’s pain and from that imagination an emotion is expressed. Imagination is a kind of inadequate consciousness. It is what one has instead of understanding, but it is also uniquely human. It depends upon a certain ability to manipulate images, to form images from complex experiences, and to be affected by language. Although the Ethics does not read like a book of psychoanalysis, Spinoza lays the groundwork for a psychoanalytic understanding of the emotions as offshoots of imagination. For both Freud and Lacan the image has the power to affect a person emotionally. Little Hans’ horse, the Rat Man’s bizarre oriental torture fantasy, the Wolf-man’s tree full of wolves are all examples of patients overcome by the power of images, images that have their basis in experience, in language, in belief. For Freud, the entire engine of the Oedipus Complex is the young boy’s belief in his father’s threat of castration. For Lacan, though in a different way, there is also an intimate connection between language, belief, and desire. Peter Brooks in Reading for the


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Plot draws the relationship between desire and narration using an essentially Lacanian model. Plot as we have defined it is the organizing line and intention of narrative, thus perhaps best conceived as an activity, a structuring operation elicited in the reader trying to make sense of those meanings that develop only through textual and temporal succession. Plot in this view belongs to the reader’s “competence,” and in his “performance”—the reading of narrative—it animates the sense-making process: it is a key component of that “passion of (for) meaning” that Barthes says, lights us afire when we read. We can, then, conceive of the reading of plots as a form of desire that carries us forward, onward, through the text. Narratives both tell of desire—typically present some story of desire—and arouse and make use of desire as dynamics of signification. (37) “Desire,” in this definition, is far from a primal force that erupts in the body and fragments all sense making. Rather, desire itself is already caught up in a process of sense-making, of interpretation, and, as all ardent readers know, of image-making. For Brooks, the forces of desire are tied indissolubly to the images of desire. Desire is inherently unsatisfied and unsatisfiable since it is linked to memory traces and seeks its realization in the hallucinatory reproduction of indestructible signs of infantile satisfaction: it reposes on phantasmatic scenarios of satisfaction. Such unconscious desire becomes, in the later life of the subject, a motor of actions whose significance is blocked from consciousness, since interpretation of its scenarios of fulfillment is not directly accessible to consciousness. One can now begin to grasp the manner in which desire comes to inhabit the language of narration (Brooks 55). So we see that the emotional life of the human, especially of the human in literature (both the human represented and the human reading), is tied up with a number of tendencies that define it. For the human, emotion is not an upsurge of primal energy, but rather the result of an investment of energy in a judgment, an image, a belief. It is to this extent that I will call the novelistic use of emotion human. In the novel we have nothing if we do not have judgment, image, and belief. And from emotion we may move easily to the second criterion for literature and criticism’s definition of the human: inwardness. It is not out of place to ask, after the previous description of the emotions,

6


where exactly these emotions are supposed to take place. If emotions are merely surges of force, they can be rather simply plotted out on a two dimensional surface. In fact, if we are to trace the point at which the novel becomes “realistic,” begins to present to us human beings who, unlike the classical hero or the picaresque fool, are not far above or below us, we will be able to place it in those moments when a character develops an inward life, private experience, a complex interiority that is capable of surprising us. Emotion itself does not make for the fully human character, the character that emerges, according to Ian Watt, in the eighteenth century, and is firmly established by the nineteenth. Take, for example, Homer’s Achilles. Certainly few characters in literature are as passionately emotional as Achilles. But he is not a realistic character because, as Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg explain in The Nature of Narrative, Achilles is not drawn in depth or complexity, but is shown in terms of one emotion: anger (161). Achilles does not have a complex interiority into which stimuli can enter to be transformed. And it is this lack of interiority in the classical that emphasizes the interiority of character that we take for granted today. An illustration: A rock certainly has no interiority, so what happens to it is utterly predictable. I kick it and, depending on its size and the power of my kick, it moves a certain distance (or breaks a certain number of my toes). There is no delay between my kick and the movement of the rock. It does not consider how to respond. Achilles’ actions are almost as predictable. On the battlefield he will kill. When insulted he will be outraged. When his best friend is killed in battle, Achilles will wreak revenge on his friend’s killer. For all that, Achilles is still a compelling character, but nonetheless a hero, half-god, half-human, and, indeed, the divine lineage of so many heroes is a potent reminder that they are not of our kind. Achilles does become more human, according to Scholes and Kellog, in the moment when he makes his speech to Priam’s son Lycaon, refusing to spare his life, telling him that death must come to all: “And do you not see what kind of man I am, handsome and powerful—my father a great man and the mother that bore me a goddess—even upon me will fall stern destiny and death” (qtd in Scholes and Kellogg 162). There is anger in this speech, yes, but there is also a hint of regret, a clue to something unseen, something that adds dimension to an otherwise inhuman character. And it is notable that the speech is a pause, a highly unrealistic suspension of the battle that rages all around him, because it is precisely this pause that is interiority. It is the difference between kicking the rock and kicking the person.


7

The rock moves immediately and predictably. The person, on the other hand, may respond in a variety of ways, paralysis, weeping, violence, reason, compassion, f light. The action, the kick, has entered into an interiority and has been delayed in returning to me as reaction. It has passed through a region where the laws are different, often unknown, often in f lux, and has reemerged transformed. Interiority is a region that operates by a set of laws different from those of the physical world. These laws can be gleaned through long observation, through clues and hints, but are not readily apparent and are neither static nor simple. We may say that three things must always be present in interiority. It must, first, be a kind of enfolded space that is an island of separateness in the world that surrounds it. In other words, it must function by a set of autonomous laws. Second, it must be hidden. Because it is its own separate world, it will not be visible from the outside. It will leave signs of its workings (an example is Freud’s famous parapraxes), but will never be directly observed. Third, it must be formed. It must not merely be a place of chaos and wild energies. There will be some structure to this interiority. Even in Freud, the overwhelming power of eros is the basis for a structure, a kind of pneumatic machine that increases and discharges energies. Freud, of course, is a leading contender to be called the father of interiority. The unconscious certainly meets all three criteria for interiority. It is hidden, even from the conscious mind that it underlies. It is an island of separateness within rationality and common sense. And it functions by very specific laws: condensation, displacement, equilibrium, wish fulfillment. In “Creative Writers and Daydreaming” Freud tells us that the writer, like the “dreamer in broad daylight,” gives the reader a phantasy, indulges in a kind of wish fulfillment that is made palatable to the reader (in a way that the simple relating of daydream would not) by the pleasing use of form and technique (140–141). Dreams are wish fulfillments; phantasies are related to dreams in being related to wish fulfillment; and writing is a kind of controlled and structured phantasy (the writer does something like Freud’s “secondary dreamwork” on the unfulfilled wish). It is for this reason that Freudian criticism often uses literature as nothing more than a set of symptoms revealing the inner struggles of a writer or a character. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel, tells us that it is “the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source” (45). But how is this hidden life revealed? Scholes and Kellogg are certainly right to name Christianity, with its concern for the inward self, the soul, as one of the first sources of interiority for the western mind (167). The examination of conscience,

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the experience of desire, and the contrast of the public and private self are all powerful sources for the kind of interiority that we take for granted today. In fact, we see today an almost total erosion of the idea of the public self. The politician, the celebrity are our ultimate models of duplicity and superficiality. The private self is, we say, where the real judgment on character is to be made. But how to reveal this private self. The illustration of character has always been a problem in writing. Even the most two- dimensional heroic character must have traits, motivations, desires. Sometimes the illustration of these traits is as straightforward as direct narrative statement: “The knight is bold and courteous.” Sometimes a character may speak an interior monologue in which thought is not distinguished from speech. But probably the most characteristic mode of revealing interiority in the twentieth century is stream of consciousness, which, according to Erich Auerbach in his analysis of Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse, marks the moment when the interior reality supersedes the exterior. In Virginia Woolf ’s case the exterior events have actually lost their hegemony, they serve to release and interpret inner events, whereas before her time (and still today in many instances) inner movements preponderantly function to prepare and motivate significant exterior happenings. This too is apparent in the randomness and contingency of the exterior occasion . . . which releases the much more significant inner process. (538) This inner process that Woolf tries to plumb is, as we have seen, “a more genuine, a deeper and indeed a more real reality” (540). It is an interiority that is paralleled by the domestic interiority of the Ramsay home. And it is this kind of domestic interiority that is the source for much of the novel’s concern for the inner life of the private individual starting in the eighteenth century. Ian Watt traces a number of very concrete sources for the increased emphasis on private inward experience: the rise of increased suburbanization in England created a suburban type that contrasted with the urban type that had preceded it. “Urbanity” denotes the qualities of politeness and understanding which are the product of the wider social experience which city life makes possible; with it goes the spirit of comedy which, in Italian, French or English comedy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries centres on the gay life of the streets and the


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squares, where the walls of houses afford a purely nominal privacy. “Suburban,” on the other hand, denotes the sheltered complacence and provinciality of the sheltered middle-class home. (187) Along with this lifestyle go several other social conditions. The increased emphasis on letter writing encourages a more complete revelation of the inward self. “Letters,” Watt says, “are the most direct material evidence for the inner life . . . and their reality is one which reveals the subjective and private orientations of the writer both towards the recipient and the people discussed, as well as the writer’s own inner being” (191). In addition, the printing press produces a kind of literature, the printed novel, that not only makes the reading of the novel a more automatic, immediate, and intimate experience, but suits itself extremely well to private consumption. It becomes possible for people to indulge vicariously (and privately) in passions and ideas that they would profess shock at in public (198–199). The inward life becomes, to a great extent, the hidden life, and the enclosing walls of the suburban home are paralleled by the walls that separate the outer person from the inner. Although inwardness in the novel is a complex subject, I will not go any further in exploring it in its details. I only want to point out that the novel, as it develops in the eighteenth century and continues on to the present, has created a notion of character as inwardness, an enclosed interiority that is complex, hidden, and structured, around language, around a wish or around desire. To emotion and inwardness, I will now add “individuality” as a third concept around which the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American novel is organized. We might say, in fact, that individuality is an inevitable offshoot of inwardness. Interiority can only be individual. One of the strongest forms this belief takes is in those philosophies that detach the individual from collective responsibility and accountability: when I stop being responsible for the sins of my father, the transgressions of my tribe, when my actions are not the sole judge of my moral worth, when I examine my conscience as the source for an “authentic” ethic, I am in the realm of individuality. A traditional story tells of a man who, after a life of service to others, compassionate acts, and religious observance, declares on his deathbed that he is in fear for his soul because really he is a sinful man. Here are the beginnings of individuality. It is with the concept of the individual that we are gaining new ground for our definition of the human. The individual’s value is measured against that which it escapes. Individual autonomy is autonomy

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from tradition, from received ideas, religious and cultural. What makes a person fully human in our definition is precisely the ability to assert a kind of independence for the self (again, the inward self ). We are not human because of our participation in a polis; humanness is not conferred through citizenship in a certain nation. It is rather attained by the individual’s negotiation with their own culture, although this culture must be one that will allow the negotiation to take place. Again, Ian Watt suggests some concrete reasons for the new concern with the individual in the eighteenth century. The novel’s serious concern with the daily lives of ordinary people seems to depend upon two important general conditions: the society must value every individual highly enough to consider him the proper subject of its serious literature; and there must be enough variety of belief and action among ordinary people for a detailed account of them to be of interest to other ordinary people, the readers of novels. (60) It is the uncoupling of the human being from the bonds of tradition that allows for this variety of belief, and it is this unpredictability that makes human action interesting. This uncoupling is most effectively accomplished, as Watt points out, in a new capitalist society. Social hierarchies are relaxed, older forms of authority are weakened, and new relationships take their place. But in the hurly burly of capitalist speculation, f luidity, and destruction there is little in the way of cultural, religious, or moral guidance. Answers do not come ready made for the individual, but must be puzzled out within some broad outlines. For every problem, there are myriad possible responses. Tzvetan Todorov illustrates the difference between the traditional character of the Arabian Nights, whose actions are predictable, and the more complex character of the nineteenth century, for whom one cause can lead to numerous effects. “In a nineteenth century novel, the proposition ‘X is jealous of Y’ can lead to ‘X withdraws from society,’ ‘X commits suicide,’ ‘X courts Y,’ ‘X hurts Y.’ In the Arabian Nights, there is only one possibility: ‘X is jealous of Y→X hurts Y’ ” (68). Unpredictability is one of the defining traits of the individual. The unexpected is the very humanness of the individual human. And the individual’s uniqueness springs from their complexity. Each individual works out their relationship with the culture around them, with other people and with themselves according to their temperament, their experiences, their ethics. So much that need not be considered in the


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traditional character must be considered in the modern character. We might imagine, for example, how absurd it would be to think of Achilles as a complex character. We know that there is only one response for Achilles to the killing of Patroclus by Hector: kill Hector. But what if Achilles were a complex individual? What if he were wrapped in the kind of personal psychology of, say, a twentieth-century modernist character? What would he do? Kill himself? Dedicate himself to being more peaceful as a way of honoring Patroclus’s memory? Go home? Curse the gods and become as much of an atheist as one can be in a world where the gods regularly come to dinner? Of course, it is ridiculous to speculate on such possibilities. There is only one possibility for a character whose actions are dictated by the laws of tradition and the rules of war. Within these rules he has all the f lexibility that Homer can give to him. His character is indeed made more complex by his unexpected compassion toward Priam, allowing him to finally claim Hector’s body. But, it is important to note, it is still in terms of the warrior code that Achilles’ actions have meaning and express true compassion. He honors an honorable enemy, but does not reveal any particular inwardness in doing so. Compassion comes upon him just as anger and rage do. In the same way, a modern character who acts only in accordance with rules and traditions cannot be a fully drawn character unless this compliance with outward authority is the sign of some inward state. The code—the duty as soldier, husband, legislator—does not circumscribe the personality the way it does in Homer. The modern character must, to some extent, act against what is socially expected of him, to reveal what is expected of him at a deeper level. We expect a personality to unfold, an inner world to be revealed; and if the outer world is held in abeyance, so be it. Again, I will not delve into the historical complexities of the formation of individuals, the economic, social, and philosophical roots of individuality. I only want to point out that for the novel after the eighteenth century, individuality is a given; it is the source of what we value in the human. And this individuality is created, in large part, from the fourth aspect of the novel that I will consider: experience. The human character in the novel is the result of a certain set of experiences, both expected and unexpected. Henry James draws perhaps the most famous parallel in literary criticism between character and experience when he says “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?” (401). And Milan Kundera, in an interview, is careful to place incident among the determinations of character: “Because making a character ‘alive’ means: getting to the

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bottom of his existential problem. Which in turn means: getting to the bottom of some situations, some motifs, even some words that shape him” (35). We expect things to happen to the characters in novels, and we expect these occurrences to matter, to shape the character, teach them, even destroy them. Again, we can contrast the classical type with the modern. In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus is a character who certainly undergoes many adventures. He is also a character with a very welldefined personality. Just as we can rely on Achilles to act as the great warrior, we can expect Odysseus to think and trick his way out of problems, relying on his skill in arms only when necessary. But there is ultimately little connection between his experiences and his character. He returns home, reclaims his house and his wife, exacts revenge on the suitors. He does exactly what he would have done had he arrived home years earlier. Experience has not deepened his character. Nor is this a f law. We do not expect this deepening of character in a classical figure. Oedipus’s fate is his character and it is fixed for all time. Antigone’s tragic defiance is her character and it too stands in a kind of crystalline eternity. In the novel, however, we expect change. The bildungsroman is built around just this imperative. The young person undergoes certain incidents that become experience and lead to adulthood. Experience is, in a sense, cumulative. It adds up to something. It is the creation of something, and it is intimately tied to narrative, so much so that one cannot say whether experience is the basis of narrative or narrative the basis of experience. Nor can we draw a clear line between the writer whose observations of reality become narrative, the character who is shaped by experience, or the reader for whom the novel becomes experience. Giorgio Agamben, in his essay “Infancy and History,” draws the connection between the formation of experience and the power of narrative. It is [the] non-translatability into experience that now makes everyday existence intolerable—as never before—rather than an alleged poor quality of life or its meaninglessness compared with the past . . . It is not until the nineteenth century that we find the first literary indications of this everyday oppressiveness, and certain well-known pages of Sein und Zeit on the “banality” of the quotidian . . . would simply have made no sense even just a century earlier, but this is precisely because the everyday—not the unusual—made up the raw material of experience which each generation transmitted to the next . . . Each event, however commonplace and insignificant, thus became the speck of


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impurity around which experience accrued its authority, like a pearl. For experience has its necessary correlation not in knowledge but in authority—that is to say, the power of words and narration. (14) Henry James, in “The Art of Fiction,” also illustrates the bond between writing and experience. I remember an English novelist, a woman of genius, telling me that she was much commended for the impression she had managed to give in one of her tales of the nature and way of life of the French Protestant youth. She had been asked where she learned so much about this recondite being, she had been congratulated on her peculiar opportunities. These opportunities consisted in her having once, in Paris, as she ascended a staircase, passed an open door where, in the household of a pasteur, some of the young Protestants were seated at a table round a finished meal. The glimpse made a picture; it lasted only a moment, but that moment was experience. (398) Experience, as we can see here depends upon incident. Something happens, is worked upon, and becomes experience, understanding, knowledge. But there is also a mysterious element to experience. Some moments crystallize into experience. Some happenings work a change in character. Some incidents are turning points. What seem like momentous decisions—the decision to marry, to go to war—can turn out to be of little value for experience. Others—the decision to walk down a certain street, the decision to learn the f lute, to look one way rather than another—can become what Agamben calls the “impurity” around which experience shapes itself. A character is the sum total of its experiences. Sometimes the sum is a practical measure of success: David Copperfield ends his novel with changed financial circumstances, greater wisdom, a keener appreciation for human goodness. The sum may be purely moral. Although Lily Bart in The House of Mirth does not live to the end of the novel, and although she loses everything in the process of sliding out of her social circle into the gray reality that eventually takes her life, she has accumulated much in the reader’s eye. She has made moral choices. She has fought temptations and has reached for authentic connection with all of her strength. Lily Bart becomes an element of experience, not only for those characters around her, but also for the reader. And the moral effect is certainly

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cumulative. At the beginning of the novel, Lily is near the peak of her beauty and power, but is barely visible morally. As the novel progresses, she makes decisions, each one of which pushes her to the fatal conclusion of her life. But in the end, she is completely, morally, almost blindingly, visible. Experience has accrued around her. Her actions are authored, we might say, with authority. But, of course, the mystery of experience (at least one of its mysteries) is that it always leads to different results depending on whose experience it is. This difficulty brings me to another defining feature of the human as it is manifested in characterization: potentiality. The novel is an unfolding of potential. This, of course, is not quite as simple as it sounds, since novels often (indeed usually) begin with some form of disruption, death, displacement, a mystery, a problem, which had not seemed part of the character’s potential world. In addition, there are always two sets of potentialities running parallel in a novel. The potential that unfolds in a situation and the potential that unfolds within a character. The former is always laid out clearly for us at the beginning of the novel; the latter unfolds in the breaking down of the former. Again, we might take The House of Mirth as an example of a novel whose two course of potentiality run parallel, but in opposite directions. Lily never realizes the potential that she has been raised and trained for: to marry a wealthy man and take her place among the highest social circles of New York. This is what we are brought to expect almost from the first page of the novel. Here is a world. Here are its rules. Here is a character singularly qualified to take this world on its own terms and triumph (and indeed, how many times is triumph dangled before Lily, close enough for her to grasp if only she will?). The unfolding of her beauty (which is the outward sign of her potential to achieve wealth and position) does not take place as anyone would have guessed. Rather, potentialities that were latent in her (and never would have been realized if the other potential had passed into actuality) are made real, most notably, the awakening of her moral self. The disruption happens in the clash of one form of potentiality with the other. In order for one to pass into actuality, the other must be silenced. In this particular novel of potential, the potential that exists in character will not allow the other potential—the one we could reasonably expect to actualize—to unfold itself according to plan. John Gardner calls this kind of novel “energeic” from Aristotle’s energeia, which is “the actualization of the potential that exists in character and situation” (Gardner 185). And in his essay “The Ideology of Modernism,” Lukacs distinguishes between abstract and concrete potentiality, the former being nothing


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more than a subjective illusion, but the latter being the cornerstone of character and change. But in life potentiality can, of course, become reality. Situations arise in which a man is confronted with a choice; and in the act of choice a man’s character may reveal itself in a light that surprises even himself. In literature—and particularly in dramatic literature—the denouement often consists in the realization of just such a potentiality, which circumstances have kept from coming to the fore. These potentialities are, then, “real” or concrete potentialities. The fate of the character depends upon the potentiality in question, even if it should condemn him to a tragic end. (600) Potentiality is what lies dormant in character, in the human. More than just imaginary, potentiality is, as Lukacs says, “concerned with the dialectic between the individual’s subjectivity and objective reality” (600). It is potentiality that gives depth to human response. It is what allows a seemingly amoral character to develop a moral sensibility. It is what allows a character to move beyond their surroundings. Closely tied to the formation of individuality and interiority, potentiality is what makes each character more than just the sum of experiences. In The Coming Community, Agamben ties potentiality to a definition of the human. “There is in effect something that humans are and have to be, but this something is not an essence nor properly a thing: It is the simple fact of one’s own existence as possibility or potentiality. But precisely because of this things become complicated; precisely because of this ethics becomes effective” (42). We must remember that experience and potentiality always imply each other in the novel. Potentialities are set loose even (or especially) by the most unexpected occurrences; occurrences are shaped and directed by potentialities that, as Lukacs reminds us, must be concrete to be effective; potentialities are already highly formed and formalized. So far I have traced out five concepts that, taken together, give us a picture of the human in the novel: emotion, interiority, individuality, experience, and potentiality. The final concept, what we might see as the culmination of the other five, is “meaning.” Scholes and Kellogg give us a good rough-and-ready definition of meaning to start out with. “Meaning, in a work of narrative art, is a function of the relationship between two worlds: the fictional world created by the author and the ‘real’ world, the apprehendable universe. When we say

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we ‘understand’ a narrative we mean that we have found a satisfactory relationship . . . between these two worlds” (82). Meaning, then, is the forging of a correspondence between two series, two worlds; and this correspondence is a function of interpretation. It is the job of interpretation to bridge the gap between fictional and actual worlds, or the gap between fictional and moral worlds, fictional and philosophic worlds, fictional and religious worlds. Interpretation is the human activity par excellence because it is so tied up with language, and more specifically, with language as signification. Interpretation cares little for its reference to a concrete world, but rather is satisfied (indeed delighted!) to find correspondences between one linguistic series and another. What do I do, for example, when I interpret the novels of a particular author as a response, a cooptation, an indictment of certain contemporaneous political events? I am simply drawing two parallel lines of language, of code, between the fictional series and the political series as they are expressed, written, discussed. When I interpret a human creation, there is no doubt but that it has human meaning (when I apply the same efforts to the natural world, the results are more problematic. It is amazing enough that mathematics so often corresponds to natural motion; that such motions might have moral or ethical meaning is probably too much to grant). There is nothing more suited for the human to interpret than human creations. As Annie Dillard points out in Living by Fiction, Why is it sane to find meaning in a doodle and insane to find meaning in a puddle of rain? Why is it sane to count the incidence of the word “murder” in Shakespeare and insane to count frost cracks in the sidewalk? . . . The boundaries of sense are actually quite clear. We commonly (if tacitly) agree that the human world has human meaning which we can discover, and the given natural world does not. That human beings and human culture are “natural” phenomena is undeniable; nevertheless, we draw our intellectual line so it divides the human from the inhuman—quite rightly. We separate culture from nature; we perform a limited set of intellectual operations on natural things and a more extensive set of operations on cultural things. And we agree that it is sane to inquire what cultural things mean and insane to inquire what natural things mean. (138–139) There are, of course, countless contenders to define exactly what this human meaning is. Phenomenological intentionality, Freudian drives,


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and wish fulfillment where the mechanisms of language and representation come face to face with the forces of the body, Heidegger’s Dasein, in which the human finds itself enveloped in a language through which Being sets about interpreting itself, Christian ontology, in which man’s moral salvation is at the center of God’s plan. As different as these methods of interpretation are, they have one thing in common: they never stray from the human. Even when they see the human surrounded by the natural world, it is the human that confers names, meanings, significations on the world. And even when man is taken up by forces—God, Being—these forces express themselves in their highest form through man (and, indeed, in Heidegger, there is no other Dasein than the lived life of the human). We tend to dismiss as superstition any interpretation of the world that finds meaning while ignoring the human. And what is true of science and philosophy is a fortiori true of the novel, and the human in the novel. It is not just the novel that we interpret, but the humanity of the novel. We search for human meanings, even in those extreme cases where the characters are animals—what, after all, is White Fang but a novel about the moral redemption of a lupine soul? What is the great whale Moby Dick? Not just a blind brute, but a force of evil, a malevolence that, although it may spring from the depths of nature, only has meaning for human culture. It is, in fact, Ahab’s particular insanity that he wishes to attribute a humanly meaningful malice to Moby Dick. It is unbearable for him to think of the white whale as just another mammal, one who injured him in a primitive and immediate struggle for survival. The great power of Moby Dick is, of course, that we leave the novel not entirely convinced Ahab is insane. And even if our interpretations are more sophisticated, even if we eschew as naive the interpretation of character, we still do not get past the power of the human to impose meaning. We may search the novel for symptomatic points of ideological contradiction, we may, as Lacanians, work through the patterns of signification, the chains of displacement along which desire travels. But it is still human desire that is being displaced. In fact, for Lacan, language is tied more closely to the cultural than in almost any thinker. It subsumes the raw power of the drive even more so than in Freud, for whom representation (Freud’s “memory traces”) is always a crucial element of desire. And as complex as the worlds are that interpretation grapples with, it is nonetheless a human world. Freud tells us that the human mind is more complex than consciousness can grasp; Marx tells us that the workings of ideology and economy always supersede the individual’s ability to

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grasp; Lacan tells us that language is a system within which we articulate our own subjectivity, a system that determines our very ability to understand. Yet all of this complexity is still human complexity. The cultural world presents as many mysteries as the natural world, and the veil placed over its workings is just as opaque as that placed over the workings of the physical world. The difference is that, as we plumb the human world, we can do so in human terms. We can speak of desire, of good and evil, of redemption and emotion. From Literature to Language; from the Human to the Nonhuman The relationship between the human and literature is almost one of identity. The literary is that which shows forth the humanness of the human; it is the definitive human activity. And the human is but the creation of a system of meanings and values that must in large part be called literary. The human takes shape among an endless proliferation of stories, characters, mythologies. There is no story without the human, no human without stories: one reality with two faces. Up to this point, we have seen two terms: literature and the human. Language, so far, has been subsumed under literature. We certainly do believe that literature is a special use of language, but until we look at language as autonomous, as a separate realm that functions by its own laws, we will have difficulty in moving past the simple equation of the literary with the human. Our picture of the human in the novel becomes much more complicated when the human\literary becomes the triad of language\literature\human. But why should we want to move past this identity of the literary and the human in the first place? Can we be satisfied that there is a definition of the human given in the novel, and that this human being is valuable and is the basis for art? Those who have read many novels will answer, I believe, “no,” because in the course of reading many novels we have all surely read some bad ones and even more mediocre ones. The sign of the mediocre novel is that the characters, the humans depicted, never go beyond the realm of the human. In What is Philosophy? Gilles Deleuze articulates this limitation of so many contemporary novels. We dwell on the art of the novel because it is the source of a misunderstanding: many people think that novels can be created with


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our perceptions and affections, our memories and archives, our travels and fantasies, our children and parents, with the interesting characters we have met and, above all, the interesting character who is inevitably oneself (who isn’t interesting?), and finally with our opinions holding it all together. (170) A novel can be written using all of the concepts I have articulated— emotion, interiority, individuality, experience, potentiality, and meaning—and never leave the narrow range that Deleuze describes. And certainly, we have all had the experience of finishing a novel and feeling that we have just come from visiting a very dull town where everyone is perfectly nice. The mediocre novel can give us characters, struggle, life and death, family history (in fact I have noticed recently a spate of novels about family history), childhood memories, love, hate, the full range of human emotions, and still leave us feeling cold. And this coldness is not a result of poor writing, sloppy technique, sentimentality. It is rather the result of being immersed in a world where the human remains within the boundaries prescribed for it. But when we pick up the great novel, the one that haunts us for the rest of our lives, we know that we are in the presence of something that goes beyond the human as it has been so far described. Something fabulous, something material, something, perhaps, that underlies the real world has been extracted from the characters in the great novel. As Deleuze says of Thomas Wolfe: “Thomas Wolfe extracts a giant from his father . . . Wolfe may describe the people of old Catawba through their stupid opinions and their mania for discussion, but what he does is set up the secret monument of their solitude, their desert, their eternal earth, and their forgotten, unnoticed lives” (171–172). So we are in the presence of a mystery. Novels are filled with the human, but it is not the human alone that makes a great novel memorable. At the same time, the human is necessary. Novels are about the human. Or rather, we might say that a great novel is about something in the human, something that goes toward making the human up, something that occupies the human, is always found in an intimate relationship with the human, but is not itself human. It is the nonhuman without which the human could not be what it is. I will start by pointing out that language has often met this definition, that it is both intimately involved with the human, yet somehow more than human. Language shatters the easy equivalence of literary and human by opening up a dimension of the nonliterary in literature (that is, everything that lies outside of the scope of the literary but on which the

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literary depends) and of the nonhuman in the human (that is, all that lies outside of the scope of the human, but nonetheless makes it up). The question of the nonhuman is central here. It is a question implicit in all the questions we might ask about language, and it is a question that can be phrased in terms of language. What is the nonhuman, and why must it be invoked by the question of language? If we insist on phrasing the question of the nonhuman in affirmative terms (that is, if we insist on seeing in the “non” of “nonhuman” negativity rather than difference) we will find ourselves back at the three great figures of the nonhuman: the animal, the machine, and the divinity. These three figures are not, of course, essentially nonhuman. They are not, in other words, defined by their deviation from the human. They are, at best secondarily nonhuman. The nonhuman, as something that can be spoken of, that can act and appear, is caught within the disjunction of the three, the empty space created and enclosed (but not occupied) by their imperfect overlap. And these three figures of the nonhuman are paralleled by three kinds of language, three powers that can be assigned to language and between which our own thinking about language negotiates its uneasy path: semiotics, information, and revelation. The animal; pure semiotics. Language as a system of recognizable signs. As Agamben tells us, “Animals do not enter language, they are already inside it” (Infancy 52). Semiotics is grounded in recognition rather than understanding. The animal recognizes a certain sign—the beaver’s tail-slap on the water, the honeybee’s signal indicating the presence of pollen—because the sign is repeated, either genetically in the animal’s inborn responses or experientially in its ability to learn. Our own response to language, our ability to make sense of it, depends upon our semantic skills, the ability to figure meanings in sentences we have never encountered. You can understand the sentence “My daughter repaired the refrigerator although she was sick with the palsy” even though it is unlikely that you have encountered this sentence in the past. But this semantic competence rests on a certain level of semiotic efficiency, recognizing certain letters as signifiers for certain sounds and recognizing words as distinct signs. This is the first language we encounter. The machine is language as information. Information differs from simple signification in that it relies upon a kind of coding that can intensify the signifying function of language. Felix Guattari uses the example of the bank card: “The a-signifying semiotic figures don’t simply secrete significations. They give out stop and start orders but above all activate the ‘bringing into being’ of ontological Universes” (49).


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There is something immediately physical about this kind of coding; the most privileged example of it is the DNA double helix, information as chemical bonds. There is also something brutal about this kind of language, its atheistic immediacy, its relentless attachment to the actual. Information is a step up from the pure sign, calling on higher levels of organization and memory, but neither form of language can justify a claim to truth. Semiotics deals only with recognition and misrecognition, information only with structure. It is only a divine language (whether that divinity is God, the Idea, or transcendence) that can begin to make a claim to truth. This is our third language, the language of revelation. In his essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” Walter Benjamin traces a line that runs through knowledge, language, and divinity: “God rested when he had left his creative power to itself in man. This creativity, relieved of its divine actuality, became knowledge. Man is the knower in the same language in which God is creator” (323). This language, in its myriad forms, is the language of creativity and truth. It snatches the human up from above. It grounds the human in that which infinitely surpasses it: “language as such is the mental being of man; and only for this reason is the mental being of man, alone among all mental entities, communicable without residue” (318). We open our mouths to speak and what issues forth? Signs? Information? Names that are grounded in our privilege as humans, our hegemony over a nature that communicates itself to us in order to be named? When we write, where do we locate ourselves? In the position of masters who control a circus of unruly signs, or as bodies through which something is written or writes itself? This is the paradox of language. It is what we control—and there is no doubt that skill does tame the f lux of language, makes it into an instrument—but it is the very same language that can suddenly show itself forth to us as a relentless revelation, a lighting that withdraws from understanding as it founds the very possibility of understanding. Human or nonhuman? Our own creation or a gift that obsesses us? We might think of language as we would think of an apparition out of the darkness of an empty road. Is it a fellow wanderer? Does it share my nature and is it haunted by the silence and mystery of the darkness? Does it fear and ward off the imminent reality of the outside? Is it powerless to fight the spirit that possesses it? And can I speak to it? Gain comfort in a shared humanness? Or is this figure itself a secretion of the darkness? A ghost sent to haunt and possess me? Even if it shows compassion for my plight, will its infinite power over me always make it a stranger?

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The question, in short, is this: is language itself a force or is it taken up by forces? It is well to remember that Derrida’s “Force is the other of language” (27) comes in an essay entitled “Force and Signification.” When language signifies, that is, when it assumes its role as producer of signs and information, it will be open to questions of the other, it will be material haunted by the mystery of its own life, its own animation. But if language is itself a force, if it is language that opens a space of being, or language in which all of nature rests, then it is far more than instrument, but carries with it, in mediating immediately the communication of mental being, what Benjamin has boldly called its magic. It is in this sense that Heidegger has called language the “House of Being.” It is in language that the world comes out from its concealment and into its revelation. For Heidegger language is not instrumental, not used secondarily by any force or outside power. It is rather in language that the unfolding of Being occurs. But Heidegger takes pains not to make language secondary to Being, and so his difficult formulation “Language is language”: “This statement does not lead us to something else in which language is grounded. Nor does it say anything about whether language itself may be a ground for something else. The sentence, ‘Language is language,’ leaves us to hover over an abyss as long as we endure what it says” (“Language” 191). This abyss is, for us, the very question of language’s nature, and the impossibility of its resolution. We will see how this difficulty parallels the difficulty we will always have in drawing the relationship of the human to the nonhuman. Although the hard and fast distinction between these three types of language (signs, information, and revelation) breaks down almost as quickly as it is proposed, it still leaves us with a new perspective on literature. Information carries semiotics along with it, depends upon it, and, by the same token, the language of revelation takes up signification. No discourse, no matter how factual, how technical, or how prosaic can escape being taken up by the revelatory power of language. And it is this taking up of everyday language that is the language of revelation. Benjamin speaks of mental being communicated in and not through language. Language as such, the language of revelation, is language in which mental being is communicated, but which is not separate from that which fills it up. Language, as Benjamin reminds us, communicates itself. Our third kind of language, then, is a kind of operation upon the first two, a modification of them, an intensive occupation. In a sense this was Benjamin’s great project. In his attempt to imbue historical materialism with the power of messianic cessation of happening, he was forced away from speaking in conventionally


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religious terms, even though in the Language essay he gives religion pride of place in the communication of the highest mental being. His attempt in “On the Mimetic Faculty” to trace a line from occult practices to language through mimesis, suggests that Benjamin was searching for ways to speak of the revelatory and creative power of language without having to resort always to the language of theology. It is this ambivalence that gives so much uneasy energy to Benjamin’s thinking, and so much compressed power to his political and aesthetic writing. Intensive language, language possessed by a power from which it cannot divide itself, gives us, finally, a way to talk about literature. Literature is nothing but this intensity. It is never to be found without it. And more important than establishing the difference between literature and other uses of language is the naming of the intensities that are put into play in literature. And if literature is about the human, if it is always speaking in the voice of the personal, the subjective, the psychological, the moral—all the crowning achievements of the human— then the movement whereby language is taken up by what is other is paralleled by a movement in which the human is taken up by all that is nonhuman. And just as the language of revelation is a kind of possession of utilitarian language, a possession that is more a mutual capture than a domination, so the nonhuman is a possessing of the human by something that nonetheless retains the deepest intimacy with it. It is in this sense that we can say the human is created and sustained by the nonhuman, and that literature is maintained by a language that overf lows and escapes it. The possession of language by its other takes on many forms. We can speak of it in terms that may seem to belong more to physics or in terms that evoke a transcendence far beyond the traditional western conception of Being. The possession of the human by its other—the nonhuman—also takes many forms. In fact, for each of the defining characteristics of the human in the novel—emotion, interiority, individuality, experience, potential, and meaning—there is a nonhuman concept to which it relates and which takes it beyond itself. I will refer to these from now on as “modalities” of the nonhuman. I use the term “modality” because, in dealing with the nonhuman, I am dealing with one thing, one reality, but a reality that manifests itself differently at different moments. Much like language, whose modes differ widely, from the purely utilitarian to the transcendent, the nonhuman is expressed in its modalities, without which it is only a vague concept. Each of the modalities of the nonhuman covers the entire field of the human/nonhuman relation. In other words, each modality can work

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independently of the others and can lay claim to giving a perspective on the human that needs no supplementation. But at the same time each modality allows for others. It is, for example, not a contradiction to say that the human exists and is constituted within a plane of affect and to say that the human is constituted by the events that make it up. Event and affect are two modalities of the nonhuman, but taken together they do not give us a more “complete” view of the human or nonhuman. The modalities of the nonhuman do not “add up,” one might say. They are not meant to be a cumulative taxonomy of the nonhuman, but rather exist in relations of resonance with each other, of differential repetition, of imperfect overlap, of mutual intensification, and, at times, of mutual capture. The first of these modalities—affect—takes one of our defining features of the novelistic character—emotion—from the human to the nonhuman. 1. Affect For Deleuze, what possesses language is sensation and affect, which cannot be far from what Derrida means when he says that force is the other of language. The writer uses words, but by creating a syntax that makes them pass into sensation that makes the standard language stammer, tremble, cry, or even sing: this is the style, the “tone,” the language of sensations . . . The writer twists language, makes it vibrate, seizes hold of it, and rends it in order to wrest the percept from perceptions, the affect from affections, the sensation from opinion . . . (What is Philosophy? 176) “Sensations, percepts, and affects,” Deleuze is careful to explain, “are beings whose validity lies in themselves . . . They could be said to exist in the absence of man because man, as he is caught in stone, on the canvas, or by words, is himself a compound of percepts and affects” (164). In other words, in order to form language, the human must already be constituted by affects and percepts. And although the language of revelation (which we have said is language caught up by what is in excess of it) can be argued to be coterminous with affect (the language in which Agamben’s animals are caught up is certainly nothing but relations of affecting and being affected) it is equally true that language as information and language as sign becomes more than itself when we consider


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it from the point of view of the force that takes it up. It is only because signification is exceeded by affect that we can make the same words the basis for different speech acts. “I shall return” might be a promise, a threat, or a citation, but it is only in abstracting it from a context—that is, a set of affects—that we can consider it “purely” as signification. Derrida, in his critique of Austin in “Signature Event Context,” correctly notes that Austin has managed to overlook the iteration of the signifier, a repetition upon which the speech act is based (36–47). What is most interesting about this critique is that, in taking Austin to task for attempting to bypass the problem of signification, Derrida is forced to hand signification over to a power that exceeds it far more than any idea of speech act ever could: the power of repetition. For there to be signification, there must be an affect—repetition—that already holds sway over the signifier, indeed, that defines the signifier as signifier. There is no signifier that is spoken only once. To signify is, in a sense, to repeat, to be caught up in cycles of repetition whose power extends beyond signification. Repetition, sensation, action can all be the basis of affect, and affect, as Deleuze has described it (borrowing from Spinoza), is whatever comes into being when something is affected or affects something else. More than that, it is the determination (which must always be actual) that founds all potentiality. Language is filled with affects, and indeed, would have no existence without them. But this also means that language is not a homogeneous and empty space in which various affects can be displayed like paintings on a wall. Language-as-affect (which we will see later is the same thing as Language-taken-up-by-affect) is so various that it begins to seem more and more misguided to see language as a genus (or a system, a Langue) into which individual events (or speech acts, or parole) are gathered. A love sonnet, a battle cry, a judgment from the bench, a mass, do not seem to be convincingly related by tarring them with a brush called “language.” But if affect is an affecting or a being-affected, then all that makes language possible, all those forces that link up with it, become part of it. Emotion, sensation. possibility, material, force, all have their place in language. And though we may argue along with Benjamin that it is only in the human that the most perfect language takes place, we must also argue (and not against Benjamin) that human language has nothing to communicate of the nonhuman world without that nonhuman world communicating itself to him. What, for example, is less human than light? Less removed from the f leshy weight of the body, the torpidity of muscle? And yet what is more the basis of human knowledge

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and understanding, Heidegger’s Dasein standing in the lighted clearing of Being? How much is clarity, uncovering, dispelling of darkness the proudest achievement of the human mind? This is what I mean when I say that affect is nonhuman, yet, far from being hostile to the human, gives it the gift of possibility. With “affect” we have the first of the six modalities of the nonhuman. Affect allows us to think of the human in terms of what surpasses it, undermines it, fragments it, but also in terms of what simultaneously supports its, energizes it, and holds it together. And although affect is often used interchangeably with emotion, we can see that affect goes beyond the realm of emotion. It is more accurate to say that emotion is a branch of affect. Emotion is one way of marking an impingement of one force upon another—the potentiality of human judgment brought together with a particular experience, leading to a particular feeling. But an action is also an affect, a perception is an affect, a composite of perception, feeling, movement can be an affect. Affects are far too varied and complex to be named as emotions. They happen between the human and something else. They place the human into a composite with the nonhuman, and each element of the composite participates in the affect as much as any other (I will mostly avoid the question of whether an affect can occur without a human being. Of course it can— animals have affects, and even objects carry the impingement of other forces within them or on their surfaces—but since I am dealing with the novel I will always deal with the nonhuman that is intimately related to the human). So affect is our first modality of the nonhuman. 2. The Event Events, much like affects, are difficult to define according to the traditional formula of “it is an A, which has the differentiating attributes of X,Y,Z”; but the event, as it has been described by Deleuze in The Logic of Sense does have an intimate relationship with language, even though it is difficult to speak of it in terms of being, in terms of any actually existing state of affairs. Defining the event, Deleuze tells us, is much like hunting Lewis Carrol’s Snark. Events are both real and nonexistent, both realizable and unfulfilled in their realization. It is important not to confuse the event with a state of things, with bodies and materials that come together to produce results or experience. Rather than being a set of bodies and things, rather than being the mingling and colliding of these bodies, the event is the effect of their mingling and colliding. Events are what Deleuze, after the Stoics,


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calls “incorporeal entities” (Logic 4), which are “not physical qualities and properties, but rather logical or dialectical attributes” (4–5). Existing and not existing; non-corporeal, yet the effect of bodies; neither active nor passive, yet the result of action and passion, the event is always paradoxical. And its greatest paradox is its relation to language. Deleuze takes us through a description of the event that makes of the event a kind of complex: event-sense. Sense is what is expressed in a proposition. So we are faced with a kind of becoming of the event. We have the event, which is sense, which is the expressed (or expressible) of a proposition. If we ask what independence the event then has from the proposition that expresses it, we will be on the right track and will be prepared for Deleuze’s paradoxical response. [W]hat is expressed does not exist outside its expression. This is why we cannot say that sense exists, but rather that it inheres or subsists. On the other hand, it does not merge at all with the proposition, for it has an objective (objectité) which is quite distinct. What is expressed has no resemblance whatsoever to the expression. (21) To call the event ideal is not at all to call it unreal. It may not exist, it may not act or suffer action, it may not even be found to exist outside of a proposition. But if the event teaches us anything, it is that existence itself is a narrow slice of the real. The event does not exist, it does not act, but it does “make possible,” it does have force. In fact, for Deleuze, it is the sense-event that makes language itself possible. How, Deleuze asks, does sound, which issues from bodies, become separated enough from those bodies to be organized into propositions and expressions? How, in other words does the body’s sounds cross the threshold from grunts of pleasure or pain, from the tearing and chewing of food, to the relative autonomy required for language? Something must separate the proposition-sound of language from the corporeal-sound of the body. Something must separate the proposition from the state of affairs. And this something must turn one face toward language and one toward states of things. It must use this double aspect to organize the relationship between language and the state of affairs, but be neither one nor the other (for if it were one or the other it could not separate and organize the two series language and states of affairs; it would merely homogenize them so that we would be left with the need to say that all states of affairs are language, or that language is simply another state of affairs, both of which beliefs have been followed fruitlessly for decades).

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“It operates,” Deleuze tells us, “on both sides by means of one and the same incorporeal power” (183). From Blanchot to Deleuze to Foucault, the perfect model of the event has always been death. Death has an extreme and definite relation to me and my body and is grounded in me, but it also has no relation to me at all—it is incorporeal and infinitive, impersonal, grounded only in itself. On one side, there is the part of the event which is realized and accomplished; on the other, there is that “part of the event which cannot realize its accomplishment.” (151–152) It is no wonder that the event is so often spoken of in terms of its imminent terror. It is ghostly, crossing the threshold from the nonexistent to the existing world, making possible and exerting force while powerless to act, finding its way into the world through the walls and traps of existence. It is the ideal model of the relationship of human and nonhuman. The objection that the nonhuman does not exist must be met head on with a claim that renders the objection irrelevant. The nonhuman does not exist, does not act, but, like the sense-event, makes possible the human. It has force that is not of existence, and it holds together the human and the nonhuman in two resonating series that make the human possible. We can speak of the nonhuman much as Aristotle speaks of prime matter, as having no existence in itself as such, but as having a kind of reality. In other words, the nonhuman, like prime matter, does not exist, but at the same time, it is not nothing. This distinction between “nonexistent” and “nothing” will always be important, since we can never see the nonhuman in itself and as such, but we will never be able to consign it to nothingness. It does not make actual, but makes possible. And if the human (in its guise as the psychological, the personal, the ego) finds this relationship disconcerting, it is the understandable fear that comes from the encounter with the overwhelming force of the real that exceeds existence. And, of course, the event cannot be subsumed under the rubric of “experience.” In experience, there is an accumulation of happenings that lead to other happenings. Rather than—as in the event—the mingling of bodies leading to a result, experience produces causes from causes: my house burns down, which causes me to become homeless; my homelessness causes me to go to a shelter; my stay at the shelter causes me to meet someone who helps me; his help causes me to find another place to live. A string of causes, one leading to another. The event, however, is the


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pure result. My house burns down. As an event, it is pure result: houseburning-down. Deleuze expresses these events as infinitives: houseto-burn-down. They are not, in other words, conjugated, but exist in an autonomous state, even though they are always to be found in states of being. So the event is not the experience, although all experience is occupied by events. 3. Force Force is our third of the six modalities of the nonhuman. I have chosen the term modality because, as shall become apparent, the six modalities are different perspectives, or perhaps different realizations of one diagram, one event. Already we can begin to ask questions about the relation between affects and events, and now between affect-event-force. We can begin with a kind of approximate commonsensical description of force, if only to bring to the surface some of the prejudices of the everyday understanding. We tend to see force as the most actual of things, the most unproblematically real. We speak of the transfer of force in physics as something that happens at the level of actual bodies; the gathering of forces in a political or military sense, which again has to do with actual bodies in the world; or the force of compulsion taking place on existing bodies and psyches. But force, much like the event, is more of a real nonexistence at the heart of power and of formations of power. In Foucault, Deleuze says again and again that force comes from the outside (86, 101). This is not simply to say that the force of one entity may impinge on the force of another entity exterior to it, but rather that force lies outside of (and not merely exterior to) that in which it inheres. The power to be affected is like a matter of force, and the power to affect is like a function of force. But it is a pure function, that is to say a non-formalized function, independent of the concrete forms it assumes, the aims it serves and the means it employs . . . And it is also a pure unformed matter independent of the formed substances, qualified objects or beings which it enters: it is a physics of primary or bare matter. (71–72; emphasis in the original) If there are echoes of Aristotle’s prime matter here it should not be surprising. Like prime matter, force is a reality whose freedom from form puts it below the threshold of existence, but that nonetheless cannot be simply called nothing, or unreal. Structures, institutions,

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stratified relations do indeed capture and shape forces (and indeed could not exist without force), and forces can only ever be seen within stratified formations, but, as with the event and the state of affairs, force subsists and insists. Language, literature, and the human are clearly such stratified formations. And just as “[w]e can already foresee that the forces within man do not necessarily contribute to the composition of a Man-form, but may be otherwise invested in another concept or form” (124), so we may say that literature and language are also possessed of these forces that may enter into relations with other forces of the outside. Literature and language envelope unformed matters and non-formalized functions. As a means of naming these unformed forces, Deleuze gives us the concept of the diagram. And as his example of a functioning diagram, Deleuze gives us Foucault’s Panopticon, a “pure function” of imposing behaviors or taste upon an enclosed and limited group. It matters little how and when this diagram is realized (like the event and force the diagram is never exhausted by particular actualizations), in a prison, in school, in advertising, or in an office. The diagram, then, can be defined in several ways: “it is the presentation of the relations between forces unique to a particular formation; it is the distribution of the power to affect and to be affected; it is the mixing of non-formalized pure functions and unformed pure matter” (72–73). Of course the question for the human becomes, into what diagram does it enter, what non-localized, infinitive relation of forces does it depend upon? And for literature the question is, what diagrams are enclosed by and enclose the text? And can the text itself be a diagram, a distribution of powers to be affected, of singularities, of unformed matters? Apart from the ideological presumptions that literary theory often loves to tease out of texts, apart from the reflected images of the human, apart from the recognizable complexes of the unconscious, what else subsists in and with the text, the story, the poem, and the novel? And when we discover meaning in a text, when, as I have said, we find a match between the world of the novel and the world of powers, relationships, and movements, what are we doing but diagramming forces? The relatively unformed forces that occupy any novel are the basis for the wellformed interpretations and meanings we can glean from the story. 4. Singularity The novel encloses singularities, singular points. This seems a truism if, by “singularity,” we understand “individual” defined psychologically.


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The individual never accounts for all the singularities she encloses. Much that goes to make up the human is lost in the human’s account of itself. It is for this reason that singularity is defined as “pre-individual, non-personal, and a-conceptual” (Logic 52): “one must remember rather that psychological and moral characters are also made of pre-personal singularities, and that their feelings or their pathos are constituted in the vicinity of these singularities” (55). As with our other modalities of the nonhuman, the singularity is caught up in paradox. We must say that it is not that particular quality that makes something belong to a class (we might ask what, in other words, makes any particular human belong to “humanity”); in other words, it is not an individual. But neither is it simply an entity that is absolutely unique, so unique that it does not belong to any class. What would this even mean? To the extent that we consider a thing as actually existing we cannot help but at the very least categorizing it as a “thing.” So the singularity does not belong to the individual in which it is held any more than the event belongs to the proposition that expresses it. But, on the other hand, the singular is not the universal, even though the singular does have a kind of generality about it, the same generality of the event: “Singularities are the true transcendental events” (Logic 102–103). Pre-personal, and pre-individual, the singularity can burst from the individual that contains it; singularities, or singular points, make up individuals, but they also communicate, at another level, with other singularities outside of the individual: “singularities- events correspond to heterogeneous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather ‘metastable,’ endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed. (Potential energy is the energy of the pure event, whereas forms of actualization correspond to the realization of the event)” (103). If we wish to describe the singularity in terms of existence we might say, with Deleuze, that they are “turning points and points of inf lection; bottlenecks, knots, foyers, and centers; points of fusion, condensation, and boiling; points of tears and joy, sickness and health, hope and anxiety, ‘sensitive’ points” (52). There are myriad ways in which these modes of singularity can be translated into the language of the personal—“I have my limits,” “this is a sensitive area for me,” “I just can’t get past this,” “I’m reaching my breaking point.” But there are also myriad ways that the language of the personal fails to give a name to the singularities it encloses. When there are unrecognized or barely recognized perceptions, when there is language that only gestures to something that it

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cannot name, when there are effects that seem unrelated to any discernible causes—there the force of the singularity is at work. The problem of the singularity is to give it a name. The human, language, and literature all enclose singularities, all are partial realizations of singularity-events. But it is not as identity that the human breaks open to let loose its singularities; it is not as ideological manipulation that the novel resonates with singularity- events. And it is not as a mechanism of identity that language reveals the pre-individual and apersonal forces that give it life. It is for these reasons that we must avoid reading novels in terms of personality, ideology, or identity. The novel does not represent the human; it does not trace itself back to an ideology that places the human at the center of society and the universe. It is clearly concerned with the human, but this is because both the human and the novel are constituted in the vicinity of the same sets or series of singularities. Needless to say, in crossing over from the human to the literary to the outside of both, these singularities reveal themselves as nonpersonal, nonsubjective, and nonhuman. If a character is only an individual, if she only has memory, emotion, experience, she is an empty shell. The individual is occupied by singularities, singularities of affect, of perception, of action. It is the singularity within the individual that makes it resonate. The individual becomes more than desires, feelings, schemes; her actions take on larger proportions because they are happening on ground not occupied by the personal, but by a mysterious singularity that we struggle to name even as we feel its effects upon us. 5. The Outside Just as the event is not to be confused with a state of affairs, or a singularity with an individual, so the outside must be distinguished from a simple exteriority. A body can be said to have an inside and an outside that meet at the surface of the skin. In a field of interacting bodies, then, each body will encounter others that are outside of it, exterior to it. This is not, however, the exteriority, or the outside to which I am referring. The sense in which one body is outside another, or one is outside of an institution, or the unconscious contents are outside of consciousness are what we might call relative exteriority. But there is another outside, another exteriority that is at once farther away and more intimately close. Deleuze does not often speak of it in his work, though so many of his concepts—the virtual, singularity, the event— rely on it, and in some books (Difference and Repetition, Foucault) he


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has acknowledged the importance of Blanchot for a thinking of the outside. Not surprisingly, it is impossible to say what exteriority is. Nor is it surprising that Deleuze, Blanchot, and Levinas make different uses of the concept, uses that overlap but are far from identical. When Deleuze says that “[i]t is always from the outside that a force confers on others or receives from others the variable position to be found only at a particular distance or in a particular relation” (Foucault 86) we see an exteriority that is, more than anything else, the outside of particular determinations. There are, as we have seen, formed matters and formalized functions that make up not only particular institutions, but even what is recognizable to us as actuality. We do not see unformed matters, or forces directly. They are outside not only of institutions and formations, but outside of actuality as well. It is, however, an outside that forms the interiority of thought: “[I]f thought comes from the outside and remains attached to the outside, how come the outside does not f lood into the inside, as the element that thought does not and cannot think of? The unthought is therefore not external to thought but lies at its very heart, as that impossibility of thinking which doubles or hollows out the outside” (97). For Blanchot, the outside takes on a more haunting aspect, which is that of death. Death haunts Blanchot’s work, not as the final possibility toward which we move, not as an imminent necessity to which we must surrender, but as the ultimate impossibility, indeed as the very model of impossibility. Death is both the most certain and uncertain of all things. It is true that it will come, but doubtful that I will be there to greet it, to grasp it, and make it my own death. Since dying is the very nonbeing of the “I” that it takes away, it is not the “I” that dies. There is not a trace of action in dying. It is pure passion, pure passivity, and hence, radically separated from any subjectivity. And this relationship (or non-relationship) to death is paralleled in the subject’s relation to language. As Foucault tells us in Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from the Outside “[T]he being of language only appears for itself with the disappearance of the subject” (15). The writer is caught up by language. Her writing is in no way an act of mastery or control, but rather a kind of deathlike passivity, a contention with impossibility. This is why Blanchot can draw his rather disturbing comparison between the artist and the suicide. “Both the artist and the suicide plan something that eludes all plans, and if they do have a path, they have no goal; they do not know what they are doing. Both exert a resolute will, but both are linked to what they want

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to achieve by a demand that knows nothing of their will” (Space of Literature 106). Clearly, the writer’s great struggle is not the facing down of the dreaded dragon called death. Death is not to be feared as the relentless enemy; rather, it refuses to engage in battle. It slips away, but in slipping away draws one after it. It is the impossibility, yet the reality, of that which lies beyond the actual. And we have seen, in so many modalities of the nonhuman (the event, singularity, force), the same kind of disjunction between the actual and a nonexistence that is nonetheless real. The writer’s relation with force, the singularity-event, takes on the same impossibility as his relationship with death. It is for this reason that death, the event, exteriority, force are modalities or aspects of the nonhuman: “In the work man speaks, but the work gives voice in man to what does not speak: to the unnamable, the inhuman, to what is devoid of truth, bereft of justice, without rights” (232). Levinas expresses, in a more “properly” philosophical discourse, the same concern with what lies on the outside of the actual. But the “beyond” of which he speaks is the beyond of Being itself, if Being is totality: “The visage of being that shows itself in war is fixed in the concept of totality, which dominates Western philosophy. Individuals are reduced to being bearers of forces that command them unbeknown to themselves. The meaning of individuals (invisible outside of this totality) is derived from the totality” (Totality 21–22). There are, of course, many totalities that dominate western thought. Almost every system tries to impose coordinates that totalize the field of existence: the unconscious, history, even capital have taken on the role of totalizing forces that cover the entire field of nature/culture. For Levinas, Being is the grandfather of them all. But there is a beyond of this totalized and totalizing Being, a surplus always exterior to the totality, as though the objective totality did not fill out the true measure of being, as though another concept, the concept of infinity, were needed to express this transcendence with regard to totality, non-encompassable within a totality and as primordial as totality . . . It is ref lected within the totality and history, within experience. (22–23; emphasis in the original) This beyond, this “otherwise than being,” takes on the form not of Blanchot’s Outside, but of alterity, the otherness of ethical faceto-face encounter. The issue of language, then, becomes largely the issue of speech and communication. All language is taken up by the


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ethical relationship with the Other: “Language is not enacted within a consciousness; it comes to me from the Other and reverberates in consciousness by putting it in question. This event is irreducible to consciousness . . .” (204). In Otherwise than Being Levinas introduces the distinction between the Said and the Saying, and explains that while the Said can always be assimilated to being, can always be taken up in a theme, the saying escapes the said at every point. “Saying signifies otherwise than as an apparitor presenting essence and entities” (46). Of course we already understand the infinite modalities of the said. They are called themes, subjects, contents. But we have little sense of the modalities of saying. Levinas leaves us with several problems, some concerning literature, others concerning the human: to what extent does literature embody the face-to-face of the ethical relationship? To what extent is it an address to the transcendence of the other? And to what extent can literary criticism see literature as a saying rather that a said? And if it can address itself to the saying of literature, what tools does it have at its disposal? And does it need to create new tools that will at least take some trace of the saying of literature? And if literature is indeed, as I have said, about the human, how does Levinas’ human intersect with the novel? For although Levinas is by no means an anti-humanist—and in fact he might be said to be the twentieth century philosopher most firmly committed to humanism—his human is certainly not a humanbeing. The human face encountered in the face-to-face of the ethical relationship is taken up by the transcendence of the otherwise-thanbeing. If we are to define the human as the personal, the psychological, the social, then this transcendent human that overlaps it can only appear in the world as the nonhuman, that which is not personal, not psychological, not a subject in society, but rather a kind of virtual human that can only actualize itself in the human-being by differing from itself. 6. The Virtual Our sixth, and last, modality of the nonhuman is the virtual. As we have seen most of the modalities of the nonhuman are related to approximate everyday definitions from which they must be distinguished: affect is not emotion; an event is not a state of things or an experience; force is not physical; the singular is not the individual; and exteriority is not merely the space outside of a delimited body. In the same way, we must understand the difference between the virtual and the term with which it is too easily confused, the potential. The virtual

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in many ways has a wider scope than the potential because it can cross the space of difference. Perhaps the best elaboration of the limitation of the possible is Aristotle’s in Metaphysics. His two great examples of the limitations of the possible are the transformation of wine into vinegar and of the human seed into a human being. Aristotle tells us, first of all, that wine is not potentially vinegar. Wine as a substance, as a this, does not become vinegar. Wine may become many things—hot, cold, sour, agitated, mobile, and all the while remain wine. So this is the first condition of possibility: a thing may manifest as many possibilities as it will, so long as it remains itself. Consequently, wine does not have the potentiality to cross the threshold that makes wine wine. But we know that wine does in fact turn into vinegar, it does in fact cross the threshold, but only by differing from itself. So we might say as a first rule that the limits of substance are the limits of possibility, whereas the virtual proceeds by differentiation. Aristotle also tells us that the seed is not potentially a human until it has been fertilized, indeed it is not potentially human until it has started irrevocably (except by external accident) on the process of becoming human. It is almost as if Aristotle is saying that the seed is not potentially human until it is actually human. This is overstating the case, but it does point to our second rule, which is that potentiality becomes real by a process of resemblance. The actuality is essentially the same as its possibility. My actual ability to speak French is almost identical to my potentiality to speak French. This resemblance is the source of Bergson’s critique of possibility as merely a retroactive projection of the present moment into the past. Only when I can actually speak French, in short, do I project backward into the past and say “There must have been a potentiality to speak French present all along!” The virtual contrasts with the possible on these two main points— sameness/difference and resemblance/disjunction. The virtual is not, like the possible, contrasted with the real, but with the actual (Levy 13–17). The virtual is perfectly real qua virtual, but as it begins to actualize it differs from itself. The actualization of the virtual does not resemble the virtuality from which it springs because, in actualizing, it crosses the threshold within which it is identical to itself. It therefore becomes problematic to understand the relation of the actual to its particular virtuality, and indeed, the problematic is the form of the virtual. “Contrary to the possible, static and already constituted, the virtual is like a problematic complex, a node of tendencies or forces that accompanies a situation, an event, an object or any entity and which calls for a process of resolution: actualization” (14; my translation). This resolution


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will also, with justice, go by the name “creativity,” and the novel, in its always problematic relationship with itself and with the forces that intersect it, can become a great series of virtual transformations and the theory of the novel becomes a theory of the virtual problematic contained in the novel. The novel becomes a kind of space where the rules of potential change are trumped by the momentum of virtual evolution. No longer caught in a linear relation that forces us to ask fruitless questions of order (which came first, which is the cause of the other), the human, language, and literature are all taken up into that timeless time, that abstract yet real threshold between a past that has just disappeared and a future that will just begin. All three are caught up at once in the modalities of the nonhuman, and to properly understand any of them, and especially their relationship, we must be prepared to let them unfold, unmake themselves as they will. I would also like to distinguish the “virtual” from what Lukacs has called “abstract potentiality,” which is nothing more than a subjective fantasy. Potentiality—seen abstractly or subjectively—is richer than actual life. Innumerable possibilities for man’s development are imaginable, only a small percentage of which will be realized. Modern subjectivism, taking these imagined possibilities for actual complexity of life, oscillates between melancholy and fascination. When the world declines to realize these possibilities, this melancholy becomes tinged with contempt. (“The Ideology of Modernism” 599) In fact, every possibility is not present in a human being, or in anything actual. Within certain limits, the human may manifest itself in many ways. It may change, learn, develop; but because its potentialities are manifest in a concrete actuality, it cannot become all things. Within the threshold of its being, there are things that cannot become manifest. A mortal cannot become omnipresent or eternal. So the desire for endless potentiality is only a frustrated wish. Virtuality is distinguished from potentiality not because it offers endless prospects of transformation (it indeed offers more than potentiality does) but because the transformations do not happen within the limits of being. The “I” does not get what it wants from potentiality; rather, the “I” itself is transformed into something else, crosses its preestablished boundaries. But the virtual transformation is as real as what Lukacs calls “concrete potentiality.” It happens between very real terms, and mixes bodies, affects, actions, and perceptions. It is not merely a matter

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of fantasy, but, as I have said, of a problematic. How does something transform into something else? How does one reality branch out and create others that differ from it? Thinking of the novel we might ask, in Wharton’s The House of Mirth, how the obsession with beauty transforms itself into a moral awareness (and a moral awareness that keeps a trace of the aesthetic that originated it from across several thresholds); we might ask, in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, how Sutpen transforms himself into Quentin Compson, and how history is constituted by a series of virtual transformations. We might ask, in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing, how Billy Parham becomes transformed in his relationship with the wolf, and we might further ask how the wolf, as virtual image, puts Billy into a transformative relationship with the image of a demonic God. All of these questions will focus on the most concrete aspects of each novel: how it creates and develops affects, how it takes from the impersonal forces within and around each character, how language is made to resonate with the affects and virtualities that the writer manages to create. Transformation is, after all, a material affair. Literature/Language/Human I have said that the language of revelation is the taking up of semiotics and signification by a force that is outside of it. When it is caught up by a modality of the nonhuman, a force, and event, language is not other than that force, that event. It maintains no autonomy. And indeed, if we ask whether there is a “pure” language, a language free of the intensive possession by the nonhuman, we must answer that such a language could neither refer, express, or in fact even appear. Although, as we have seen, the modalities of the nonhuman possess a paradoxical reality that is not of existence, the existence of language would vanish into nothingness if it were cut off from what lies beyond it. There is no reason the triumvirate of literature, language, and the human need be the only constellation with which we are concerned. Certainly language and the human have their roles in many formations—plastic arts, war, law. But surely literature most directly takes language as both its medium and its matrix. And it can be argued that it is in the novel that language and the human form their strongest alliance (since poetry so often concerns itself with the other-thanhuman, and film has made its mark by raising physical objects to a new level of expressiveness).


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The question that remains for us is not whether or not the modalities of the nonhuman have something to contribute to criticism but what new affects can we find mapped out in our most familiar masterpieces, what new forces will we finally see shooting across the whiteness of the page, what great and singular events will be hovering in the infinitive spaces of the most classic stories, what free-f loating crystals of exteriority shall we find in the characters whose worlds seem so closed, what virtualities await us, unactualized and, even so, haunting the familiar forest paths, the elegant parlors, the dark mansions that we dream of together?


CH A P T E R

T WO

Wharton’s Aesthetics and the Ethics of Affect

Characters can only exist, and the author can only create them, because they do not perceive but have passed into the landscape and are themselves part of the compound of sensations . . . Affects are precisely these nonhuman becomings of man. —Deleuze, What is Philosophy? 169 The miracle of distance asserts itself in many modes, spatial, conceptual, temporal. It is the miracle that mathematicians feel when they have created and discovered a formula for the sheer aesthetic delight of its form and harmony and then realize, to their great surprise, that their formula may be used to predict price f luctuations or send a probe slingshotting around Jupiter. And it is the same miracle that transfixes the theorist who explores a concept, a theory, for the pure enjoyment of its elegance and complexity, and who discovers—again with a great shock of delight—that the concept is the key to unraveling the hard knot of a problem lying at the center of a story, a problem that begins with a close reading of a story, an opening to the rules and conditions of that particular fictional world. The concept comes from a great distance to a profound intimacy with a story’s singularity. In this case our elegant concept is called “affect” (and we will see how this elegant concept is tied to another elegant concept: “virtuality”) and our problem, our irresistible enigma, is called “Lily Bart,” the paradoxical beauty of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. It is appropriate that we should have already heard the words “beauty” and “elegance” because it is in Lily’s beauty that our problem first begins. The shock with which Wharton begins the novel—“Selden Paused in

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surprise”—is the very shock the reader encounters with the unnamable singularity that is Lily. “He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her” (6). Selden’s impression of Lily Bart in the opening scene of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, as much as it may be a confused impression is one that begs to be named, and its name can only be Lily Bart. In Grand Central Station, itself an intersection of dull humanity, Wharton gives us Lily Bart, a character and an intersection of affects, affects that may be sensed—only vaguely—by an interested and sensitive audience like Selden. The affects that intersect in Lily resist being named in any conventional language. They can only be named by speaking awkwardly. She “always roused speculation . . . [H]er simplest acts seemed the result of far-reaching intentions” (3). Or, “Her vivid head, relieved against the dull tints of the crowd, made her more conspicuous than in a ballroom” (4). The difficulty of naming Lily’s affects even leads to the speculation that she is a creature apart from the run of humanity: “Was it possible that she belonged to the same race? The dinginess, the crudity of this average section of womanhood made him feel how highly specialized she was” (5). “Requiring sacrifice of the dull,” “standing in relief,” “giving the impression of far reaching intentions”: none of these affects has a name. We cannot label them merely attractiveness, ambition, uniqueness, because they are, like Lily, highly specialized. They are neither feelings, nor emotions, nor qualities of personality, but affective intensities. Lily does not “feel” them—she is enveloped by them, and she only feels or provokes feeling because of them. They are the place where the proper name Lily Bart intersects with the proper name The House of Mirth. Amid the rushing throng of common humanity—of personality, emotion, the familiar motivations of mere mortality—Lily stands as a creature of affect, a being who speaks the language of the human with a decided accent. But before we can explore Lily as a being of affect, we must begin to understand how affect functions, the ethology that maps its movements and transformations. For the moment we will leave Lily in this state of affective stasis in order to explore the concept of affect itself. We will begin with a negative definition that will relate affect to the two conceptual categories with which affect is often confused: feeling and emotion. If we wish to picture the relationship between the three we may imagine them as three concentric circles, feeling enveloped by emotion, emotion by affect. Feeling is what we can describe in terms

Wharton’s Aesthetics & Ethics of Affect

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of the personal—my “personal feelings”—my loves, hates, happiness, suspicion. However mixed they may be, feelings may always be named, indeed we may even argue that they come into being precisely by being named. Emotion is a more complex term and it forms one of the conditions of possibility for feeling. Emotions are accompanied by feelings, of course, but emotions themselves are more akin to orientations, stances toward the world. And the same might be said about the related area of moods. They too are orientations, dispositions that are not first psychological. Heidegger, in his description of moods in Being and Time, focuses on moods as orientations at the same time as he rejects moods as essentially inward. “A mood is not related to the psychical . . . and is not itself an inner condition which then reaches forth in an enigmatical way and puts its mark on Things and persons (B&T 176). “It comes neither from ‘outside’ nor from ‘inside’, but arises out of Being-in-the-world, as a way of such Being” (176). Heidegger expresses this being-turned-toward as “being-delivered-over” or “thrownness.” We have no trouble saying that novels have moods, and we mean by this, not that they have consciousness, but that they are spaces traversed by certain forces, forces that may then traverse us as readers, turning us in certain directions. In fact, we might even say that the “emotions” of novels exemplify the original sense of emotions—the Latin e “out,” and movere “to move”— far better than the inward-turning emotions of psychology. If emotion is a disposition, we may say in turn that we are disposed, but by what? Gilles Deleuze, in his two studies of Spinoza—Spinoza: Practical Philosophy and Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza—proposes that the answer is “affect.” For Spinoza the definition of affect is implied in the definition of Substance (or the terms that Spinoza uses interchangeably with substance: Nature or God). We needn’t get caught in theological terminology to conceive of an absolutely monistic substance, infinite and indivisible, which acts by self-affection, by a turning of force back on itself, by a self-differentiation that is synonymous with creativity. In Spinoza, the active (the always active) force of Nature (or God, or Substance) expresses itself in the world through affections: “By mode I mean the affections of substance” is Spinoza’s fifth definition in Book One of Ethics. Indeed, this active force is the world. The mode, the affection of substance, is what we name a being. Substance subsists in its modalities. In propositions 18 (God is the immanent, not the transitive, cause of things) and 13 (absolutely infinite substance is indivisible) we see a world in which each existing thing not

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only comes from an absolutely real and active force, but is an expression of the undivided power and essence of that force. In other words, the thin slice of the actual that we call the existing world is surrounded by what is not; not all that is real comes into existence. But this nonexistent world subsists and is effective within the modalities it generates. In his study of Deleuze, Alain Badiou names this realm “The Virtual”: “ ‘Virtual’ is without any doubt the principal name of Being in Deleuze’s work” (42). The virtual is a kind of groundless ground, real, though nonexistent, that forms the condition of emergence for actual beings (physical, psychological, or even conceptual): “The ground,” Badiou argues “is, in other words, that eternal ‘share’ of beings by which their variability and their equivocity are moored in the absolute unity of Being” (44). A unified Being that subsists virtually and that subsists equally in all of its modes (or its creations). It is not a new idea in philosophy. Aristotle named it prime matter, Spinoza substance, Deleuze virtuality. But how do we map this movement of the virtual and the actual? Where do we see this abstract being that is nonetheless perfectly real? An example: I take a walk. A simple enough act, but is it merely to be described as an “act”? What is “a walk”? Is it my body? No, the body alone, necessary for the walk, does not account for its being. Is it the action of my body when it is walking? No. I can be walking in a number of circumstances without “taking a walk.” Is it my intention, my inward desire to experience a walk? Again, this internal desire does not account for or create the walk (I may intend to walk without doing so). Is it the environment through which I walk, the city at night, or a country path? Is it the smell of a damp forest or the glitter of street lights on a wet pavement? We can multiply examples endlessly, but we will never find in any one of them the conditions that create a walk. “The walk” is entirely abstract, not to be found in any of its elements, physical, temporal, psychological, or literary, though emerging out of them. As an affective assemblage—and Spinoza takes pains to describe modality in this way—it is both active (“taking a walk”) and passive (“experiencing a walk”). But who would deny the reality of a walk? It is real, it is abstract, it is unlocatable. It is an affect. Spinoza speaks a kind of “cosmic” language. His terms are large because he is speaking of infinite substance. This speaking of infinity is usually ruled out-of-bounds by contemporary theory of the novel, caught as it is in rules of social constructivism, ideological groundings, and signification. It is a measure of Deleuze’s courage and his love for Spinoza that he does not balk at speaking of the novel in this very


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Spinozist monistic language. In doing so, he gives us a perfect set of concepts for understanding what a great novel accomplishes and what Wharton in particular accomplishes in Lily Bart: Everything that novelists must extract from the perceptions, affections, and opinions of their psychosocial “models” passes entirely into the percepts and affects to which the character must be raised without holding on to any other life. And this entails a vast plane of composition that is not abstractly preconceived but constructed as the work progresses, opening, mixing, dismantling, and reassembling increasingly unlimited compounds in accordance with the penetration of cosmic forces. (What is 188) So how do these concepts fulfill the promise of solving the textual problem we are naming Lily Bart, the hard knot of a problem that requires the concept of affect to undo? The House of Mirth presents us with the enigma of being a radically ethical work based around the life of a character who makes monumental ethical decisions with absolutely no basis in her character, her personality, her personal history, her desires, for doing so. It is not unusual to encounter a reader of The House of Mirth who feels little sympathy for Lily’s plight—and to my dismay I have encountered more than one such reader. They have expressed the conviction that Lily has not earned the nobility with which she dies, and that indeed she is receiving some sort of just payback for her shallowness and blindness. As dismaying as these responses might be, we must remember that they echo many of the early critical responses to The House of Mirth. The critics of Wharton’s novel, those who wrote their reviews from 1905 to 1906 and those whose work ref lects more contemporary political concerns, seem to be in agreement that the novel documents a moral struggle. Its categories are those of ethical choice, will, and personal character. If Lily fails as a character it is because, as Mary Moss complains in her 1906 Atlantic Monthly review, she “is guided entirely by taste, without a shadow of conviction. Lily is no more deliberately venal than she is deliberately decent” (310). And so, Moss concludes: “At best, Lily can only inspire interest and curiosity. You see, you understand, and you ratify, but unfortunately, you do not greatly care” (310). Other of Wharton’s contemporaries, in language that may remind us today more of Republican political truisms than literary criticism, question Lily’s lack of will. “Her moral fibre has been so undermined by her self-indulgent way of life that she has neither the courage nor the decision to grasp the best when it is within reach” (Ford 311).

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Along with this concern for Lily Bart’s “moral fibre” is the assumption, made often, that it is her want of humanness, or a want of humanness in her circle of effete socialites, to which we might trace her ethical deficiency. Lily has “not a particle of genuine, fundamental, good human feeling, and has very little bad” (312). Good or bad, it seems that any human feeling would be a step in the right direction. The panacea for Lily, according to several critics, would be a healthy dose of inwardness, a courageous uncovering of the “true” (always inward) self as opposed to the false social mask that Lily is expert at assuming: “Lily has merely learned to suppress and camouf lage her own impulses and ambitions” (Ammons 349). This inwardness might be a hidden source of creativity that, Elaine Showalter laments, must be wasted “entirely upon a display of self ” (360). The inwardness may be the place where Lily can express feelings without the emotional reserve, that “little impalpable barrier” across which she and Selden cannot communicate (Federko 40). This inwardness might be something that should have but did not form in childhood: “Lacking a constant figure to whom she could attach herself, Lily fails to develop a viable core to her personality” (Erlich 55). And, of course, the inwardness may be the realm of those sexual passions that Lily has managed to blind herself to, and regards only with discomfort (58). Whatever the contents of the “inward” Lily—sexuality, freedom, creativity—it is, for many critics, the place of the “real,” the “authentic” Lily. The real Lily seems to be the one capable of making moral choices, the one who always throws away the opportunities that are placed before her, and who finally, in burning Bertha Dorset’s letters, gives up her last chance at social redemption. To be fully human, rather than a commodity, rather than a mere beauty, rather than a creature of impulse and sensation, Lily must make moral choices, must reject the ethical compromises that her peers accept without question. But Wharton is careful to draw Lily Bart as a character with no basis in her personality to make moral choices. Lily is from beginning to end a creature of her world. “There were moments when she longed blindly for anything different, anything strange, remote and untried; but the utmost reach of her imagination did not go beyond picturing her usual life in a new setting. She could not figure herself as anywhere but in a drawing-room, diffusing elegance as a f lower sheds perfume” (132). She is bred to this world, its pleasures, its rewards, its relationships and strategies. Even her discontentment with its treachery and pettiness is an element of the world. The dullest socialite of her inner circle, the most ruthless businessman, has wit enough to see their world for the


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mockery that it is. Even Selden, Lily’s only possible line of f light from this world, is more of a diversion, a source of the very fantasy that binds Lily to her social circle. One is never so entrapped by a world as when one imagines that one is inwardly free of it. Notwithstanding this radical internalization of the culture that will eventually cast her off and destroy her, Lily does make moral choices, wrenching ones, choices in which she sacrifices not only a life of leisure, but life itself. And this is our double bind: the radically ethical character with no personal grounding in ethics. Where then do Lily’s ethical decisions emerge from? From the unlikeliest of places, we will see: from her beauty. Like “a walk,” beauty is an affective assemblage, real, abstract, virtual. Beauty is not ethics, but it is the condition that allows the ethical to emerge. Lily is characterized by a certain set of complex affects that are neither emotions nor feelings, nor even personality traits (as we will see in more detail in the paragraphs that follow). These affects, though conceptually they lie outside of the range of the moral-humanist discourse of the novel, nonetheless provide the grounding for that discourse, give it its possibility, but secretly, without being able to be named in terms of that discourse. The moral-human has little to say about affective assemblages. But before we continue we must provide at least a partial mapping of what these affects are, and how they assemble themselves. Again, these affects are referred to in the novel, but do not form part of its moral stance. They are, we might say, the excessive gestures of the novel, only spoken of in terms that are neutral or negative. We will examine two of the affects that subsist in the character of Lily Bart and are both facets of her beauty. I have said that affect, as Spinoza and Deleuze elaborate the concept, is both active (substance affecting itself ) and passive (substance being affected by itself ). In terms of a singular being, affect is what the being is capable of, but equally what it is capable of experiencing or undergoing. For Lily, there is an active affect that we will call “crystallization” (in which the effect of Lily’s beauty is most powerfully felt) and a passive affect that we will call “sensation” (in which lily is most poignantly vulnerable to beauty). The Crystal Lily Lily is crystalline. This is not merely a metaphor. She is not simply “like” a crystal, or a gem. She can be like a gem only because she partakes of the affective being of the gem, the crystal, what it is capable of

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doing, what it is capable of undergoing. Beneath the process of resemblance there is a sharing of affect. “The glow of the stones warmed Lily’s veins like wine. More completely than any other expression of wealth they symbolized the life she longed to lead, the life of fastidious aloofness and refinement in which every detail should have the finish of a jewel, and the whole form a harmonious setting to her own jewellike rareness” (119). The first affect of the gem: to be rare, to be valued. But there is another affect of the gem that we will name “stasis.” In crystallization we have the freezing of a movement, the capture of a movement by the lattice-structure underlying the crystal. In its real abstraction, the crystal and the woman share a virtual being. a subtle change had passed over the quality of her beauty. Then it had had a transparency through which the f luctuations of the spirit were sometimes tragically visible; now its impenetrable surface suggested a process of crystallization which had fused her whole being into one hard brilliant substance . . . [T]o Selden it seemed like that moment of pause and arrest when the warm f luidity of youth is chilled into its final shape. (255) In Lily, movement is arrested. Again, we are not speaking psychologically or personally, but affectively. Lily’s beauty, that gem-like rareness that Wharton confers upon her, stops the f low of time. Perhaps the most characteristic moment of The House of Mirth is the tableau vivant scene, where Lily holds her audience rapt as she stands in a frozen pose before the spectators. Indeed so skillfully had the personality of the actors been subdued to the scenes they figured in that even the least imaginative of the audience must have felt a thrill of contrast when the curtain suddenly parted on a picture which was simply and undisguisedly the portrait of Miss Bart. Here there could be no mistaking the predominance of personality—the unanimous “Oh!” of the spectators was a tribute, not to the brush-work of Reynolds’s “Mrs. Lloyd” but to the f lesh and blood loveliness of Lily Bart. She had shown her artistic intelligence in selecting a type so like her own that she could embody the person represented without ceasing to be herself. It was as though she had stepped, not out of, but into, Reynolds’s canvas, banishing the phantom of his dead beauty by the beams of her living grace. (178)


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But there is another time that Lily lives in: the time of conspiracy and decline. Her social circle is replete with schemes being carried out, rumors being circulated, weekends, dinners, and adulteries being planned. Her own place in this world is circumscribed by time: her remaining years of youth and beauty, the goal of marriage toward which she struggles, the ascendancy that she anticipates. It is this time that stops. Her crystalline beauty, in other words, crystallizes and arrests social time, the time in which her own moral decline is unfolding. Selden perceives—as do we—that Lily’s beauty shows itself in those moments when it freezes the f low of normal time, the languorous leisure time of her social circle, the time of aging and devaluation that threatens her worth as a commodity, and the narrative time that structures the reading of the novel. In her article on beauty and pleasure in film, Laura Mulvey has noted how the beautiful woman freezes the f low of diegesis. The same is true of Lily Bart’s beauty in The House of Mirth, except that this beauty that freezes time is not the result of fetishization, but of participation in a wider set of affective forces. Even in the first pages of the novel, when Selden encounters Lily in Grand Central Station, Wharton notes “It struck him at once that she was waiting for some one, but he hardly knew why the idea arrested him” (3). And two paragraphs later she tells us “Miss Bart was a figure to arrest even the suburban traveller rushing to his last train” (4). Does this arrest have an ethical dimension? Can we, for a start, see this sudden suspension of time in situations where an ethical decision must be made? In our mapping of Lily’s affects we see that while value, rarity, indifference, and stasis may be a part of the affect of crystallization, crystallization is itself taken up in certain forms of arrest. The crystal is itself an expression of the f lows and arrests of time and movement. And it is the movement of social time, the inertia that propels the stars of the social firmament in their accustomed orbits, that must stop in order for ethics to become even possible. Indeed, those moments of The House of Mirth that are most unambiguously moments of ethical decision making are taken up by this freezing of movement. They are what, in chaos theory, have been called bifurcation points, moments when the crowding mass of embryonic virtualities and incipiencies reach a kind of crisis point where one of the virtualities inherent in a system must pass the threshold into actuality (Massumi 23–45). Lily works toward a goal, marrying well (Selden asks her ironically “Isn’t marriage your vocation?” (11)) but she never actualizes that potential: “She might have married more than once—the conventional rich marriage which she had been taught to consider the sole end of existence—but when the

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opportunity came she had always shrunk from it” (207). Mrs. Fisher tells a story about one of Lily’s early lost opportunities. An Italian Prince, rich and the real thing, wanted to marry her; but just at the critical moment a good-looking step-son turned up, and Lily was silly enough to f lirt with him while her marriagesettlements with the step-father were being drawn up . . . That’s Lily all over, you know: she works like a slave preparing the ground and sowing her seed; but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest she over-sleeps herself or goes off on a picnic. (251) Early in the novel we see Lily about to engineer a proposal from the rich but obtuse Percy Gryce, another one of the dullards that populate her social circle and whose only distinction is his interest in Americana. After she has charmed him, shown herself to advantage, and even feigned an interest in and knowledge of his hobby, she commits a series of blunders, all unworthy of her putative expertise and mastery in the art of man-catching. She insults Bertha Dorset, a rival for Selden’s affections (or at least someone who had once enjoyed his favor) and she breaks her promise to walk in the afternoon with Percy Gryce, a walk where the expected proposal is to be proffered. As she walks, instead, with Selden, she is aware of the forces contending in the moment: “There were in her at the moment two beings, one drawing deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other gasping for air in a little black prison-house of fears. But gradually the captive’s gasps grew fainter, or the other paid less heed to them: the horizon expanded, the air grew stronger, and the free spirit quivered for f light” (84). This is the moment of passional suspension, when Lily is at an immobile point (a “moment,” a word Wharton uses again and again) where she suddenly senses all of the virtualities resonating in her being, all that her particular beauty and sensation is calling her to. I have said that affect is always in excess of its particular actualizations, or rather that affect is the perception within actuality of all the unactualized but real virtualities immanent to it: The escape of affect cannot but be perceived, alongside the perceptions that are its capture. This side-perception may be punctual, localized in an event . . . When the continuity of affective escape is put into words, it tends to take on positive connotations. For it is nothing less than the perception of one’s own vitality, one’s sense of aliveness, of changeability (often signified as “freedom”). (Massumi 36)


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But the moment of passional suspension may also be filled with less positive energies. What characterizes the moment of passional suspension is its overfullness; not only do many incipiencies crowd for entry into the actual, but there are always too many to be dealt with. The moment of decision is always a kind of impulse, a sudden movement that detaches itself from the inchoate power of virtuality, wrests one actualization from the crowding throng of virtualities. It is just such an impulse that seals Lily’s second major decision, not to marry George Dorset, who is at her mercy. if she came to him at such a moment he would be hers with all the force of his deluded faith. And the power to make him so lay in her hand—lay there in a completeness he could not even remotely conjecture . . . She stood silently, gazing away from him down the autumnal stretch of the deserted lane. And suddenly fear possessed her—fear of herself, and of the terrible force of the temptation. All her past weaknesses were like so many eager accomplices drawing her toward the path their feet had already smoothed. She turned quickly, and held out her hand to Dorset. “Goodbye—I’m sorry; there’s nothing in the world that I can do.” (329) And her final decision, the decision to destroy the letters that would give her power over Bertha Dorset and guarantee social redemption, is made in Selden’s presence in just the kind of overfull moment of passion that has punctuated the story. Wharton falls back always on the suddenness of the moment of decision (like “moment,” “sudden” is a word Wharton uses almost obsessively when Lily makes an ethical decision). The actualizations that always give birth to the “real Lily” always happen in bursts, in moments, in “now” times that are created and filled by the impulse. On her way to Bertha Dorset’s house to confront her with the letters, “She seemed suddenly to see her action as he [Selden] would see it” (410). As she thinks of Selden “All her resentment of his fancied coldness was swept away in this overwhelming rush of recollection . . .” (410). “But the sudden longing to see him remained; it grew to hunger as she paused on the pavement opposite his door” (411). And in the midst of her confession to Selden, her awareness of the letters she carries strikes her with the same suddenness: “She broke off suddenly. Her tears had risen again, and in drawing out her handkerchief her fingers touched

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the packet in the folds of her dress. A wave of colour suffused her, and the words died on her lips” (416). There is always, in Lily’s ethical decisions, a moment of suspension followed by a sudden onrush of feeling. It is not simply that Lily has, in a purely personal sense, “too much to think about.” Her moments of stasis are moments when the virtual registers itself both in Lily’s consciousness and in the novel. Lily, almost from the first page of the novel, is marked by virtuality. She is not only the limited creature, the ornamental bauble, the commodity, the social seal of approval, but she is all that has not been actualized. But all that has not yet come to actualization in Lily is still nonetheless perfectly real. This is the key difference between virtuality and potentiality: the potential is not real until it comes into being; the virtual, on the other hand, is perfectly real even when unactualized. The unactualized virtuality, perceivable in a being or situation, can be called affect. The reader must always see Lily through Selden’s eyes because Selden is the only character who sees (albeit imperfectly) all that lies unactualized but real in Lily’s character. Selden perceives Lily—however confusedly—as affect. Lily stands out in time. It is in fact the everydayness of her world— the “little temptations” Lily fears will pull her down—that is her enemy. She is the person her social circle recognizes when she lives in the normal time of habitual activity. Indeed, even for Selden, there is a kind of everyday Lily Bart who is susceptible to judgment. “It was much simpler for him to judge Miss Bart by her habitual conduct than by the rare deviations from it . . .” (366). What I have called the affect of crystallization, then, is a kind of temporal stasis, one that can issue into the world of actuality as value, beauty, indifference, or passional/ ethical suspension. And it is not only in time but in space that Lily stands out. Her social world is based not only on the structures of habit, ceremony, leisure, but on the organization of certain forms of space. There are the elaborately planned weekends at the Trenors’ home, Bellomont, the ritualistic space of social encounters, and the strict segregation not only from the world of Gerty Farish, but from those social circles further down the hierarchy of fashionability. Another affect, then, an affect that is spatial rather than temporal, characterizes Lily, the affect of detachment, to which Wharton refers constantly. Lily always stands in sharp relief to her background. Indeed she often contrives to create a proper backdrop for her own beauty. The simplicity of the tableau vivant scene she creates shows her to be keenly aware of


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her own effect. But it is most powerfully in scenes of daily life, in mundane settings, where Lily’s beauty stand out shockingly. In the train station in the opening of the novel “Her vivid head, relieved against the dull tints of the crowd, made her more conspicuous than in a ballroom” (4). Lily has, Wharton tells us, “learned the value of contrast in throwing her charms into relief ” (61). But it is not only in moments of great beauty that this vividness is apparent. As Lily sits at her mirror “She turned out the wall-lights and peered at herself between the candle-f lames. The white oval of her face swam out waveringly from a background of shadows, the uncertain light blurring it like a haze; but the two lines about the mouth remained” (36). Even in moments of fear, fatigue, despair, Lily stands out from the world around her, not just from the impoverished world of the Gerty Farishes and the Nettie Cranes, but even from the world that claims her as one of their own: “But what especially struck [Selden] was the way in which she detached herself, by a hundred undefinable shades, from the persons who most abounded in her own style” (288). It is not, of course, in any refined ethical sense that she detaches herself from her world. She is, considered personally, in thrall to it. She is dazzled by its splendor, she luxuriates in its comforts, breathes its air, speaks its subtle language, and indeed, in spite of her barely articulated protests against it, cannot really imagine herself in any other world. This detachment, this membership in another race, is a perfectly real force in the novel, although it is impossible to name precisely. And, although it cannot be named, it is often perceived, by Selden, by Rosedale, and by us. If we are to name it we can only awkwardly call it her beauty. Awkwardly because we have little sense of what Lily actually looks like. We know she is slim and dark-haired. Apart from that we get few pictures of her (and it is indeed a crime when publishers try to provide us with pictures on book covers. They are never right. Not because they are not beautiful enough, but because we can see them). She is a creature of affect that must be perceived rather than seen. And we have a sense that her beauty is more than just a physical quality. It is composed of, as Lily says, “intuitions, sensations, and perceptions.” And it is in sensation that we find the key to Lily’s ethical detachment from her own world. Lily’s sensations are circumscribed by high society. Her sensations are not an escape from reality, but rather an intensive investment in that reality. We can even mark out, with some degree of accuracy, the limits within which her sensations function. There is the optimal limit, marked by luxury, ease, comfort, and most importantly beauty. The

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novel begins as close to this limit as it will go. And there is the pessimal limit: squalor, poverty, and most importantly ugliness. Lily’s nature luxuriates in the sensations and the details of wealth. The windows stood open to the sparkling freshness of the September morning, and between the yellow boughs she caught a perspective of hedges and parterres leading by degrees of lessening formality to the free undulations of the park. Her maid had kindled a little fire on the hearth, and it contended cheerfully with the sunlight which slanted across the moss-green carpet and caressed the curved sides of an old marquetry desk. Near the bed stood a table holding her breakfast tray, with its harmonious porcelain and silver, a handful of violets in a slender glass, and the morning paper folded beneath her letters. There was nothing new to Lily in these tokens of studied luxury; but, though they formed a part of her atmosphere, she never lost her sensitiveness to their charm. Mere display left her with a sense of superior distinction; but she felt an affinity to all the subtler manifestations of wealth. (51–52) By the same token, she is repulsed by manifestations of ugliness, dinginess, the squalor of her final boarding house room, the progressively shabbier hotels in which she and her mother live after the financial ruin and death of her father. But even in the worst situation, with her strength at an end, she still reacts to the warmth and the “almost miraculously clean” kitchen of Nettie Struthers. For Lily, beauty is tied up with sensation, and this sensation is a kind of “raw stuff ” that can be turned to proper or improper uses. Sensation is the manifestation of this raw stuff. It is virtuality in person. And virtuality, the striving for transformation of the incipiencies of a situation, is at the heart of Selden and Lily’s talk at Bellomont. Selden says “The real alchemy consists in being able to turn gold back again into something else; and that’s the secret that most of your friends have lost.” Lily mused. “Don’t you think,” she rejoined after a moment, “that the people who find fault with society are too apt to regard it as an end and not a means, just as the people who despise money speak as if its only use were to be kept in bags and gloated over? Isn’t it fairer to look at them both as opportunities, which may be used either stupidly or intelligently, according to the capacity of the user?” (91–92)


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It is not the first time Lily thinks of beauty in terms of what it makes possible: “Lily understood that beauty is only the raw material of conquest, and that to convert it into success other arts are required” (44–45). The virtuality, the raw material that should be used well, must be brought into actualization by certain arts. For Lily, sensation is on the cutting edge between virtuality and actuality. The sensation that signals her freedom and her virtuality also keeps her from crossing over to the actual. She is meant to be married; it is her particular expertise. When Selden tells her that marriage is her vocation, he is saying more, perhaps, than he intends. Indeed, hunting a husband is her vocation; having one, on the other hand, she can do without. It is as if Lily senses that certain decisions will forever end the process of transformation that is at the very heart of sensation and virtuality. But in terms of affect, what does all of this mean? Lily is a creature of affect, of sensation, of virtuality. She exists in a milieu to which she particularly belongs and beyond which she cannot see. Still, she resists this milieu, but with a power that cannot be personal (since her personality— loves, hates, attractions, repulsions, memories, standards—are tied up with the social circle she aspires to succeed in). Lily’s power, the power that lies beyond her personality, beyond her humanity, beyond her worth as an individual, is the power to break her social circle down into the affects that make it up. We can certainly name some of these affects—comfort, color, balance, warmth, beauty, excess, jewel-like rareness, detachment, spaciousness. None of these affects is, in itself, creative or destructive. They are at best neutral. The difference between Lily and the rest of her circle is that Lily is the only one who sees these affects as unformed, or uncaptured. And it is precisely because of this perception that she can see the objects that populate her world as beautiful. There is a smallness and a stagnancy to Lily’s circle because it is relentlessly actual. It is filled with things and with people who do not change, museum pieces and lives that have reached a goal and stopped, spinning in on themselves in a kind of f lurry of inactivity. Lily, on the other hand, lives in two worlds at once, on two planes that coexist, although neither may be said to properly “exist” for the other. On one plane there are all the formed matters that we recognize in the story, all of the really existing objects and personalities that form a whole world. On this plane Lily is herself one personality among many. She has articulate and fully formed desires. She wants wealth, comfort, luxury, status, security. She breathes the air of high

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society. She has a formed history, motivations from childhood that we can plainly see could lead her to her present place. She is surrounded by objects, houses, jewels, carriages, dresses, that form the content of this world. We might even, on the terms of this world, understand her discontent. The faults of her contemporaries are, after all, quite fully formed themselves. This world of Lily’s is fully comprehensible to us. It is no mystery why she would want to reject a Percy Gryce or a George Dorset, and no mystery why she would find a frugal life with Selden an unacceptable sacrifice. But even with all the completion and totality of this plane—what we might call, for the sake of brevity, the plane of organization—we are still left uneasy. Lily’s protest, if it is merely the protest of one who has stepped just far enough beyond her bounds to criticize her world, will not have much value for us. It will not be able to speak in the name of humanity. It takes very little in the way of ethical vision to tire of the dishonest, passionless, effete circle of the Dorsets and the Trenors of the world and if that is all that Lily has done then it is no wonder some critics have dismissed her as someone whose ultimate demise we cannot greatly care about. But there is another plane on which Lily lives. On this plane there are no formed matters, no personalities, no names, no psychological motivations, no interiority. This plane we will call, after Deleuze, the plane of consistency. On this plane subsist unformed (or relatively unformed) matters, f lows, events, singularities, virtualities, affects. When Lily breaks down her world into these affects, or when Wharton herself breaks Lily into these affects, we see Lily in her moments of greatest beauty, intensity, and independence. Indeed, she stakes her greatest claim to human value and strikes her greatest blows against dehumanization when she is a crystalline event that stops the f low of time, when she is suspended in overfull moments of passion, when she turns objects into sensations, when she walks through a world in detachment, when she admires precisely those things that—on the plane of organization— hold her back. The plane of consistency is not human. It is not captured by the human, although the two planes must always coexist. The “human” world of the plane of organization in effect creates the plane of consistency on which it rests, just as the plane of consistency creates the possibility for the human world. They are always together, yet always apart. The plane of organization takes the movements, affects, intensities of the plane of consistency and captures them, forms them. Yet these captured affects never leave the plane of consistency; they are


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captured only provisionally and partially. They escape; they resonate in the objects that have captured them. Lily hears the resonance, the affect. The contents of her world—what are merely objects for the comfortable socialites around her—are, for Lily, incipiencies, virtualities awaiting transformation. It is precisely in the commitment to this transformation, and in her unwillingness to ever renounce it, that Lily finds a grounding in ethics. For Selden, these affects actualize in a way that functions practically. He has a plot of safe ground, a job, an apartment, a separate life. He does not need to gamble everything on every throw of the dice, as Lily does (and for this reason he cannot grasp Lily’s kind of ethical power). His detachment creates an aura of distinction, his difference makes him an object of desire (for Bertha, Lily, and Gerty), and his appreciation for beauty is seen as cultivation. His appropriation of these affects is so successful, in fact, that Selden lives on the plane of organization, with very little sensitivity to those same affects that Lily hears resonating throughout her world. Indeed, if Selden has one great ethical failing, it is his inability to see Lily as more than just a person, his unwillingness because of jealousy and fear, to see how closely she lives to the unformed world of affect and sensation. And it is precisely because of her lack of success, precisely because she cannot capture and hypostatize the affects that make her up, that she is “the beautiful Miss Bart,” that she forms, in the middle of ugly ostentation, the only real beauty of the novel. It is also the reason she is sacrificed. All of the affects that Selden embodies so successfully eventually actualize destructively for Lily. Her detachment becomes isolation, her crystallization becomes a hard glaze of indifference, and her governing sensation becomes the desire for sleep. Selden’s ethical/aesthetic philosophy captures, better than he could have imagined, the dangers of the affective, the intense. “I don’t underrate the decorative side of life. It seems to me the sense of splendour has justified itself by what it has produced. The worst of it is that so much human nature is used up in the process. If we’re all the raw stuff of the cosmic effects, one would rather be the fire that tempers a sword than the fish that dyes a purple cloak” (92). Lily is, in fact, “used up” by her world. Her story is the story of one who did not escape, who could not find her way out of her limits alive. But in her singularity, she has drawn a line out of her world. Beyond her intellect, beyond her imagination, even beyond her emotions she finds a way out of her world through the very center of it, through the plane of consistency that subsists within it. Everything that we

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can value in her as a human, every ethical decision, every movement of freedom can be traced back to the plane of consistency, those unformed, uncaptured affects that resonate in her world, and that are always tied to the radiance of beauty. It is in becoming more than human, more than just a person, that Lily matters, that she becomes a fire that tempers.

CH A P T E R

T H R E E

Invisible Man: Affect, History, Race

It is a truism—or nearly so—to say that literature is about problems. Happy lives are the fodder of wish fulfillment, not fiction. So it is not difficult to point out the myriad problems faced by the nameless narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: the cruel disillusionments he undergoes with Dr. Bledsoe, Mr. Norton, the Brotherhood, his loss of home, of ambition, of hope, of friends. Like the majority of his fictional brethren, Ellison’s invisible man struggles from crisis to crisis. But this definition of a problem is the least interesting we can put forward. It misses the real workings of the problematics that we always encounter in reading. It is too bound by the personal. The character’s problems are always problems of personality, emotion, identity, experience. And as true as this is for the general run of novelistic character, it is a fortiori true of the narrator of Invisible Man, whose renamings, forgettings, erasures form the whole set of crises that structures the novel. But there is another kind of problem, another kind of problematic that faces the reader in the act of reading. And it can only be described as tactile, a feeling in the skin as one reads, a feeling of a certain heaviness, an unnamable set of turning points, of bottlenecks, of thresholds that cannot be directly articulated in the content of the story. It is only when these singular points begin to resonate together that a problematic is about to be articulated, and only when this problematic is articulated that theory has a ground upon which to work. A theory, in other words, addresses itself to the unspeakability of the problematic. So what is the problematic of Invisible Man, the set of points that resonate in the novel but cannot be spoken by the narrator? From my own experience of the novel I would call it “heaviness.” Not “weight,” mind you, because the concept of weight designates a kind of extended,

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measurable quality of an object (whether we are using weight in its literal sense or in the sense of gravitas or seriousness). Heaviness, rather denotes an intensive quality that has no units of measurement, that does not exist along a continuum. The problem is this: that there are certain moments of Invisible Man where one suddenly feels oneself in the presence of heaviness, a heaviness in comparison to which other moments— however serious or tragic—seem light, perhaps with the lightness by which so much personal experience seems plagued. The moments of heaviness are several: the Prologue and Epilogue that frame the story, the Battle Royal that opens the first chapter, Trueblood’s story of incest with his daughter that holds Mr. Norton in such rapt fascination, the accident in the Paint Factory and the narrator’s hospitalization in the factory clinic, the narrator’s subsumption of Rinehart’s identity, and the final apocalyptic riot in Harlem where the narrator confronts Ras, now Ras the destroyer, and literally stumbles upon the new retreat underground where we find him at the story’s opening. What is it that gives these scenes their heaviness? And why is it that these scenes form a kind of frame for the novel, enclosing on either side the narrator’s work as a spokesman for the brotherhood? It is as if, reading Invisible Man, one is in the presence of two novels, one recognizably about a character with a psychology, with emotions, with relationships, with—however tenuous—an identity (one that is more solidly affirmed in the constant lament at the losing of it), and another novel, an underground novel, an invisible novel that has little to do with the narrator’s own account of his life. The narrator is so often wrong when he tries to articulate a plan, a program, but it is in the texture of the voice, the perceptions, and affections that give the voice its possibility that we will find our problem. To articulate this problem further we must ask what—for our purposes—a “problem” is. In The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze, discussing Lewis Carroll, a writer with as great a sense of the absurd as Ellison himself, says, The mode of the event is the problematic. One must not say that there are problematic events, but that events bear exclusively upon problems and define their conditions . . . The event by itself is problematic and problematizing. A problem is determined only by the singular points which express its conditions . . . We must then break with the long habit of thought which forces us to consider the problematic as a subjective category of our knowledge or as an empirical moment which would indicate only the imperfection of

Affect, History, Race

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our method and the unhappy necessity for us not to know ahead of time—a necessity which would disappear as we acquire knowledge. Even if the problem is concealed by its solution, it subsists nonetheless in the Idea which relates it to its conditions and organizes the genesis of the solutions. Without this Idea, the solutions would have no sense. (54) And if we fear that Deleuze’s definition seems a little too mathematical, or a little too much like the ridiculously mechanistic objectivity of the Brotherhood’s ideology, Deleuze goes on to explain: The relation between mathematics and man may thus be conceived in a new way: the question is not that of quantifying or measuring human properties, but rather, on the one hand, that of problematizing human events, and, on the other, that of developing as various human events the conditions of a problem . . . When Carroll speaks of a parallelogram which longs for exterior angles and complains at not being able to be inscribed in a circle, or of a curve which suffers from “sections and ablations” that it has been forced to undergo, one must remember rather that psychological and moral characters are also made of pre-personal singularities, and that their feelings or their pathos are constituted in the vicinity of these singularities: sensitive crisis points, turning points, boiling points, knots and foyers . . . (55) The problematic, then, can be described as a set of relationships of singular points. And, as in mathematical problems, the issue of these singular points is the issue of difference. We encounter, in reading, not just one moment, one event of heaviness, one singularity, but rather a set of events, or singularities that unfold themselves along the line of the reading. In order to articulate a problem, we must be able to articulate not just the points and events, but the relations of difference that obtain between them. We have already seen one aspect of the problematic of Invisible Man— the points of heaviness that seem to frame the narrative. We must now add another element to the problem. If we are to conceive of the problematic, the singular, points of Invisible Man unfolding along a line of differentiation, we can ask what the termini of this line are. Between what two points do the points of heaviness lay themselves out? We would not be too far wrong to name them as “history” and “race,” the two great forces whose constant clash propels the narrator from identity

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to identity, from white to black, from loyalty to betrayal, from recognition to invisibility. These forces are the final great irreconcilables of the novel. But we cannot know that they are irreconcilable unless there is a third term, some idea, some belief, some law that has tried to hold them together. And it is here that I want to speak—before addressing the question of the problematic—of a kind of false problem, a kind of trap that Ellison sets and that is too easy to fall into. Why do writers set traps? Do they expect us to fall into these traps, or—deftly avoiding them—are we more likely to come to some insight? It seems to me that the issue of the problematic offers an answer: writers set traps only for themselves. It is in the setting of the trap—the articulation of the central crises of the narrative—and in the working out of it—breaking through the trap he has set for himself—that the writer can manage to articulate the other problematic, the problematic of singularity, of events, of affects. We might call the false problem the problem of the personal, or of emotion. The novel itself gives us ample evidence that the link between race and history is the personal, the individual. In his essay “The Ending of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man” Per Winther says “In the Epilogue the hero is rewarded for his labors; he has achieved that freedom which comes with the ability to give form to one’s ideas, feelings, and experiences” (284). To the Brotherhood’s brand of science the narrator opposes a deeply felt personal experience. We are exposed countless times throughout the novel to a kind of emotional self-revelation; we follow the drift from anger to optimism to despair to elation to terror with a kind of microscopic exactitude. In remembering Clifton’s death the narrator says, And suddenly it occurred to me that he might have been angry before he resisted, before he’d even seen the cop. My breath became short: I felt myself go weak. What if he believed I’d sold out. It was a sickening thought. I sat holding myself as though I might break. For a moment I weighed the idea, but it was too big for me . . . My mind backed away from the notion. (447) In arguing with Brother Jack after Clifton’s funeral, the narrator—and thus the reader—is acutely aware of every emotion: “ ‘But are you sure you’re not their great white father?’ I said, watching him closely, aware of the hot silence and feeling tension race from my toes to my legs as I drew my feet quickly beneath me. ‘Wouldn’t it be better if they called you Marse Jack?’ ” (473).


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It is in the conf lict between race and history, the ideology of history that the narrator dismisses as “a machine,” that the emotion, the individuality, of the narrator takes form. We see the dawning of awareness and of disillusionment. Suddenly I couldn’t stand it. “Look at me! Look at me!” I said. “Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my good—only they were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop? Is this the new true definition, is Brotherhood a matter of sacrificing the weak? If so, at what point do we stop?” Hambro looked at me as though I were not there. (505) It is in terms of the self, the person, that he makes his decision to follow his grandfather’s cryptic advice and “damn them with yeses.” My God, what possibilities existed! And that spiral business, that progress goo! Who knew all the secrets; hadn’t I changed my name and never been challenged even once? And that lie that success was a rising upward. What a crummy lie they kept us dominated by. Not only could you travel upward toward success but you could travel downward as well; up and down, in retreat as well as in advance, crabways and crossways and around in a circle, meeting your old selves coming and going and perhaps all at the same time. (509–510) And it is with the same kind of awareness of his race and himself that he opens his eyes to the Brotherhood’s final plan: “They want this to happen,” I said. “They planned it. They want the mobs to come uptown with machine guns and rif les. They want the streets to f low with blood; your blood, black blood and white blood, so that they can turn your death and sorrow and defeat into propaganda. It’s simple, you’ve known it a long time. It goes, ‘Use a nigger to catch a nigger.’ Well, they used me to catch you and now they’re using Ras to do away with me and to prepare your sacrifice. Don’t you see it? Isn’t it clear . . . ?” (558) Every problem, it is said, has the answer that it deserves. The problem whose three points are history, race, and emotion (or individuality)

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certainly receives the answer that it deserves, which is no answer at all. In this—what I have called false—problematic, history is represented by the worst kind of vulgar Marxist ideology, a kind of nineteenthcentury mechanistic smugness that blinds itself to the complexities of community life, the reality of racial difference, and the subtle movements of a culture. It paints itself as scientific, but its science is nothing but a kind of stupid faith in a simplified set of laws. To this kind of ideology the novel seems to oppose the personal experience of race. And in this context the racial and the personal become one and the same. It is not simply a matter of race, nor simply a matter of character, but in the intertwining of the two, we see the narrator working out a position in the world: Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of a biochemical accident to my epidermis. That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality . . . It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves. Then too, you’re constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. Or again, you often doubt if you really exist. (3–4) In doubting his own existence, the narrator is staking a claim to personality, to character, to being the center of an experience, however invisible it may be to others (the invisible man, we must note, is never invisible to himself ). It is this claim to being a character that allows the narrator to resist the blinkered ideology of the Brotherhood. But why is this, then, a false problem? It is false because emotion, character, race do not resist the history to which the narrator stands opposed. To weigh in on the side of the personal is not at all to reject or escape the mechanistic ideology of history, but simply to become its pawn. Even the narrator’s return to his grandfather’s deathbed advice to “overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agree ‘em to death and destruction, let ‘em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open” (16) plays into the hands of the Brotherhood, to whom the riot in Harlem poses no threat. But it is in the narrator’s grandfather that we see most purely the workings of the personal, the deep secret inner life that lives “in the lion’s mouth” and that never reveals itself except at the moment when death grants it a final reprieve. But even the grandfather’s personal wisdom does not


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allow the narrator to undermine the Brotherhood’s ideology. The individual, the deeply felt inner being, does not challenge ideology because it is itself ideology’s proudest achievement. To the false problem of history-emotion-race, then, we must posit a more workable problem, a problem whose solution is not foreshortened by the limitations of the problem itself. The problem will be named history-affect-race, and will take us beyond the boundaries of the personal, the inward, the emotional. “Affect” is a concept with a history both in psychoanalysis (Freud) and in philosophy (Spinoza). In fact, Freud gives us a picture of affect that follows Spinoza’s on several important points and seems to move the personal beyond itself into the world of energies and experiences. And what is an affect in the dynamic sense? It is in any case something highly composite. An affect includes in the first place particular motor innervations or discharges and secondly certain feelings; the latter are of two kinds—perceptions of the motor actions that have occurred and the direct feelings of pleasure and unpleasure which, as we say, give the affect its keynote. But I do not think that with this enumeration we have arrived at the essence of an affect. We seem to see deeper in the case of some affects and to recognize that the core which holds the combination we have described together is the repetition of some particular significant experience. (Introductory Lectures 491–492) For Freud, as we see, affect is not to be simply equated with feeling. It is rather a wider category in which feeling is to be included. It is “highly composite,” made up of discharges, innervations, perceptions of actions, and feelings of pleasure or pain, but also of repetition and— most importantly—of the impingement upon the body and mind of some particular experience. A particular affect is close to what Deleuze has called an “assemblage,” in that it can combine many elements both concrete and abstract, both natural and artificial. Freud and Spinoza agree on a number of points. For Spinoza (in Ethics Part II, prop. 17), “If the human body is affected in a way (modo) that involves the nature of some external body, the human mind will regard that same external body as actually existing, or as present to itself, until the human body undergoes a further modification which excludes the existence or presence of the said body” (77). He goes on in the Proof to say that “although the external bodies by which the human body has once been affected may no longer exist, the mind will regard them as present whenever this activity of the body

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is repeated” (78). Spinoza also allows that, in these affections, there is a movement toward greater or lesser perfection (Part III, def. 3): “By emotion (affectus) I understand the affections of the body by which the body’s power of activity is increased or diminished, assisted or checked, together with the ideas of these affections” (103). As does Freud’s, Spinoza’s affect involves a movement that can be pleasurable (happy) or painful (sad) (Part III, prop 11, scholium): “We see then that the mind can undergo considerable changes, and can pass now to a state of greater perfection, now to one of less perfection, and it is these passive transitions (passiones) that explicate for us the emotions of Pleasure (laetitia) and Pain (tristitia)” (110). But Spinoza complicates the picture considerably by postulating a dynamic force—Nature, God, Substance (the name matters little)— that is the source of all affects: “Particular things are nothing but affections of the attributes of God; that is, modes wherein the attributes of God find expression in a definite and determinate way” (49) (Part I, prop. 25, cor.). It is precisely with this idea that Spinoza comes crashing into the twentieth century. Affects are not simply the preserve of the human, the personal, but tie the human to the much more dynamic set of forces—relations, perceptions, impingements of force on force. Substance or Nature is nothing more than this relation of forces. They are, as Deleuze has said, the nonhuman becomings of the human, and what we might call the making invisible of things. Clearly, in dealing with affect we are dealing with something far more complex than merely “feeling.” We find it in the realm of thinghood and action, actuality and virtuality, activity and passivity, but it is far from general. In fact, Freud and Spinoza would also be in agreement on the complexity and specificity of the affective. For Freud the affective is the realm of the psychological “complex” that must involve psychic, somatic, social, and natural elements. For Spinoza, proposition 16 of Book 1—“From the necessity of the divine nature there must follow infinite things in infinite ways (modis) . . .” (43)—bespeaks the complexity and richness of nature’s affections. And because Spinoza so fiercely rejects the reality of intellectual categories—good, evil, beauty, ugliness, human, inhuman—it follows that each mode must be radically singular (though also highly composite: singularities are not “pure” but always highly complex). Whether we are confronted with the complexities of the Freudian unconscious or the radical power of Spinoza’s substance, we are faced with the same conclusion: we have created terms to deal with the intricacies of the world—self, personality, emotion—and while those terms


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are useful, they name only a narrow range of the affects that create the world. Literature and art are two of the places we allow those other affects, those other complexes that we name with difficulty, to show themselves. Affect allows us to think of the personality in terms of what surpasses it, undermines it, fragments it, but also in terms of what simultaneously supports it, energizes it, and holds it together. And although affect is often used interchangeably with “emotion,” affect goes beyond the realm of emotion. It is more accurate to say that emotion is a branch of affect. Emotion is only one way of marking an impingement of one force upon another—the potentiality of human judgment brought together with a particular experience, leading to a particular feeling. But an action is also an affect, a perception is an affect, a composite of perception, feeling, movement can be an affect. Affects are far too varied and complex to be named as emotions. They happen between the human and something else. They place the human into a composite with the nonhuman, and each element of the composite participates in the affect as much as any other. We are no longer in the realm of personal individuality, but of individuation, of an assemblage of elements that stands on its own and may be recognized. Deleuze grants a particular name to such an assemblage: There is a mode of individuation very different from that of a person, subject, thing, or substance. We reserve the name haecceity for it. A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a subject. They are haecceities in the sense that they consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected . . . Tales must contain haecceities that are not simply emplacements, but concrete individuations that have a status of their own and direct the metamorphosis of things and subjects . . . A degree of heat, an intensity of white, are perfect individualities. (Plateaus 261) If the problem of Ellison’s Invisible Man, then, is the conjunction of history-affect-race, we must ask first what those affects are, where they can be found, what impersonal individualities they possess, and second, how these affects (or these haecceities) run through the terminal points of history and race. We cannot be satisfied with a history that is only mechanistic and a race that is only personal.

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It would be the work of a book-length study to map out all of the affective movements of Invisible Man, so I will restrict myself to three: what I will call the affective movement of sensation and energy, the history of invisibility, and the transformation of class to mass. The narrator undergoes moments of sensation that, while they contain an emotional element cannot be reduced to that emotional element. The two most important such moments happen just before he goes to college and just after he arrives in Harlem. In other words, just before and after he crosses well-demarcated personal thresholds. The first is the Battle Royal of chapter one; the second is the factoryhospital scene in chapter eleven, both demarcated by his encounter with electricity. In both scenes the narrator is thrust into sensation at the very moment he is hoping to attain normalcy, to give a speech, to take on a job. Mixed in with the quite understandable emotion of such events, fear and panic, there is nonetheless a kind of molecular perception, an awareness of sensation and energy. In the Battle Royal, Everyone fought hysterically. It was complete anarchy. Everybody fought everybody else. No group fought together for long. Two, three, four, fought one, then turned to fight each other, were themselves attacked . . . The boys groped about like blind, cautious crabs, crouching to protect their mid-sections, their heads pulled in short against their shoulders, their arms stretched nervously before them, with their fists testing the smoke-filled air like the knobbed feelers of hypersensitive snails. (23) When the Battle Royal ends with the knockout of the narrator he has one more indignity to endure, scrambling, along with the other fighters, for coins on an electrified mat. “I crawled rapidly around the f loor, picking up the coins, trying to avoid the coppers and to get greenbacks and the gold. Ignoring the shock by laughing, as I brushed the coins off quickly, I discovered that I could contain the electricity—a contradiction, but it works” (27). He endures the final indignity when, still battered and spitting blood, he makes his speech to the unhearing crowd and receives his prize, a college scholarship. So far, the sensations he has undergone do not seem to have coalesced, do not stand up on their own, but he is on his way to forming a history, an affective history that will run parallel to his personal history and the abstract history of the Brotherhood. In the factory hospital, where he is taken after being caught in a boiler explosion, he undergoes another affective encounter with


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electricity when the factory doctors experiment on him with electrical shock therapy. A whirring began that snapped and cracked with static, and suddenly I seemed to be crushed between the f loor and ceiling. Two forces tore savagely at my stomach and back. A f lash of cold-edged heat enclosed me . . . I tried to remember how I’d gotten here, but nothing came. My mind was blank, as though I had just begun to live. When the next face appeared I saw the eyes behind the thick glasses blinking as though noticing me for the first time. (232–233) After he has been discharged he leaves the factory and as he walks out he has one of the first experiences of himself as a stranger. Leaving him and going out into the paint-fuming air I had the feeling that I had been talking beyond myself, had used words and expressed attitudes not my own, that I was in the grip of some alien personality lodged deep within me . . . Things whirled too fast around me. My mind went alternately bright and blank in slow rolling waves. We, he, him—my mind and I—were no longer getting around in the same circles. Nor my body either. Across the aisle a young platinum blonde nibbled at a red Delicious apple as station lights rippled past behind her. The train plunged. I dropped through the roar, giddy and vacuum-minded, sucked under and out into late afternoon Harlem. (249–250) In both cases the narrator’s perception is a matter of undergoing an assault, so it is still not clear that a new kind of perception, an affective perception, is awakening, the awareness of energies, of f lows, of sensations, of affects. We do know that the narrator’s identity, his wish to conform to what has been expected of him, is being jarred loose. But this weakening of identity is only a kind of negative afterimage of the new—and truly materialistic—perception that is only in the embryonic stages at this point. It is here too that we see the second of the workings of affect— the narrator’s history of invisibility—come into play. “Invisibility,” we must note, is not a matter of emotion. One does not just have an emotional sense of invisibility; one does not simply feel disrespected, overlooked. The feelings themselves are only offshoots of a larger affective condition, and because the condition is affective rather than emotional,

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it preexists the evaluations we or the narrator might place upon it, and so mutates as it undergoes its own history. It is not bound to any emotional or moral evaluation, so invisibility, as affect, can migrate from ethical situation to ethical situation. Invisibility begins as a condition imposed upon the narrator by others. In the Golden Day the mad vet berates Mr. Norton and the narrator for their mutual blindness and invisibility: You cannot see or hear or smell the truth of what you see—and you, looking for destiny! It’s classic! And the boy, this automaton, he was made of the very mud of the region and he sees far less than you. Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other. To you he is a mark on the scorecard of your achievement, a thing and not a man; a child, or even less—a black amorphous thing. (95) To be black here is to be amorphous, but to have that condition foisted onto you. The narrator stumbles through the novel, never seen, never heard; to the Brotherhood he is a mouthpiece who is not paid to think; to Mary he is a potential community leader, to the women of the Brotherhood he is an image of fantasy. But his invisibility is separate from the moral valuation the narrator places upon it. It is a potential, a force, an affect, and is taken up as such as the narrator’s illusions fall away. When he takes his invisibility upon himself, it becomes a matter, not of feeling, but of movement, of relation, and it is in this movement that he finds not only a world he has never seen, not only the meaning of race, but the history that has evaded him even in his greatest commitment to the Brotherhood. The figure of this change is the always unseen, but always present figure of Rinehart. After he accidentally—and it is in the accident that we see the greatest workings of affect, in the chance encounter, the fall one takes into one’s future—assumes Rinehart’s identity, he begins to see what he has missed. “Perhaps I’m out of his territory at last, I thought and began trying to place Rinehart in the scheme of things. He’s been around all the while, but I have been looking in another direction . . . What on earth was hiding behind the face of things?” (493). And later as he begins to see Rinehart’s great powers of transformation, he undergoes his own transformation in which the boundaries of the world are laid bare to him. Still, could he be all of them: Rine the runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the


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Reverend? Could he himself be both rind and heart? What is real anyway? But how could I doubt it? He was a broad man, a man of parts who got around. Rinehart the rounder. It was true as I was true. His world was possibility and he knew it. He was years ahead of me and I was a fool. I must have been crazy and blind. The world in which we lived was without boundaries. A vast seething, hot world of f luidity, and Rine the rascal was at home. (498) The narrator gradually awakens to this seething world of possibility, and although every plan he formulates fails (for in his formulations, he is still within the mechanistic ideology of the brotherhood) he has been taken up by a pure affective movement, and it is in this movement that he is able to see and smell and feel the difference between a class and a mass, a crowd, a community. I went into the crowd, walking slowly, smoothly into the dark crowd, the whole surface of my skin alert, my back chilled, looking, listening to those moving with a heaving and sweating and a burr of talk around me and aware that now that I wanted to see them, needed to see them, I could not; feeling them, a dark mass in motion on a dark night, a black river ripping through a black land . . . I was one with the mass, moving down the littered street over the puddles of oil and milk, my personality blasted. (550) It is but a short step—literally—before the narrator will fall into his new awareness, his warm hole from which he is prepared to emerge in the Epilogue. We have now seen enough of the movement by which he comes to his awareness to articulate the problem of history-affect-race more completely. In the false problem of history-emotion-race, we have seen that the third term—in this case emotion—not only places itself between the two termini of history and race, but that it transforms them. Adding any new element to the problematic changes the problematic entire. The problem is a continuous multiplicity that depends upon the relationship, the differential relationship, of all of its terms. Emotion, as a conjunction between race and history, transforms history into nothing more than a set of blind mechanisms and race into nothing more than personal feeling, an individuality that cannot resist the machine of the Brotherhood’s ideology but is manipulated and dominated by it. The new term—affect—then, changes all of the terms of the problematic, which now becomes the problematic of history-affect-race.

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The relationship between race and history becomes clearer. History is no longer the realm of mechanical laws but of possibilities, of embryonic forces that make themselves available for transformation. We are reminded here of Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History”: “Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins” (255). The narrator rereads his own history in light of his newly awakened awareness of the affective world: “How could I have missed it for so long? Hadn’t I grown up around gambler-politicians, bootlegger-judges and sheriffs who were burglars; yes, and Klansmen who were preachers and members of humanitarian societies. Hell, and hadn’t Bledsoe tried to tell me what it was all about?” (510). The narrator does not condemn these figures of his past, but sees them rather as border figures, affective assemblages that break apart the very ideology to which he has been in thrall all these years. To these figures we may add the figures of the father-lover (Trueblood), the doctor-madman (in the Golden Day), and the humanitarian dictator (Bledsoe). Benjamin reminds us again and again that the past itself must and can be redeemed because it is still a pool of unrealized possibilities. The revolutions that have been crushed, the movements that have died, the communities that have never crystallized, the hopes that have never been realized, all form a kind of vast embryonic set of forces that will not respond to personality, nor to mechanistic laws, but will only be mastered by the one, the historian, the revolutionary who can meet them on their own terms, who can perceive them although they lie, for the victor’s history, below the threshold of perception. Before there is ideology, before there is ethics, before there is a plan of action, there must be a kind of pre-personal, even ahistorical movement of forces, of perceptions, of relationships. The narrator’s history is a history without boundaries. And it can be so precisely because affect has transformed race into a kind of catalyst of perception, of sensation, so that, coming into contact with history, race does not crumble into some passive personal inwardness, but transforms history into a material f low that can be worked, directed, plunged into. And it is important to note here that affect is precisely what keeps race from falling into a kind of essentialist stasis. Race is not a thing, not a hypostatized object, but is rather a matter of a-personal movements, relations, impingements of body-on-body, idea-on-body, sensation-on-body, sensation-on-idea. The narrator moves through crowds; he takes the texture of the world around him. His projects fall


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away in a movement of relation, to his world, his streets, his history. The invisibility that has kept him under lock and key for so long has become the very affect that has allowed him to see, not only himself, not only his place, but all of the fissures and cracks that run through the world. When he emerges from his hole he will know where the fault lines are, what voices he may speak for and who speak for him, what transformations are just below the threshold of being. And he will know where to strike.


CH A P T E R

FOU R

Cormac McCarthy and the Event of the Human

Just as, in Deleuze and Guattari, every desiring assemblage has a name, often a proper name (they speak of Schubert and Wagner machines in Music as well as a Riemann machine in mathematics), so the name of an author must conjure up for us the world that he has created. The name of the author becomes a focal point not for an individual life, but for a complex, sometimes contradictory, set of actions, passions, and materials. What worlds are conjured by the proper name “Cormac McCarthy”? They are worlds often aimless, always violent, worlds wherein the motives that define understandable human behavior are overwhelmed and erased by a kind of anonymous exigency of the f lesh. Necrophiliacs, murderous philosophers, dark avengers more metaphysical than human, vagrants exiled from the worlds of their birth, boys undergoing the bloody passage to manhood. With these characters we have the beginnings of a description of McCarthy’s world, but what the name of McCarthy says over and over again to us is that these are not characters dropped into a world. The greatness and much-praised beauty of McCarthy’s landscapes is that they are not settings, not geography, not obstacles. In fact, properly speaking, they are not; they escape being, and in escaping, carry along the human world with them. It is not by chance that McCarthy’s novels so often articulate a philosophy of being, of the struggle with God, of the darkness of existence, of the defining power of death. And it is equally unsurprising that this articulation is never a final say, but is haunted and besieged by another power that is not philosophical, but speaks within philosophy: the power of the event.

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We may cast the event as the opposite of narrative. There is what we might call narrative time and event time, and although there is no reason they cannot coexist, or cannot be simultaneously real, they are not of the same nature. For narrative, events are happenings. They are ongoing states of affairs. Situations, episodes, moments. And they are states of affairs that are organized, put into relationships of cause and effect (or, what amounts to the same thing, put into relationships that challenge us to find ties of cause and effect, or into relationships where cause and effect, by being rejected, are flagged for constant attention). It even matters little whether the happening is real or imaginary, told by a disinterested omniscient voice, or a character embroiled in fantasy and emotion. Narrative time is the time of happenings. In fact, as Giorgio Agamben says in Infancy and History: “experience has its necessary correlation not in knowledge but in authority—that is the say, the power of words and narration” (14). “Modern man makes his way home in the evening wearied by a jumble of events, but however entertaining or tedious, unusual or commonplace, harrowing or pleasurable they are, none of them will have become experience” (14). What makes the modern world unbearable, for Agamben, is the untranslatability of happenings into experience, the failure of narrative authority to place order into events. When narrative authority does not intervene, happenings become a jumble, a chaos of moments, acts, words. The isolated happening strikes against us meaninglessly in spite of its power. There can be little as disturbing as viewing one’s own life in retrospect as a series of unconnected happenings without direction or motivation. And what is true of an individual’s life is doubly true of the human in general. Our humanness is not only defined biologically as one point of a progression to a (in some way) better form, more adaptive, more efficient, but the meaning of the human must be given in the form of a narrative, of happenings that are bound together, with the human—the humanity of the human—as its telos. What does it mean, then, to become more human, or to become human? A character wins something, or loses something, comes through experience changed, or perhaps does not come through (as with Wharton’s Lily Bart) but leaves, in their death, a sign to be interpreted, a life organized into meaningful directionality (and again, Lily Bart’s life has order, direction, even a theme). It is an interesting experiment to think of the theme of one’s own life. Is it freedom? Rebellion? Duty? Love? Whatever it is, it organizes the happenings of one’s life, attributing greater and lesser importance to events, and always moving toward or at least imagining a culmination. When the film ends, when we put the novel down having read the final word, the characters will have years to live—Humphrey

Cormac McCarthy & Event of the Human

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Bogart and Claude Raines will leave Casablanca and go on to new adventures, Huck Finn will light out for the territories—but still, something has come to fruition. Something has been affirmed. The sacrifice of Rick the Barkeeper, the great moral choice of Huck Finn, are moments that define the human. And although it is possible to speak of freedom, dignity, sacrifice without invoking the human (although it is amazing how often the term “human” slips into discussions of what we value) it is impossible to speak of the human without these meanings that are its only content. But surely there are fictions that have no truck with meaning, that short circuit all the mechanisms of meaning, that fragment time, f latten character, affirm no value, play intellectual games, refuse direction, unmask the myth of reference for the endlessness of signification. What these approaches have in common is that their first gesture is to discard the pretense of meaning, of reference. Language, as signification, is a self-referential system freed from narrative that is no more than an unruly spirit banished from the house of language. But as obvious as this rejection of narrative is—after all how does one break the hegemony of narrative except by an overt rejection?—it leaves us with two choices, neither of which will concern me. We can have narrative, character, motivation, direction, meaning, a fiction that is isomorphic with experience, that believes in the substantiality of the human, or we can have fictions that are experimental, that see through the limitations and masks of narrative, that refuse the transparency of language, that revel in the materiality of words. But what honest reader can say that they do not miss, in certain fictions, the authority of narrative? That in revealing the meaningless building blocks of meaning, much contemporary fiction has taken away our reasons for reading? What I am asking is this: Are we forbidden to ask for narratives that speak of the human, that are ethical, passionate, and authoritative but that also, in keeping narrative, strip it bare? Can we seek stories where the materiality of language does not leave narrative behind but occupies it like a sort of benevolent parasite? Can we be taken up in happenings that are not dependent upon a naive belief in the transparency of reference but that nevertheless give us a language whose power is greater than transparency and greater than signification, a language whose immediate mediation, as Benjamin says, is its magic? Certainly this would be a strange writing! It would have to tell a story and submerge it in the telling; it would have to have direction, but direction to no end, a kind of nomadic movement that emphasizes the transit between points rather than the point to be reached. It would have to speak of the human,

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even of the value of the human, while at the same time rejecting all of the terms—dignity, freedom, responsibility, morality—that serve only as justification for the human, those prefabricated honors that adorn most resplendently the chests of the pettiest dictators. Needless to say, this fiction would be a fiction of tension, of the resonance of divergences, of overlaps between worlds, of compossibility, of paradox; and whose work embodies more perfectly these resonant energies than Cormac McCarthy’s? McCarthy’s work, and the strange workings therein, have the look of narratives—episodes, voices that speak in the ornate detachment of traditional narrators, goals toward which characters move, and fears from which they f lee—but they are narratives that are occupied by some other spirit than their own. It is as if a familiar body were occupied by some usurper ghost that bore a striking resemblance to the soul it had displaced; the look of the body is as we have always known it, but the animation is otherwise, the fit not quite perfect. And where the seams of body and soul show in their raggedness is the only apprehensible sign that something has changed. It is only as a beginning that I will point out how McCarthy’s narratives have the feel of something different, how they employ something like narrative while taking away narrative’s own world. It is not so much that narrative itself is undone, deconstructed, fragmented. It is rather than the intactness of narrative, the world that closes around it as a totality, the world in which it moves as a sea creature through its element, is no longer there. The narrative is whole, but it is also carried off whole. And indeed McCarthy’s world bears little resemblance to the world we know; its characters, whether gentle or murderous seem devoid of psychology, and McCarthy often deliberately avoids turning his stories in what would seem like organically appropriate directions. In The Orchard Keeper, his first novel, McCarthy draws three characters together in what seems like a fateful embrace. Marion Sylder, the bearish bootlegger, murders, in self-defense, the loathsome Kenneth Rattner and later in the novel befriends Rattner’s son, John Wesley. The order of battle here seems drawn up for revenge or at least for revelation. McCarthy even goes so far as to make the boy’s mother force a promise of vengeance from him. You goin to hunt him out. When you’re old enough. Goin to find the man that took away your daddy . . . How can I? He had begun to cry. Your daddy’d of knowed how. He was a Godfearin man if he never took much to church meetin . . . The Lord’ll show you boy.


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He will not forsake them what believe. Pray and the way will be made known to ye. He . . . you swear it, boy. ... You won’t never forgit No. Never long as you live. Long as I live. Yes, she said. (66–67; emphasis in the original) What is most interesting about this passage is that it is probably the most coherent statement of aim in the novel. It is what is most familiar to us as a piece of narrative, an engine to move the story forward. There is psychology—a promise made in childhood that could be expected to stay with the young man that John Wesley becomes. There is direction, the search, the discovery, the decision to kill or to forgive. The very familiarity of the possibilities opened up by the mother’s words makes us suspicious. And indeed this promise is just taken up whole by the novel, carried along, and finally washed ashore in the movement of events, perceptions, acts. It is, in itself, a wholly comprehensible moment of narrative, but the world in which it is set gives it no foothold, no purchase with which to launch a sequence of causes and effects. So there is no revenge, no revelation; a line of narrative runs off into the void. Characters in McCarthy seem also to arise in a world where their motivations are seemingly comprehensible but are shot through with the inexplicable. In Outer Dark, we have the overlapping quests of Rinthy Holme and her brother Culla. When Culla takes the baby that he fathered with his sister and leaves it in the woods to die, and the baby is taken by a passing tinker in what turns out to be a horrifying parody of those mythological stories in which children are rescued from the wilderness, Rinthy sets out in search of her child. Having discovered Culla’s lie that the baby had died at birth, Rinthy goes without direction in search of the tinker that she believes has bought the baby from her brother. She searches for, as she says, her “chap,” and her brother searches for her. But both searches are at the very least odd distortions of searches. Culla wanders aimlessly from job to job, staying one step ahead of the law that is pursuing him. He often states that he is looking for his sister, yet he does not ask anyone about her. What would seem like a satisfying psychological answer—that he is in fact moving away from something—has little foundation in the narrative. The only thing that changes suddenly in Culla’s life is the disappearance of his sister, and

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when he leaves his house and sets out on the road, his actions certainly bear the markings of a search, but it is a search that is never undertaken, but only undergone; it is what would be left if a search could, paradoxically, be torn from its goal and pursue itself along a line with no points. And although Rinthy’s search seems to be what we would recognize as a coherent narrative movement it too is shot through with two great paradoxes that McCarthy plays on. Rinthy tries to explain her search to a store clerk. She asks him if he has seen a tinker. Yes, the man said. They is one stocks here. Name of Deitch. Is that the one you was a-huntin? I never did know his name, she said. Well what did he look like? I ain’t able to say that neither, she said. I never knowed they was all different kinds. ... I don’t know, the man said. But I don’t see how you goin to find him and you not knowin his name nor nothin. (75) Later, after she explains her predicament to a farmer he pushes the paradox to the point of absurdity: “ ‘It’s best not to have to do lots of things. Like hunt somebody you never heard of . . . Was that not it?’ Never seen, she said” (107). The second difficulty of her search is that she has no reference points from which to move. Lacking this point, her actions seem, dare we say, pointless. The Farmer asks Rinthy if her search is not rather an escape. You ain’t run off from somewheres are ye? No, she said. I ain’t even got nowheres to run off from. He considered this for a moment, one eye almost shut. If you ain’t got nowheres to run from you must not have no place to run to. (101) Culla later explains to an old man that his sister has run off and he is searching for her. The old man tells him Best place to hunt em is home again. She ain’t rightly got a home. Where’d she run off from then? (126)


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And Rinthy says, to a town doctor who treats her for the pain of her swollen breasts that will not stop producing milk even six months after she loses her child, “ ‘I don’t live nowheres no more . . . I never did much. I just go around huntin my chap. That’s about all I do any more’ ” (156). Rinthy’s wanderings have the form of a search, but it is a search cut loose from any moorings, a search that takes on its own autonomy, and, indeed, it is a search that overshoots its goal. Rinthy does indeed come to a kind of culmination of her search when she encounters the tinker who curses her for a liar when she confesses that her brother is the father of her child. We see Rinthy once more after the tinker has threatened to kill her if she continues her search, and when we see her she is living with her brother again and again about to set off. She is pure f light; it is as if the movement precedes her and she lives to embody it. She did not know that she was leaving. She woke in the night and rose half tranced from the bed and began to dress, all in darkness and with gravity. Perhaps some dream had moved her so. She took her few things from the chifforobe and bundled them and went to the landing beyond her door. She listened for his breathing in the room opposite but she could hear nothing. She crouched in the dark long and long for fear that he was awake and when she did descend the stairs in her bare feet she paused again at the bottom in the dead black foyer and listened up the stairwell. And she waited again at the front door with it open, poised between the maw of the dead and loveless house and the outer dark like a frail thief. It was damp and cool and she could hear roosters beginning. She closed the door and went down the path to the gate and into the road, shivering in the cold starlight, under vega and the waterserpent. (211) She is the movement from one nothingness, the “dead and loveless house” to another, the “outer dark” of metaphysical horror. And if there is an element of Outer Dark that confounds the sensemaking of narrative, it is the three murderous strangers. Again, they seem to have some semblance of narrative purpose, but only a semblance. They do not pursue Culla; neither does he f lee from them. They are the cause of the final denouement of the novel, the death of the nameless child that Culla has fathered, but their connection to the child is entirely fortuitous. They pop up in the landscape as if arising from it. Culla and Rinthy travel the roads in straight, though aimless, lines, but the strangers do not travel, they emerge. There is no way to

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locate the relationship of Culla-Rinthy-Strangers in any geographical space and so impossible to make the actions of any one into coherent causes. The actions of all the characters exist in a kind of causal celibacy, no action leading to others. It is a strange kind of sterility that allows each action to exist for itself without first being plucked out of a narrative sequence. Even in terms of narrative meaning, the strangers are problematic. They are perhaps embodiments of Culla’s guilt at the very existence of his damned offspring, and of his abandonment of the child. The three strangers, it seems to the narrative mind, must have some connection to the meaning of Culla’s crime. But we search for this meaning in vain. Are they punishment, a kind of divine retribution? Are they projections of Culla’s own inner darkness? Are they existential figures of the randomness and meaninglessness of evil? All of these answers strike one as foolish as soon as they are proposed. The narrative mind is, as it is so often, caught between two unacceptable choices. The strangers are part of the meaning of the novel or they are figures of meaninglessness (they contradictorily signify meaninglessness). When we attempt to fix a meaning on them we find that they embody too many contradictions to serve as centers of meaning or of explanation. The lead stranger, the “bearded one,” is “spectral, palpable as stone” (231) and this contradiction stands as a sign for all of the contradictions borne by the three figures. They are both ghostly and physical. They seem to carry a kind of divine wrath about them, yet they are mired in the petty and the squalid. In their first encounter with Culla, they steal his boots. They may be figures of retribution, yet their violence is undirected. Their presence in the novel seems to be the upshot of Culla and his crimes, but their relationship to him, in terms of the narrative, is almost incidental. (They do not search for and find Culla; he stumbles on them twice by sheer accident.) Moreover, their execution of the nameless child, an execution carried out with no sense of punishment, retroactively renders Rinthy’s search a useless gesture. In short, when we search for meaning in Outer Dark, we are left with a series of happenings that have semblances of meaning, meaning that is both illusory and entirely real. Even in McCarthy’s later novels, in which the narrative mechanisms seem much more familiar, even to the point of being adventurous, of setting out and defending philosophical and ethical values, of creating three dimensional human characters, his narratives are animated by something unfamiliar. In The Crossing we have all the elements for the building of a narrative line—colorful characters, adventures, actions


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to be performed, goals to be reached and obstacles placed in front of those goals, decisive actions, narrow escapes, even horses. But the narrative proceeds not by adding action to action, not by giving us more at the end than at the beginning. This is surely a characteristic of narrative: each effect becomes a cause, which spawns another effect, another cause, so that we may see the story as a kind of adding up to a conclusion; we may go back and pick out episodes in a kind of temporal inventory. But in The Crossing just the opposite happens. The novel does not progress from a principle of addition but of subtraction. The narrative, as a result, still makes sense to us and is recognizable as a narrative, just as a movie run in reverse would be recognizable to us as a movie. The world of Billy Parham eventually and relentlessly disappears. At the end of The Crossing, we see Billy Parham sitting in the road outside of an abandoned gas station in tears, after he has driven off the last chance to commune with any sentient being. The albeit clumsy device of the pathetic dog at the end of the novel is less clumsy when it is seen as a kind of devolution, a reverse progression. The novel begins with Billy Parham taking a wolf he has trapped into Mexico to set it free in the mountains. After he is forced to kill the wolf and he returns to Mexico with his brother, they are followed by their mute family dog whose vocal cords had been cut in the attack that killed his parents. After Billy is alone, having lost his brother and returned to the United States, this final figure is a reminder of the relentless subtraction to which his life has been subject: It was an old dog gone gray about the muzzle and it was horribly crippled in its hindquarters and its head was askew someway on its body and it moved grotesquely. An arthritic and illjointed thing that crabbed sideways and sniffed at the f loor to pick up the man’s scent and then raised its head and nudged the air with its nose and tried to sort him from the shadows with its milky half blind eyes. (423) When Billy chases it off, f linging stones at it the dog howled again and began to run, hobbling brokenly on its twisted legs with the strange head agoggle on its neck. As it went it raised its mouth sideways and howled again with a terrible sound. Something not of this earth. As if some awful composite of grief had broke through from the preterite world. It tottered away up the road in the rain on its stricken legs and as it went it howled

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again and again in its heart’s despair until it was gone from all sight and all sound in the night’s onset. (424–425) Billy’s vain search later on for the dog, the search that ends with him weeping in the road is a kind of perfect negative image of the first great narrative thrust of the story: Billy hunts and traps the wolf, decides to return it to Mexico and begins what, at that point, seems like an additive narrative sequence. At the end of the novel he is searched out by the dog, drives away what might be the beginning of a series of actions (albeit sentimental ones), and then tries unsuccessfully to pick up the line of narrative. The novel ends, as if in testament to this narrative reversal when “the right and godmade sun did rise, once again, for all and without distinction” (426). A narrative, we might say, begins in a state of relative potentiality from which it then proceeds. It is important that this state not be a kind of zero state or absolute potentiality (which I would call “virtuality”). There must be some degree of actualization for a narrative to begin. In The Crossing, however, we are returned to a state that goes even beyond the beginning of relative potentiality. Billy Parham loses everything: the wolf, his parents, his brother, even his country, his place in history (as he is rejected from military service again and again). He is returned to a state where there is nothing but the act of weeping, the absolute passivity of the zero state. His actions have not added up to a story. Instead his story has been stripped from him episode by episode. At the end of Suttree, we see Suttree on the highway thumbing a ride out of town, on his way we do not know where. He has not so much gone on to new adventures as he has stepped out of a narrative that has run down like a watch. In a similar way to Billy Parham, Cornelius Suttree has seen his world disappear piece by piece. By the end of the novel he is still unreconciled to his family. Suttree’s relationship to his family, his rejection of the family, seems to be a problem that the novel will attempt to resolve. Instead, not only does the novel not resolve the family issue, but it sets Suttree into a world of his choosing and proceeds to erase it. By the end of the novel, Suttree’s friends are dead (Ab Jones, Wanda), left behind (Reese, Joyce), in prison (Harrogate), or in mental wards (Daddy Watson). McCarthy, in this novel, employs almost every way conceivable to make people vanish. It is a novel of disappearance. The movement toward disappearance does not nullify the narrative, rather it turns the narrative into a kind of doppelganger of itself, something like an evil narrative twin that takes on the identity of narrative while doing the opposite work, unmaking rather than making stories.


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We do not see, then, in McCarthy, the unmaking of narrative, the rejection of its conventions. We see something that works like a narrative, something that can easily be mistaken for a traditional story that functions as a series of causes and effects. But we see causes that are not quite causes (Culla’s search and the strangers’ revenge in Outer Dark; Billy Parham’s decision to return the wolf to Mexico in The Crossing; Suttree’s strangely immobile wanderings and connections in the novel that takes his name) and effects that seem to hang suspended in the element of the novel, setting off no actions of their own, ghosts that cannot grasp the material to affect it. I have said that there is something ghostly about what haunts McCarthy’s narratives, something, like the strangers in Outer Dark, “spectral, palpable as stone.” This is what I mean by “the event.” An event is, first of all, not a happening, not a state of affairs, not a substance, not an episode. It is not a proposition and not what is denoted by a proposition, yet bears a relationship to both. In the world there are bodies. These bodies meet, collide, mix. These are physical bodies, words, energies, all that is actual. There is an effect, a result of this collision that is not expressed as a substantive, but as an infinitive. The effect of the collision and mixtures of bodies is the event. The event, in other words, is a pure effect, expressed as the infinitive verb: to eat, to consume, to destroy, to incite. The event is attributed to things by an expression. If I say, for example, that I have been wounded, I am dealing with an event expressed as the infinite “to wound/to be wounded.” “To wound/to be wounded” is not a characteristic, not a being that takes up residence in my body as something that exists. It is rather an attribute, one that does not itself exist as a substantive. My body may be wounded. It exists. My wound may be seen, felt, healed. It too exists. But the infinitive “to wound/to be wounded,” while it is a result of a collision and mixing of bodies, is not itself a substantive. “To wound/ to be wounded” cannot itself be wounded, or touched or affected in any way. Yet there it stands in its impassivity, the result of an action, attributable to a state of being, expressed by a proposition. Clearly we are in the realm of the paradoxical. The event may be regarded in several ways. It turns different faces toward the world. It is both the expressed of a proposition, and, as Deleuze says in his great book of the event, The Logic of Sense, the attribute of a state of being. It is sense: Let us consider the complex status of sense or of that which is expressed. On one hand, it does not exist outside the proposition

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which expresses it; what is expressed does not exist outside its expression. This is why we cannot say that sense exists, but rather that it inheres or subsists. On the other hand, it does not merge at all with the proposition, for it has an objective (objectité) which is quite distinct. (21) The event, which Deleuze sometimes refers to as event-sense, has a double nature. It clings to the surfaces, indeed it constitutes the surface between propositions and things. “Sense is both the expressible or the expressed of the proposition, and the attribute of the state of affairs. It turns one side toward things and one side toward propositions . . . It is exactly the boundary between propositions and things . . . [I]t has an essential relationship to language. But language is what is said of things” (22; emphasis in the original). Not surprisingly, Deleuze’s most focused and sustained discussion of the event comes in a book on Lewis Carrol. It is in fiction more than anywhere else that the event makes its presence felt, where there is clearly something that turns one face toward words and one toward states of things but is neither. The event does not enter into circuits of cause and effect. An event— because it is pure effect—does not then turn into a cause for a subsequent event. The order of causality is established between happenings and happenings, between episodes and episodes, substantives and substantives. And, really, what else are psychoanalysis and ideology but two ways of establishing real links between occurrences. And the great challenge of both psychoanalysis and ideological criticism is to ground their forms of critique in substantives: there is something called ideology that functions in the world in a real way and has a grounding in systems of language or of symbols; there is something called an unconscious that has a very real, concrete, energetic existence that allows it to operate on consciousness. The difference between these two figures of causality and the event is that the event does not cause anything. States of affairs are not propelled, or produced by it. A possible reason for the sterility of the event is its temporal nature. There are two ways of regarding the present moment. It is either what is here, what is always here, never passing away. It is that which renders the past and future merely fantastic in relation to it. It is what we refer to when we say that “When I look, it is always now.” Or we can regard the present as itself an illusion. There is a future that has not yet arrived and a past that is no longer, and there is a surface at which they meet, a surface that, nevertheless, cannot be present. It is what we refer to when we say


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“When I look for the present it is already past, or it has not yet arrived.” Deleuze refers to these modalities of time as Chronos (the eternal present) and Aion (the placeless surface between past and future) (Logic 77). So, the event is what turns a face toward propositions and toward states of things. Its place is the surface between the past and the future, a surface that does not exist, but subsists ideally. These are two of the defining features of the event. A third is that an event is a singularity. What is an ideal event? It is a singularity—or rather a set of singularities or of singular points characterizing a mathematical curve, a physical state of affairs, a psychological and moral person. Singularities are turning points and points of inf lection; bottlenecks, knots, foyers, and centers; points of fusion, condensation, and boiling; points of tears and joy, sickness and health, hope and anxiety, “sensitive” points . . . The singularity belongs to another dimension than that of denotation, manifestation, or signification. It is essentially pre-individual, non-personal, and a-conceptual. (52) A noun that is an epiphenomenon of the verbs that it contains. That is the singularity. What is, for example, the point at which one falls in love? To locate it in a moment that was ever a present is impossible. There are, of course, stories of the realization: “I knew that I loved you when I saw you in tears,” but this realization is only the recognition of something that has already happened, that is already past. It is the realization of a singular point, “falling in love,” that has and has never had a present, but rather the future/past of the event. And, in this sense, seeing a human being mathematically as a “problem” that is determined by certain singular points is compatible with the greatest passions, the most unnamable emotions. It is worthwhile to quote Deleuze at length here. The relation between mathematics and man may thus be conceived in a new way: the question is not that of quantifying or measuring human properties, but rather, on the one hand, that of problematizing human events, and, on the other, that of developing as various human events the conditions of a problem . . . When Carrol speaks of a parallelogram which longs for exterior angles and complains of not being able to be inscribed in a circle, or of a curve which suffers from “sections and ablations” that it has been forced to undergo, one must remember rather that psychological and moral characters are also made of pre-personal singularities, and that their feelings or their pathos are constituted in the vicinity

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of these singularities: sensitive crisis points, turning points, boiling points, knots, and foyers . . . We can speak of events only in the context of the problem whose conditions they determine. We can speak of events only as singularities deployed in a problematic field, in the vicinity of which the solutions are organized . . . The metamorphoses or redistributions of singularities form a history; each combination and each distribution is an event. (Logic 55–56) So, to reiterate, I am laying out three conditions of the event: its nature as a pure result, sterile and impassible; its locus as the fissure between a past and a future that form and are formed by a surface between them; its nature as singularity, or distribution of heterogeneous series of singularities. These singular points are, Deleuze tells us, distributed and arranged by something. Now, if the distributions of singularities corresponding to each series form fields of problems, how are we to characterize the paradoxical element which runs through the series, makes them resonate, communicate, and branch out, and which exercises command over all the repetitions, transformations, and redistributions . . . The metamorphoses or redistributions of singularities form a history; each combination and each distribution is an event. But the paradoxical instance is the Event in which all events communicate and are distributed. (56) Deleuze offers as an example the battle, which is grasped at different levels of actualization by the different participants, which may be found everywhere and nowhere at once (a soldier in the middle of a battle might be imagined to ask “where is the battle?”), which “hovers over its own field” (100), and which is indifferent to its particular actualization in existing states of affairs (100). The battle does nothing. It is the event, the result of the colliding of bodies, yet it also comes “before” the actual battle because it subsists in the future/past of the event. The battle has happened; it is yet to come, but it is never present as an entity. The bullet is present. The dead bodies are present. The fear, anger, panic are present, but the battle itself, which is the sense (the sense-event) of the coming together of bodies is the making possible of these things coming together. For this reason, the singularity is the constituent of history while not being caught up in a causal chain in which a cause produces an effect that then becomes a cause. There are rather series of singularities, events that communicate within


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themselves: “Events are ideational singularities which communicate in one and the same Event” (Logic 53). The history that Deleuze refers to is not the history of causes and effects, but rather a kind of series or what Benjamin has called a constellation, in which the singular points are events, and these event-singularities can undergo redistributions and metamorphoses independent of any overarching temporal chain. History—the history of causal chains, that is—is susceptible to rewriting, shocks, redemption, and transformation, not because our knowledge of the temporal line is incomplete (there are cases where we may have all the relevant facts—the Battle of the Little Big Horn, say, where no one disagrees on what happens but on what event took place) but because the singularity-events that subsist change and resonate in different ways. It is not difficult to think of other examples of events, paradoxical events, that hover over their own fields, that distribute heterogeneous series, and that are neither active nor passive. A marriage, for example. It is both the result of the coming together of two people and what makes possible the coming together. We speak of marriage as if it has a causal efficacy “our marriage is what binds us together,” yet we speak as if it is a passive entity that must be affected by our own actions “We must work to save this marriage.” It is both a past (“what we have gone through together”) and a future (“growing old together”) but never locates itself easily in a present (“Is this all there is?”). It is also the arrangement and rearrangement of heterogeneous series (propositions and actions; potentialities and actualities), each rearrangement of which is another event. The same may be said of the human itself. Is the human the result of certain processes, potentialities actualized within certain types of bodies? Is the meaning of the human, the result of certain types of values, beliefs, relationships, attitudes (is the human in other words a pure result of the convergence of heterogeneous series of physical, linguistic, and social elements)? Or is it also somehow prior to the coming together of those elements? Does humanism owe its coherence to a set of actualized abilities being organized, or does the human itself, as event, as the history of the human and what the human might become, hover over its own actualizations—self-awareness, morality, language, community? Again the answer must be paradoxical. The human is a pure result. It causes nothing to happen, it is, as result, not affected by anything. Yet, it is there in its “sterile splendor” (20), assembling, distributing, making possible, yet indifferent to its own actualizations: the event of the human. And again, we may make the very same claim of the novel itself. It is both the result (of the writer’s intentions, the coming together of

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statements, the interests and limits of the reader) and what makes possible the coming together of these elements. It is the unique event that arranges and distributes other events within it. It turns one face toward propositions and another toward states of affairs; it is past and what is to come. As an event whose name is its title, it encompasses a series of infinitives that are actualized by episodes, presences, characters, actions. Like a battle, or a marriage, the novel unfolds in time (either in the process of being written or being read), but is, as ideal, indifferent to its actualizations. This indifference is what makes the interpretation of any novel such a frustrating process, one that is never complete no matter how much work is done. The critic discusses the novel as a series of causes and effects, of ideas, of characters, of inf luences, of significations. Something is always left out, left untouched by the critics’ analyses. What is left out is not a mass of detail. We can imagine an infinite amount of work being done on a given novel, analyses that take into account every detail of the novel (although this analysis is certainly not only fantastic but monstrous) but that still do not touch the novel-asevent. We only begin to speak of the event when we locate ourselves on the borderline of virtuality—the ideality of the event—and actuality, the realization of events in episodes, characters, words, actions. We can now finally circle back to McCarthy, one of the greatest American writers of the event. I have said that McCarthy’s narratives, while they exhibit the outward sign of narratives, seem to be possessed by another power that undoes the link between causes and effects. If we are to look for the resonances of events in McCarthy, we will look for those displacements of temporality, those singularities in the vicinity of which a character is constituted, the arrangement of series of these singular points. We will look for the sense of the novels, the novel as sense-events. And if we come to the conclusion that these novels say something about the human, they can only do so on the basis of the events that occupy them. The hunting down of events is, of course, the work of a lifetime, even restricted to the writings of one author, but what follows will present four exemplary moments of the subsistence of the event in four of McCarthy’s novels, Outer Dark, Child of God, The Orchard Keeper, and The Crossing. Outer Dark I said earlier that in Outer Dark McCarthy presents us with several problems. What is the role of the strangers? What is Culla’s motivation for setting out on his putative search of his sister? Why does


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Rinthy’s search come to nothing? Why does the nameless child die at the hands of the bearded stranger? I have said that seeing the strangers in terms of Culla’s own guilt (as a kind of projection of that guilt, or as an unconscious punishment of that guilt) does not work for several reasons. The strangers are real; they are scourging the entire countryside; they are not hunting Culla but are happened upon by him; their actions (the killing of the child) seem both directed at Culla’s act, yet totally disengaged from any meaning at all. It is not a problem to look for some relationship between Culla’s transgression (both the fathering of a child with his sister and the abandonment of the child in the forest) and the upsurge of the strangers in the landscape. The relationship is not internal, however. Not psychological. It is a relationship of pure externality, a co-resonance of two divergent series, neither of which precedes the other. And what arranges and rearranges the relationship between the two is the event, the set of singular points that describe the state of affairs, arranged and distributed by the unique event that organizes events within it. And what is this unique event, the event that never comes into the present? Outer Dark is not a novel that begins with a transgression. The great transgression of the novel—incest—has already happened, is already past before the action of the novel gets underway. Sibling incest is the great event that organizes and arranges events within the novel. From the incestuous moment we have three series laid out. The first is the series of the strangers’ wanderings, their appearance out of the landscape, their scourging of the landscape, their demonic upsurges. The second is the series of Culla’s wanderings, his disingenuous search for his sister, a search that has little direction, and only a nominal goal. The third series is Rinthy’s wanderings, which are far more comprehensible than her brother’s. She has a purpose, a goal that is intelligible in human terms (as opposed to the odd affectlessness of Culla). Their relationship to the event that makes them possible and arranges their singular points (and in the case of Outer Dark we might expand Deleuze’s list to say that singularities are passages, emergences, intersections) is not one of reality to potentiality. The event does not exist in potentiality. The potentiality resembles the actuality that it becomes. (The man who commits murder does so, we say, because the potential, the murder in latent form lacking only existence, was there all along. Bergson, of course, accuses the concept of potentiality of being nothing more than a retrospective projection.) But the event, as we have seen, is rather a problem than a potentiality. It is virtual rather than actual. In Difference and

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Repetition, Deleuze draws the connection between the problem and the virtual. to the extent that the possible is open to “realization”, it is understood as an image of the real, while the real is supposed to resemble the possible. That is why it is difficult to understand what existence adds to the concept when all it does is double like with like. Such is the defect of the possible: a defect which serves to condemn it as produced after the fact, as retroactively fabricated in the image of what resembles it. The actualization of the virtual, on the contrary, always takes place by difference, divergence, or differenciation. Actualization breaks with resemblance as a process no less than it does with identity as a principle . . . For a . . . virtual object, to be actualized is to create divergent lines which correspond to—without resembling—a virtual multiplicity. The virtual possesses the reality of a task to be performed or a problem to be solved. (212) The virtual (the event) actualizes along divergent lines. We see three lines in Outer Dark that diverge from the event (the original transgression of sibling incest). To call the incest that precedes the opening of the novel virtual is not, obviously, to argue that it is not a real event with real effects (a child), it is rather to say that the event (the virtual) is in what happens, in the state of affairs, in the same way that the a marriage is in each of the moments that make it up while never resting as a presence in any one of them (the past-future of the event). Sibling incest—as an event—sets off three divergent series, three sets of singularities, emergences, passages, intersections. The child is one point where all three series converge. It is what assures their convergence. But the relationship between the series is not one of cause and effect— Culla’s series does not cause the strangers’ series or vice versa—but of what Deleuze calls “quasi-causality.” “Incorporeal effects [i.e., events] are never themselves causes in relation to each other; rather they are only ‘quasi-causes’ following laws which perhaps express in each case the relative unity or mixture of bodies on which they depend for their real causes” (Logic 6). We might think of quasi-causality as a kind of resonance between heterogeneous series, a resonance that brings them together even in their divergence. We have the strangers, Culla, and Rinthy, all three manifested within a different series of movements, points, and passages. There are various ways of holding the three together, of finding quasicausal relationships.


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One way is to look at the relativity of search and movement between the three series. The strangers are the most directionless form of movement. They run a course approximately parallel to Culla’s, murdering people he has had contact with (and surely Culla’s “responsibility” for these deaths is a case of quasi-causality). They tend not to run a straight or even definable line, but emerge suddenly, defying the strictures of space and time. They entered the lot at a slow jog, the peaceful and ruminative stock coming erect, watchful, shifting with eyes sidled as they passed, the three of them paying no heed, seemingly blind with purpose, passing through an ether of smartweed and stale ammonia steaming from the sunbleared chickenrun and on through the open doors of the barn and almost instantly out the other side marvelously armed with crude agrarian weapons, spade and brush-hook, emerging in an explosion of guineafowl and one screaming sow, unaltered in gait demeanor or speed, parodic figures transposed live and intact and violent out of a proletarian mural and set mobile upon the empty fields, advancing against the twilight, the droning bees and windtilted clover. (35) The strangers emerge. They do not run a course that can be followed, but surge suddenly outward in acts of violence or of pure mobility. They were about with the first light, the bearded one rising and kicking out the other two and still with no word among them rekindling the fire and setting their battered pannikins about it, squatting on their haunches, eating again wordlessly with beltknives, until the bearded one rose and stood spraddlelegged before the fire and closed the other two in a foul white plume of smoke out of and through which they fought suddenly and unannounced and mute and as suddenly ceased, picking up their ragged duffel and moving west along the river once again. (3) ... The three men when they came might have risen from the ground. The tinker could not account for them. (229) Culla has what might be called a greater relative mobility. He does not emerge, but pursues a course from point to point. Unlike the strangers’ points, which are moments of violence, Culla’s points are moments of stasis. The reader of Outer Dark is certainly not wrong to think that, for a man supposedly searching for his sister, Culla Holme seem oddly content to rest in one place much of the time (he is always looking for

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a job, and asks the squire who fines him for trespassing if he can stay on and work long term). What Culla does, in other words, seems like a search, bears more of the marks of a search than the strangers’ movement. But nonetheless, it is a search that has no real goal, and one that subordinates the movement to the point. In fact, the novel ends with Culla Holme coming to, literally, the end of the road. Late in the day the road brought him into a swamp. And that was all. Before him stretched a spectral waste out of which reared only the naked trees in attitudes of agony and dimly hominoid like figures in a landscape of the damned. A faintly smoking garden of the dead that tended away to the earth’s curve. He tried his foot in the mire before him and it rose in a vulvate welt claggy and sucking. He stepped back. A stale wind blew from this desolation and the marsh reeds and black ferns among which he stood clashed softly like things chained. He wondered why a road should come to such a place. (242) Rinthy’s search, by contrast, is a guided one with a sure, though elusive and paradoxical, goal, to find a man that she has never seen. When she says “I don’t live nowheres no more . . . I never did much. I just go around huntin my chap. That’s about all I do any more” (156), she is speaking as one who has subordinated the point to the movement. Rinthy is welcomed by the world she moves in. She is helped, advised, taken in, but always moves on. She does nothing but search. The innocence of her movement resonates with the almost innocent evil of the strangers who seem also to move only for the sake of movement. In addition to these resonating series of movements, we have a continuum of humanity along the three series. The strangers are, of course, the farthest from the realm of the human. Their powers, their movements, their violence, their appearance as a scourge on the landscape, all bespeak a power that comes from outside of the human community. Their evil (if that is what such spectral figures can be called) is precisely that which has no human motivation, no connection to human morals (so that they are, as I have said, only seemingly figures of retribution), no motivation, but nevertheless haunts human action. The nonhuman bears a retribution to the human, but a retribution that cannot even provide the comfort of sure-handed divine justice. Culla is next along the continuum of human/nonhuman. He has the beginnings (but only the beginnings) of human affects—he is oddly placid for much of the novel, even when he is in danger—but his fathering of the child with his sister and the abandonment of the child in the woods puts him morally


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just beyond the pale of the human community. He moves through a world that no longer welcomes him. He is suspect, hunted, and seems to somehow drag the strangers in his wake. He does not cause the apocalyptic destruction wrought by the strangers but he seems the harbinger of their coming into the world. His monstrosity, though, is still half human because it is a deviance wherein traces of human morality still reside. Rinthy is the anchor in the world of Outer Dark and she is the final figure of the novel’s great paradox. She is clearly the most recognizable human character. She is the most motivated. She has what we recognize as human attachments and even human qualities—loyalty, determination, steadfastness, strength. She is what is familiar in the almost supernatural world of the novel. But what, in the end, does the novel have to say about the human? Certainly, by arranging and distributing events the novel is not forgoing its own power to speak of the human, to affect us at our cores. On the contrary, it is only by arranging and distributing singular events that the novel can make claims on moral, aesthetic, and philosophical levels. Rinthy is held in the resonating series of three movements and three modalities of the human/ nonhuman. Her own actions are held within the event of transgression that hovers over the novel like the battle over its own field. The event has actualized itself along diverging lines; coming into the world of the actual, the virtual event of her and her brother’s transgression issues in one great event that haunts the novel: homelessness. The transgression does not so much cause her homelessness (in that it literally causes her to leave the house she shares with Culla), rather it distributes a kind of metaphysical homelessness throughout the space and time of the novel. Not only, Rinthy tells us, does she no longer live anywhere, but she “never did much,” and not only is Rinthy homeless, but as a blind man says to Culla: “People goin up and down in the world like dogs. As if they wasn’t a home nowheres” (240). Rinthy is homeless, and, with her, humanity, the very essence of humanity, is homeless as well. She has become pure search, and her search renders her immune from the terrors of the strangers. Our last glimpse of Rinthy is of her sleeping in the devastation after the murder of her baby by the strangers, with the body of the slain tinker nearby. Late in the afternoon she entered the glade, coming down a footpath where narrow cart tracks had crushed the weeds and through the wood, half wild and haggard in her shapeless sundrained cerements, yet delicate as any fallow doe, and so into the clearing to stand cradled in a grail of jade and windy light, slender and

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trembling and pale with wandlike hands to speak the boneless shapes attending her. And stepping softly with her air of blooded ruin about the glade in a frail agony of grace she trailed her rags through the dust and ashes, circling the dead fire, the charred billets and chalk bones, the little calcined ribcage . . . She waited all through the blue twilight and into the dark. Bats came and went. Wind stirred the ashes and the tinker in his tree turned slowly but no one returned. Shadows grew cold across the wood and night rang down upon these lonely figures and after a while little sister was sleeping. (237–238) This is an oddly calm scene for all the blasted landscape that surrounds it. Rinthy’s humanity has been the purity of her search, a purity rendered possible by the snatching away in the event of any home that one might have, any home that one has had. Like the event itself, home is a past that was never a present, a future that will never pass into the present. It is a strange and haunting humanity that Rinthy gives to us, a humanity asleep in the ashes of blight and devastation. In the world of the actual, the transgression that begins the novel can never be traced as a cause of this kind of homelessness. Here the event of transgression, the inhuman and deadly pairing of brother and sister, circles around the great homelessness that falls on the world from the event that hovers over it. Transgression, sin, homelessness. The inhuman, the unspeakable, gives us the purity of the human search, the homelessness in which the human makes its way as passage and emergence, where it sleeps in the smoke of the terror that passes it by. Child of God In speaking of Outer Dark, there is one word that I did not employ but was tempted to: madness. The landscape of the novel seems glimpsed through the fevered mind. Another of McCarthy’s early novels—Child of God—is more explicitly concerned with madness, the madness of a man who has left behind the rules even of his own perverse and violent community. In madness we seem to have, if nothing else, a workable (if not stable) relationship to the human: madness is that which goes beyond the human, either above or below it. It is, of course, old hat to point out the ways in which madness invades and undermines the


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rational ego, how the forces of the unconscious, in being pushed away, establish the normalcy of the “human,” the rational center of consciousness. It is also, as Foucault so often tells us, one of the great faults of psychoanalysis that it cannot predict the moment that sanity will pass into madness (and therefore psychology fails to tell us who will become a danger) or it believes people have passed the threshold to madness when they are still sane (and thus the healthy are locked away). But the story of Lester Ballard, the “Child of God,” is not the story of the psychological; he is not essentially a character who passes at some point into madness. His humanity, in other words, is not invaded by madness, nor is his humanity a kind of balance of madness and sanity (as we are tempted to say of humanity in general). Rather, Lester Ballard is, as a psychological and moral character, made up of the event from which the series of his actions spring, a series that both converges with and diverges from the series of the normalizing community in which he lives and in which he becomes a legend. If Lester Ballard is human, it is a humanity that is constructed in the vicinity of certain nonhuman singularities. We might say, in short, that Lester Ballard is himself an event. One of the most paradoxical aspects of Lester Ballard’s madness, Vereen Bell tells us in The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy is that it is a kind of reworking of the elements of putative sanity. The community of Sevier County, Lester’s habitat, is presented in the novel as being all but pathologically placid. No distress is shown to evoke anxiety or to disturb the calm surface of tested structure and polite social amenity. Yet it is made to seem possible that if the community were reconstructed by some inexpert, godlike hand, with some of the wires connected to the wrong terminals, a Lester Ballard might result. (54–55) We have seen that the ideal event is not a potentiality but a virtuality that actualizes along several ramified lines, several heterogeneous series that enter into relationships of resonance and quasi-causality. One of Deleuze’s descriptions of the relative workings of series echoes Bell’s description of Ballard’s madness: “the terms of each series are in perpetual relative displacement in relation to those of the other” (Logic 39). We have the series of Ballard’s murder and necrophilia, and we have the series of Sevier County with its stories, myths, violence, incest, and crime. There is the story of the dumpkeeper with nine daughters who run wild and get pregnant one by one, and who,

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one day, finds a daughter sprawled on the ground coupling with a young man. He watched from behind a tree until he recognized one of his girls. He tried to creep up on them but the boy was wary and leaped up and was away through the woods hauling up his breeches as he went. The old man began to beat the girl with the stick he carried. She grabbed it. He overbalanced. They sprawled together in the leaves. Hot fishy reek of her freshened loins. Her peach drawers hung from a bush. The air about him grew electric. Next thing he knew his overalls were about his knees and he was mounting her. Daddy quit, she said. Daddy. Oooh. (27–28) This story, as with all the stories related in Child of God is told with a certain detached humor that is the voice of the folk tale. McCarthy’s anonymous storytellers can relate bizarre and violent events with a kind of easy lilt that incorporates them into the normalcy of the community without a ripple, as with the story of Lester and the cow. I’ll tell ye another thing he done one time. He had this old cow to balk on him, couldn’t get her to do nothin. He pushed and pulled and beat on her till she’d wore him out. He went and borry’d Squire Helton’s tractor and went back over there and thowed a rope over the old cow’s head and took off on the tractor hard as he could go. When it took up the slack it like to of jerked her head plumb off. Broke her neck and killed her where she stood. Ast Floyd if he didn’t. (35) Another narrator tells a story of Ballard, in his youth, punching a smaller boy because the boy would not retrieve a softball for him, and although the narrator tells this story disapprovingly, it is not out of the ordinary for the community, not any transgression of its standards or its history, a history that includes warring vigilante groups (the whitecaps and bluebills) and public hangings that seem as normal and festive as church services, complete with singing (167). The violence of this community is as much virtual as actual. It exists at no particular place and time; no one act makes it present or truly represents it, which is why the community can disclaim its ties with Ballard’s perversion. It reserves the right not to see itself in any of its own acts. We might name the event hovering over Child of God “community,” if we are careful not to confuse it with its actualization


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in state of affairs, and we might see, in Lester Ballard’s perversion of his community’s most characteristic attributes (its singular points), the resonation of two series (“Ballard” and “Sevier County”), one displacing the elements of the other, and both being arranged and laid out by the ideal event—community—that makes them possible. Lester is the event in person because he is a rearrangement of the aspects of his community that need to be normalized and controlled through the process of storytelling. This is why Lester’s story is told as it is, not in retrospect, by one of the anonymous narrators (who at any rate would not have insight into Lester’s detailed actions) but by a voice that follows him in the minutiae of his story. The upshot of all of this is that Child of God leaves us in an impossible position in terms of Lester Ballard’s madness put against the supposed sanity of Sevier County. McCarthy brings us halfway through the novel before Ballard begins exhibiting behavior that deviates even from the rough and ready standards of his community. When Ballard commits his first act of necrophilia—with a girl asphyxiated in a car, and while standing on her dead lover’s legs—we have already been introduced to the voices of several anonymous narrators who relate stories of Ballard and of Sevier County. We are tempted to say that it is at this point that Ballard has gone overboard. The moment itself is well defined enough; it is self-contained and sharply focused onto a moment of decision (the moment Ballard decides to take the dead girl home with him). The problem, as Vereen Bell points out, is that Lester, throughout the novel seems “mysteriously forgiven” (68) and commands our attention and our sympathy. For Bell, much of Lester’s violence and perversion can be accounted for by human needs. “When he is lonely, he simply kills some people to keep him company, to exchange a grotesque parody of love with; yet underlying all of Lester’s mad cruelty is the simple fact of human loneliness—in its form as the need for human companionship . . .” (65). Lester is, indeed, a strangely human character. I say “strangely” human because his humanity seems constituted around a great paradox. We cannot say that as a human character, a psychological type, Lester does not become mad. His actions certainly meet his own community’s standards of madness; but as a kind of human event, as a human constituted in the region of the nonhuman he is paradoxically a madman who never actually goes mad since there is nothing essentially new in his madness, nothing not present elsewhere, but presented to us in the community voice of “I’ll tell ye another thing . . .” We can easily imagine that Lester’s story of murder and necrophilia could be related in this

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communal voice and retain its humor and humanity. And indeed, even after he has begun his murderous collection of bodies, he still participates in the rituals and stories of his community, in one episode, selling watches to a group of men in the general store, one of whom buys them from him and proceeds to sell them to his friends. It is a story that seems to belong to the early part of the novel, before Lester goes mad, but it is just as at home in the second part of the story. It would be, from any writer’s standpoint, a great risk to create a Lester Ballard, to center a narrative on him and to have him reach his breaking point halfway through. McCarthy risks losing the reader, creating a monster so far removed from the human that the horror of his actions becomes simply repugnant, or worse, farcical. But Lester, in some sense, remains human. Even after he has crossed over into madness we follow him with sympathy and interest. We retain our human feelings toward him; and his humanity remains intact, as Bell says, in his ability to judge himself (55). But what, in the nonhuman realm of the event, makes this retention of humanity possible? It is that Lester is not as much a departure from his community as the coming into being of its virtual or embryonic forces. As with all events, the community is both the result of a coming together of bodies, and what makes that coming together possible. When one member crosses over into madness he actually does depart from his community, but he does so by simply putting the elements of his community into a different arrangement. This makes madness not so much a state that one enters at a certain point (and may perhaps return from if cured) as an event that does not locate itself at any point in time, but coexists with the sane, all the while maintaining an infinite distance from it. Lester as a character (or an event-character) retains one of the features of the event: he is simultaneously virtual and actual (since the virtuality is not snuffed out in its actualizations); he is the surface between the past and the future. He remains oddly outside of time, at least outside of the present. Does Lester become mad, or was he mad all along? Does he go beyond the boundaries of his community in his crimes, or does his own madness somehow signify that of the world around him? There are no answers to these questions, or at least there are only paradoxical answers because we must regard Lester in two ways, first as a human being whose existence must answer to the exigencies of time and space. He becomes mad at a certain point; he is propelled outside of a world that he has transgressed. This all happens in the time of the present, of successive moments. But he is also an event, a pure effect, the result of the coming together of bodies. He is not a substantive, but a


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virtuality, existing in a time outside of the present. Has this Lester gone mad? As an event whose singularities are arranged by the ideal event of the community (itself more a verb than a substantive), Lester is always crossing the threshold to madness and always remaining on this side of it. He is on the surface constituted by the meeting of the past and the future and he looks both ways. Paradoxically, it is just this immunity to the present that allows Lester to maintain vestiges of humanity. He does not depart from the human community; he rearranges its singular points. He does not become mad at a point in time, but, as an eventcharacter, holds all points within him in a state of virtuality. A character who is an event. An event that holds virtually the singular points of the human, even if that humanity seems lost, thrown away in the world of the actual. Events are nonhuman because they are the result of the mixture of bodies—human, animal, linguistic, material, energetic. But however much they are pure results, they also subsist in mixtures from which they maintain a kind of independence, what Deleuze has called an “extra-being.” Events do not act, do not cause effects, but nevertheless make them possible. They are virtualities that actualize along ramifying lines and distribute and arrange series of singularities that enter into relationships of resonance and quasi-causality. Events are most interesting when we see them on the cutting edge of virtuality and actuality, when something comes into existence still bearing the virtuality that has made it possible. We find things like a humanity that is defined by the pure movement of homelessness, or a humanity that madness paradoxically holds together by sidestepping the present moment. The Orchard Keeper In McCarthy’s first novel, The Orchard Keeper, we find a humanity laid out f lat on a single plane where it intersects with nonhumanity of things and animals. The Orchard Keeper is a novel of moments that do not form relationships of cause and effect. In fact, it is a perfect example of a movement of virtuality rather than potentiality. Traditional narratives are narratives of potentiality. We find at their conclusion a satisfying sense that what has happened has somehow been embodied in the potentialities of the characters and situation. The end, in some sense resembles the beginning, unfolds what was there all along (the sense that we get in The Odyssey, for example, that we are seeing the

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unfolding of an already established character). And even when there is change, we will feel that the conditions of realism have not been met if the change seems arbitrary or forced rather than springing “naturally” from the character’s potentialities. This is not to say that what I call “traditional narrative” is merely a kind of foreshadowing, that there can be no change and no surprise, or that the potentialities that we expect to unfold might not be subverted. Indeed most novels spring from a kind of subversion of potentiality in that they usually introduce some form of disruption. We might take, out of myriad examples, Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. The potentials involved in the life of an impoverished country girl—work, marriage, family, children, community—are never allowed to unfold. Rather, we have the sense that Jack Durbeyfield’s discovery of his aristocratic heritage sets off a chain of events that could not have been predicted. In fact, Hardy seems to drain the situation of all the potential it contains after Tess leaves Alec D’Urberville, has his child, and loses the child to illness, the potential embodied in their liaison seems to have been exhausted—the action is completed, the retribution duly delivered. But we discover that there is far more in the relationship than meets the eye. The retaliations continue and continue until one is tempted to accuse Hardy of a cruelty that is usually reserved for Fate itself. But in spite of all this, I would argue that Tess of the D’Urbervilles is still a traditional narrative of potential, because such novels, for all they may subvert the potentials of a situation or a world, nevertheless proceed by unfolding the potentials of a human character. Tess is more at the end of the novel that she was at the beginning. She has added to herself. Hardy says “Almost at a leap Tess thus changed from simple girl to complex woman” (97). In the end of the novel she is far more than Angel will ever understand; she has gained a gravity and a weight of experience, and so is, for us, far more fully realized as a human, as a character, than the simple country girl could ever have been. By not fulfilling the potentials that can be expected of her as a particular person in a particular place, time, and class, she has more completely fulfilled herself (her potential) as a human, and the tragedy of her character renders her even more fully human. She is now someone to understand, with a soul to be saved or lost, with the capacity to make great moral choices. And it is not any great surprise for us, as readers, that she would turn out to be such a full character. Indeed the great surprise (and disappointment) for us would be if the simple country girl had not had her life (and her expectations) dashed. It is in this sense, then, that I am referring to the potential of “traditional novels.” They do indeed subvert potentials in one area—the represented world


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of the novel—in order to more fully realize it in another, the complex image of the human that underlies and emerges from what I am naming “traditional” narrative. Virtual fictions, on the other hand (and I hope it is clear by now that McCarthy is a master of the virtual), do not proceed by sameness, by unfolding the potential of the human to be human (in however many ways), but by difference, by laying out and arranging patterns of difference. They lay out series of singularities, singular points that do not enter into relationships of causality, but nonetheless resonate with each other, intensify each other. Their goal is to give, to render something, but not something human, not something that will add to our image of the human; rather, it will render those forces, events, and singularities that underlie and surround and penetrate the human. In The Orchard Keeper, we have series of singularities that enter into such relationships. What is ironic is that, as I mentioned earlier, the novel seems, early on, to be shaping up as a traditional novel of potential. When Marion Sylder kills Kenneth Rattner in self-defense and dumps his body in a concrete pit, when Rattner’s son John Wesley is sworn to vengeance by his own rather deluded mother, and when he comes across, by chance, his father’s murderer, it seems as if the novel will be forced to resolve this “natural” movement. It is easy to see, however, that, as a novel of potentiality, The Orchard Keeper is based on a rather clumsy narrative tactic, the chance encounter. But as a novel of virtuality, of the virtual event, it is a novel of the resonation of series, of the burying of narrative in events, of the human in the nonhuman. There is no real goal to The Orchard Keeper; there are simply encounters that stand in independence from others. The novel ends with the old man, Arthur Ownby, in a mental institution, the bootlegger Marion Sylder in jail, and John Wesley visiting his mother’s grave and heading off we know not where. Although it is certainly filled with colorful characters, interesting episodes, and regional f lavor, the story is largely inexplicable. What stands out most in it is McCarthy’s voice, the poetic intensity of the language (which is a characteristic of all of McCarthy’s fiction, but perhaps nowhere so purely as in his first novel) that is more than simply a kind of writerly garnish to the meat and potatoes of plot and character. The Orchard Keeper is a novel that inserts characters into a world where things and moments have a status equal to the human and where human actions sometimes stand out in a kind of useless splendor, unattached to any purpose or any meaning, yet bearing the weight of intention. Human and nonhuman meet each other at a halfway point that is the event; a building burning has the same kind of weight and

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intention and sense as a man firing a rif le. In fact, the exemplary scene of a kind of pure event-action is Arthur Ownby’s inexplicably firing on an abandoned metal tank in the woods with a shotgun. It is an act whose power is, for Marion Sylder who observes it, all out of proportion with its actual significance. The man was putting two more shells into the breech of the shotgun and Sylder could see them now, and the dull red of the waxed cardboard tubes that had been missing from the extracted cases. The man didn’t hesitate; he raised the gun and breeched it in one quick motion. Two more blasts ripped the silence and two holes appeared now in the lower corner. He was making a huge crude X across the face of the tank. Again he examined the bits of brass before reloading. Sylder watched wide-eyed from his retreat in the bushes. He could hear the solid whop of the full cases lamming into the tank and the tank seemed to reel under the impact like a thing alive. There was something ghastly and horrific about it and he had the impression that this gnomic old man had brought with him an inexhaustible supply of shells and would cease his cannonading only when he became too weary to lift the gun. (97–98) It is as if Arthur Ownby will make himself a master of the event. He will create a pure result, untouchable by the world and issuing in no other result. There is always, however, an underlying narrative, or rather a narrative lying in ambush, waiting to impose order on the events of the story (Ownby is hunted down and institutionalized). And yet, if we are to assign any ethical or aesthetic values to the story— beauty, resolution, friendship, loyalty, simplicity, humanity—it is not on the basis of actions that issue in narrative lines, but rather on the basis of events that stand apart in their own sense. As I mentioned earlier, there is always, in McCarthy, something that seems like a narrative, functions like a story with an impetus, a thrust, something that must be resolved, something that could be seen as motivating. The paradox of The Orchard Keeper is that there is a beginning—Rattner’s death and the promise of revenge extracted from John Wesley—with no middle or ending, a kind of aborted potentiality. And there is a middle and an ending—the pursuit and capture of Arthur Ownby and Marion Sylder—that seem to have no beginning. We pick up Sylder’s bootlegging not as the beginning of a narrative line, but in the middle of one. Sylder is, for us, the one who has already


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performed the great act, the killing of Rattner. It seems as odd for Sylder to find himself in prison for bootlegging in this narrative sequence as it always seems to me that Al Capone was convicted of tax evasion. So, between these two narratives, one stopped before its beginning and the other picked up in media res, the story unfolds—already displaced and haunted by the becoming nonhuman at its core—with two incomplete narrative lines imposing something like order on the three great series of the novel, the life of Sylder, of Ownby, and of John Wesley, all of whom are emerged in singular points and moments that lay their humanity out on a plane of nonhuman things and acts. In using the term “nonhuman” here, I am not just referring to the nature that is everywhere present in the novel. Much of the novel takes place in woods, in ponds (where John Wesley meets Sylder by helping him from a car wreck), in caves. John Wesley is a trapper (though not a very successful one) and a hunter, and there are stories of hunting dogs, treed raccoons, mythical cats called “painters” that roam the woods. But it is entirely possible for a human narrative to unfold in nature. A natural setting alone is not sufficient for the creation of the nonhuman. The human, to reveal its nonhuman roots, cannot simply be placed in a natural setting, but there must be something that lays the human out on the same plane as nature, and, by “nature,” I mean events, singular points, disasters, pure happenings unconnected to personal meaning. The human must enter into a nonhuman becoming. Arthur Ownby’s attack on the metal tank is not personal, not some proto-militia man protest against the powers that be. Its horror—for Sylder—is that it is unconnected to any human meaning. It is outside of the realm of human activity. Ownby’s watch over the dead and decayed body of Kenneth Rattner, dumped into a concrete pit, is another example of an activity divorced from meaning. It is not out of respect or duty that Ownby returns regularly to cut a small tree and place it over the body. His watch is not caused by anything. It is rather the pure effect of a chance encounter. And in terms of the narrative, it actually serves no function. It establishes a link between Ownby, John Wesley, and Sylder, but it is a link that is never brought together in terms of cause and effect. Ownby and Sylder run a roughly parallel course, meeting sometimes (as when Sylder sees Ownby shooting the metal tank) and in certain ways converging (both ending up institutionalized), but never directly affecting one another. In short, whenever we expect to find logical connections between the three narratives, between one action and another, between motivation and action we are always left unsatisfied. It is not that we find no connections at all, but rather that the

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connections we find always have some divergence from the expected. So we are left with series of actions that converge and diverge from each other, that touch at some points and veer away at others. But we are also left with the breathtaking beauty of McCarthy’s language, the sheer audacity of his lyricism. McCarthy’s novel is not a human narrative, but rather the story of the becoming nonhuman of the human. That is the event of the novel: to become nonhuman, and as with all events, it is not located in a specific present, but presides over all the movements of the novel. And it is in the language of the novel that the series of human and nonhuman resonate. McCarthy does not describe a world; he does not even create a world. Rather, he actualizes a virtuality, he writes on the cutting edge where human and nonhuman meet. There is, as we have seen, the bizarre lyricism of Arthur Ownby firing on the metal tank, and earlier in the novel, the life and death struggle of Sylder and Rattner is conveyed in terms equally unsettling. The human breaks down into its constituent singularities. I take up the description at the moment when Sylder has been attacked from behind with a car jack by Rattner. His arm broken, Sylder is about to turn the tide of the fight: But when the man jerked the shaft of the jack from the punctured door he reached up, slowly, he thought, and laid his hand on the jack and still slowly closed his fingers over it. The man looked down at him, and in the gradual suffusion of light gathered and held between the gloss of the car’s enamel and the paling road dust he saw terror carved and molded on that face like a physical deformity. They were like that for some few seconds, he sitting, the man standing, holding either end of the jack as if suspended in the act of passing it one to the other. Then Sylder stood, still in that somnambulant slow motion as if time itself were running down, and watched the man turn, seeming to labor not under water but in some more viscous f luid, torturous slow, and the jack itself falling down on an angle over the dying forces of gravity, leaving Sylder’s own hand and bouncing slowly in the road while his leaden arm rose in a stiff arc and his fingers cocked like a cat’s claws unsheathing and buried themselves in the cheesy neck-f lesh of the man who f led from him without apparent headway as in a nightmare. (38) The description goes on for another two pages until Rattner lies dead, choked to death in exquisitely obscene slowness by the relentless Sylder. After Sylder has killed Rattner “He looked at the man again and time was coming back, gaining, so that all the clocks would be right” (40).


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What makes this phrase so startling is that it tells us what we somehow suspect, that the dreamlike quality, the undoing of time in the fight is not just the narrator’s taking up of a character’s point of view, but that, in some way, the temporal world of the novel (not just of Sylder’s perspective) goes out of joint. One of the other defining moments of the novel, and one that has little relevance to the narrative sequence is the destruction of the Green Fly Inn, a tavern built by some genius of self-destruction, a place so out of the ordinary that it seems not to be made by human hands but by some aberration of nature that produces only freaks. It was box-shaped with a high front and a tin roof sloping rearward and was built on a scaffolding of poles over a sheer drop, the front door giving directly onto the road. One corner was nailed to a pine tree that rose towering out of the hollow—a hollow which on windy nights acted as a f lue, funneling the updrafts from the valley through the mountain gap. On such nights the inn-goers trod f loors that waltzed drunkenly beneath them, surged and buckled with huge groans. At times the whole building would career madly to one side as though headlong into collapse. The drinkers would pause, liquid tilting in their glasses, the structure would shudder violently, a broom would fall, a bottle, and the inn would slowly right itself and assume once more its normal reeling equipoise. The drinkers would raise their glasses, talk would begin again. Remarks alluding to the eccentricities of the inn were made only outside the building. To them the inn was animate as any old ship to her crew and it bred an atmosphere such as few could boast, a solidarity due largely to its very precariousness. (12–13) Later on, the destruction of the porch of the inn, a grotesquely comic scene in which men are falling like ants into the hollow, holding on to wildly swinging railings, and jamming at the door like a mass of desperate Abbots and Costellos, marks the beginning of the end for the Green Fly Inn, a place that springs up in the novel and disappears without any discernible meaning other than the event of its precarious existence and precipitous disaster, and its final destruction by fire, where it crashes into the bottle-littered hollow: There it continued to burn, generating such heat that the hoard of glass beneath it ran molten and fused in a single sheet, shaped in ripples and f lutings, encysted with crisp and blackened rubble,

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murrhined with bottlecaps. It is there yet, the last remnant of that landmark, f lowing down the sharp fold of the valley like some imponderable archeological phenomenon. (48) The relationship between the catastrophes and peculiarity of the Green Fly Inn and the rest of the novel is one of resonance. The Green Fly Inn doesn’t cause anything to happen (although it does participate in some narrative strings like Rattner’s robbery of the men fallen from the inn’s collapsed porch) but rather resonates with all of the other events and people of the story. Its very precariousness and mystery amplify that of all the characters and actions of the story. The events at the Green Fly Inn become as much an attribute of the characters in the story as any personal qualities would be. And even if we are to insist on using inaccurate words such as “mood” (the Inn contributes to a certain mood in the novel) we must first acknowledge that the creation of a mood is a matter of resonance, of quasi-causality, of the human taken up by the language of things. For this reason, it is also misleading to say simply that McCarthy creates a dreamlike atmosphere. Not only is “dreamlike” a phrase used far too liberally to indicate anything strange or irrational, but it bypasses the question of what operation must be carried out to create the impression of a dream in the first place. The destruction of The Green Fly Inn and the killing of Rattner are both real events that take on a dreamlike quality because there is some force that intersects both dreams and waking moments, making waking moments like a dream, and making the dream like something else: the event. Because there is no real narrative line bringing together moments and assigning them relative values, most of the episodes of The Orchard Keeper can be used as examples of the nonhuman power of the event. There are the great moments (the ones we are tempted to call “symbolic,” as much as they resist symbolism): Rattner’s death, the destruction of the inn, Sylder and John Wesley’s first meeting at the site of Sylder’s crashed car, Arthur Ownby’s firing upon the metal tower, and his watch over the body of Rattner. But there are also less momentous events, smaller moments: John Wesley’s encounter with a woman who tries to seduce him, his discovery of an injured sparrow-hawk, his trading it in for the bounty when it dies, and his attempt to buy it back long after it has been disposed of, his rescue of a drowning hound, Ownby’s stories of ghostly wampus cats, his memories of his wife, Sylder’s attack on the sheriff Gifford, the killing of a cat by an owl. It is not enough, finally, to point out that these moments do not


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add up in any narrative equation, do not give us the proper unfolding of potentiality into actuality. They do not add up not because they lack the power to do so, but because they have far more power than moments. Each act exists in a kind of sterile splendor, for itself, each act containing a little event, a pure result that enters into relationships of quasi-causality and resonance with others. Resonance is the perfect model of the relationship of the human to the nonhuman. Resonance is amplification, intensification. The tenuous existence of the Green Fly Inn, the mystery of Ownby’s attack on the water tower, Rattner’s decay memorialized by Ownby: these are acts that defy narrative understanding, yet found even the most traditional narratives that bring together singular objects, moments, happenings. They are acts that seem always to exist in a past that was never present, and a future in which they will be told and mythologized. In fact, as the novel ends (or rather as it blinks out, escaping the final sum of moments in a conclusion) we see what has run through the novel all along, what nonhuman event has hovered over it. “They are gone now. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone. Over the land sun and wind still move to burn and sway the trees, the grasses. No avatar, no scion, no vestige of that people remains. On the lips of the strange race that now dwells there their names are myth, legend, dust” (246). It is myth that is the event of the novel, myth that is the becoming nonhuman of the human. But myth is itself transformed by the event. It is no longer a story told of the human meaning of the world; it cannot be made to do its work for the human understanding of the universe unless it is first of all the beauty of the event, that which comes about in the coming together of people and things, pure results that shine in a splendor just at the border of being. Both in the world and outside of it, in the present and the past. The myth has no meaning, but has sense. It does not issue in explanations, values, knowledge, but exists in the isolated force that makes these possible. I have avoided speaking explicitly of animals in The Orchard Keeper because I do not want nonhuman to signify “animal” but rather “event,” the result of the coming together of things, humans, words, actions, animals, moments. The event when it expresses itself in the world of the real (when it, as virtuality, ramifies along divergent lines into actuality) does so as becoming rather than being. This is why, as Deleuze says so often, that becoming is not being, since becoming, in effect, sidesteps the present moment in which substantives exist; becoming is a past-future with no present. And, as a movement of the virtual, becoming is a process of differentiation.

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Deleuze and American Literature The Crossing

With this process in mind, I would like to focus on one specific aspect of McCarthy’s The Crossing, a novel that, as I have said seems to proceed narratively by a process of subtraction rather than addition. As he often does, McCarthy employs a certain narrative misdirection, giving us a narrative line that explodes halfway through the novel. Billy Parham has decided to take a captured wolf back to Mexico in order to set her free in the mountains. McCarthy details the boy’s encounter with the wolf, how he traps her, travels with her, gradually earns if not her trust then her tolerance. Then, in a painful and shocking turn, Billy loses the wolf to the Mexican authorities who put her in a local carnival’s dog fights as the main attraction. Unable to rescue her from certain death, Billy returns to the dog ring after being forced out at gunpoint and shoots the wolf, ending what seemed like a narrative thrust that would traverse the entire novel (and I am certainly willing to admit a certain naive “boy and his wolf ” sentimentality that made me wish for the continuation of that narrative line). McCarthy, as I have said several times, gives us something that resembles narrative, movements that seem to have directions, but in which something else happens, in which an event comes into the world. We have seen that an event may be, as in The Orchard Keeper, a certain becoming nonhuman of the human. In The Crossing, the event that hovers over the novel is what we might call the becoming-wolf of Billy Parham. Becomings are not imitations, of course. They are not simply movements from potentiality to actuality (as water might become hot). As an event, a becoming is a movement of differentiation, of resonance, of the chasm of the past/future. For Billy Parham to become-wolf means that the virtual event called “wolf ” actualizes in him along a line of differentiation. The wolf is the event of the novel; the becoming-wolf of Billy Parham is the actualization of that event along a series of singular points. In one of the opening scenes of the novel, Billy, as a child, goes out at night to find the wolves that he has heard howling. He was very cold. He waited. It was very still. He could see by his breath how the wind lay and he watched his breath appear and vanish and appear and vanish constantly before him in the cold and he waited a long time. Then he saw them coming. Loping and twisting. Dancing. Tunneling their noses in the snow. Loping and running and rising by twos in a standing dance and running on again.


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There were seven of them and they passed within twenty feet of where he lay. He could see their almond eyes in the moonlight. He could hear their breath. He could feel the presence of their knowing that was electric in the air. They bunched and nuzzled and licked one another. Then they stopped. They stood with their ears cocked. Some with one forefoot raised to their chest. They were looking at him. He did not breathe. They did not breathe. They stood. Then they turned and quietly trotted on. When he got back to the house Boyd was awake but he didnt tell him where he’d been nor what he’d seen. He never told anybody. (4–5) This is the great moment of becoming. It is not a moment of imitation but of conjunction, of resonance. The boy and the wolves. Each is intensified, amplified by the other. The wolf turns into, first of all, a secret, something that the boy never tells anyone. The wolf, the wolf-event, of The Crossing, is always differentiating, always becoming something else in a line of transformation. The wolf is an event that is impassible, even by god. The wolf is a pure disappearance. The wolf is like the copo de nieve. Snowf lake. Snowf lake. You catch the snowf lake but when you look in your hand you dont have it no more. Maybe you see this dechado. But before you can see it it is gone. If you want to see it you have to see it on its own ground. If you catch it you lose it. And where it goes there is no coming back from. Not even God can bring it back. The boy looked down at the thin and ropy claws that held his hand. The light from the high window had paled, the sun had set. Escúchame, joven, the old man wheezed. If you could breathe a breath so strong you could blow out the wolf. Like you blow out the copo. Like you blow out the fire from the candela. The wolf is made the way the world is made. You cannot touch the world. You cannot hold it in your hand for it is made of breath only. (46) You cannot touch the world. It is an event, not a thing. The Crossing is perhaps McCarthy’s most theological novel, but it is a theology already deeply marked by the event. It is not transcendent, except in the way that the event is transcendent, standing outside the world of objects and of present moments. But it is also a theology of immanence, in the

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same way that the event is immanent, is inside of states of affairs that cause it. Billy Parham can become wolf because the wolf itself is in the process of becoming something else. Deleuze speaks of double becoming, in our case the becoming-wolf of Billy and the becoming-other of the wolf. No art is imitative, no art can be imitative or figurative. Suppose a painter “represents” a bird; this is in fact a becoming-bird that can occur only to the extent that the bird itself is in the process of becoming something else, a pure line and pure color. Thus imitation self-destructs, since the imitator unknowingly enters into a becoming that conjugates with the unknowing becoming of that which he or she imitates . . . Becoming is always double, that which one becomes becomes no less than the one that becomes . . . (Plateaus 304–305) What the wolf becomes is a disappearance, the passing away of things, the ungraspable nature of the world. The wolf becomes not God, but what God cannot reclaim, and the great beauty of the wolf is the beauty of what cannot be called back into the world yet never leaves the world. “He said that what men do not understand is that what the dead have quit is itself no world but is also only the picture of the world in men’s hearts. He said that the world cannot be quit for it is eternal in whatever form as are all things within it” (413). It is important to point out that, as tempting as it is to say, the wolf does not represent or symbolize the idea that all things pass away. The wolf is not a theme; passing away is not a theme, but an event. The wolf is not, in other words, an object in the world that dies, reminding us of the frailty of existence. This interpretation pales in comparison to what the wolf really is. The wolf is the very event of the disappearance of the world, and as Billy becomes-wolf, he is traversed by this passing away, and the god of Billy’s world becomes the god of this passing away, not a kind of wolf-god, but a becoming-wolf of god that is awful and sublime. What the wolf is, what it becomes, is what it is in the moment when Billy holds the dead wolf before he buries her. He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of a great beauty, like f lowers that feed on f lesh. What blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war. What we may well


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believe has power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can. But which cannot be held never be held and is no f lower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it. (127) In this loss we are beyond presence and absence. The event, I have said again and again, is paradoxical. There is a passing away in the world, a passing away presided over by god, but that god cannot recall. It is a passing away that never passes, or rather is always in the process of passing, so never establishes itself as a present that is no longer. The passing away of the world, the impassibility of the wolf (even when it is trapped, even when it is killed), resonates in the world. The wolf, Billy’s brother Boyd who dies in Mexico, Billy’s parents, murdered by thieves, even Billy’s country that will not accept him as a soldier, have, by the end of the novel, quit “the picture of the world” in his heart. His becoming-wolf is not just his loss of the people and places of his everyday life, but rather his traversal by this loss, his haunting by what will not stay in the past but continuously passes away. And certainly there is a whole discourse of psychology that can make sense of Billy’s experience. The wrenching scene at the end of the novel where Billy chases away an old sick dog that tries to befriend him, then searches for him once more could be seen as a testament to his continuing humanity. Billy chases away the dog, we might say, because of his fear, quite understandable by the end of the story, of attachment. The fear of another loss. And he weeps in the end because of the pain of yet another loss that he cannot reclaim. All of this makes perfect sense on its own terms, but only on condition of leaving out the entire novel. Billy’s humanity, expressed in psychological terms, cannot come to grips with the event. The psychological interpretation does not see that Billy has stepped beyond the realm of the psychological into the metaphysical. By the end of the novel he has not developed, has not learned, yet has accomplished something. He has no new qualities (and here I will identify qualities with the personal, and so with the human), but he does have new attributes, new events that have traversed him. Deleuze, quoting Emile Brehier, distinguishes between attributes and qualities: “when the scalpel cuts through the f lesh, the first body produces upon the second not a new property but a new attribute, that of being cut. The attribute does not designate any real quality . . .” (Brehier, qtd in Logic 5; emphasis in the original). The becoming-wolf of Billy Parham is his residence in the world that cannot be touched, his loneliness is no longer human; his humanity,

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if it is still there, is just one more name in a world that cannot be held down by names, as the gerente Quijada tells Billy. The world has no name, he said. The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. They cannot find for us the way again. Your brother is in that place which the world has chosen for him. He is where he is supposed to be. And yet the place he has found is also of his own choosing. That is a piece of luck not to be despised. (387–388) But in this becoming, in this passing away, there is still the possibility for ethics, still the possibility of making the right choice. Billy’s brother has chosen the place that the world has assigned him. And this is the basis for the ethics of the event, the nonhuman ethics that has nothing to do with human intention: Either ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us. To grasp whatever happens as unjust and unwarranted (it is always someone else’s fault) is, on the contrary, what renders our sores repugnant—veritable ressentiment, resentment of the event . . . [the longing for the event] wills now not exactly what occurs, but something in that which occurs, something yet to come which would be consistent with what occurs . . . (Logic 149; emphasis in the original) There is, in The Crossing, a notable lack of ressentiment for the event. There is no sense that the passing away, the ungraspabililty of the world, its haunting by the past, is unjust, or to be condemned because it undoes the world of humans. God is the one who presides over this passing away (although the power of passing away is beyond even the power of God to recall) and there may be a struggle with him and in the end the struggle may even define one’s own place in being, the borders that establish one’s own existence. what we seek is the worthy adversary. For we strike out to fall f lailing through demons of wire and crepe and we long for something


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of substance to oppose us. Something to contain us or to stay our hand. Otherwise there were no boundaries to our own being and we too must extend our claims until we lose all definition. Until we must be swallowed up at last by the very void to which we wished to stand opposed. (153) Rather than being swallowed up, Billy is transformed through subtraction. Everything is taken away from him, and what is left is not the simple human heart, not the naked essence of his soul, but rather another being that can never exist in the moment. “He seemed to himself a person with no prior life. As if he had died in some way years ago and was ever after some other being who had no history, who had no ponderable life to come” (382). This is the final becoming of Billy Parham. He stands out of time, already dead, with no history, just as the event has no history. When he sits in the road at the end of the novel and weeps, it is a gesture on the border of the human and the nonhuman. It is not the sadness that strikes us (though sadness there is) but the strange finality of it. It has ceased raining in the night and he walked out on the road and called for the dog. He called and called. Standing in that inexplicable darkness. Where there was no sound anywhere save only the wind. After a while he sat in the road. He took off his hat and placed it on the tarmac before him and he bowed his head and held his face in his hands and wept. He sat there for a long time and after a while the east did gray and after a while the right and godmade sun did rise, once again, for all and without distinction. (425–426) This is a weeping that will give birth to nothing, that will stand witness only to the new sunrise in whose light it will end. It is Billy’s nonhuman becoming, his human wolf-howl.


CH A P T E R

F I V E

The Moral Singularity: Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

We begin not with an idea, set in the earth as a guidepost, but with an echo, a strange echo across more than a century, and strange too because it is an echo of difference, as if one called out in one voice and heard the answer inf lected with some new tone, familiar and alien, as uncanny answers so often are. And again strange, because the echo travels from the present to the past, a clue planted in time. It would be hard to imagine two more different novels than Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Hardy’s world of small holders and craftsmen, dairies, and fading Victorian morality seems far more than a century removed from Cormac McCarthy’s Texas-Mexico border, the blood-soaked land, the almost vertiginous state of endless war, the grotesquely surreal violence. Although McCarthy depicts a world almost contemporaneous to Hardy’s, Blood Meridian is an unmistakably twentieth-century novel. Even the novel to which it is most frequently compared, Melville’s Moby Dick, cannot approach the nakedness of the giddy bloodletting that has made Blood Meridian arguably the most powerful American novel of the second half of the twentieth century. But more than geography and history seem to separate these novels. Their attitudes toward violence and morality seem to represent the far ends of a scale. In Tess the issues of morality, ethical behavior, revenge, forgiveness, redemption, and moral hypocrisy take the fore. There is little criticism on Tess from the earliest to the latest that does not at

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least take the moral questions as a background to other concerns, from the literary style, to the materialist questions of work and economy, to the questions of Darwinism and evolutionary biology. And the attitude toward violence is clearly tied to the moral question. The one great act of violence in the novel, Tess’s murder of Alec D’Urberville, possesses all the moral import such an act might be expected to possess. It is the final breaking point, the act in which all of Tess’s misery empties itself. But it is also the great act of love, the one act that Tess believes will redeem her in her husband’s eyes. “Angel, will you forgive me my sin against you, now I have killed him? I thought as I ran along that you would be sure to forgive me now I have done that. It came to me as a shining light that I should get you back that way. I could not bear the loss of you any longer—you don’t know how entirely I was unable to bear your not loving me!” (377). The murder is so caught up in the moral world that Tess lives in as her element that it is difficult not to see it as the perfect act of love. Contrast this moral world with Blood Meridian, a story in which violent death is not only omnipresent, but in which it is treated as the foundation upon which the world is built. Judge Holden, the philosophical voice of the book, places morality in its proper perspective: Moral law is an invention of the mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view. (250) Morality seems so far removed from the world of Blood Meridian that even the most overwhelming acts of violence seem beyond the scope of the moral judgment that would try to contain them. Steven Shaviro describes the reader’s experience in the face of this carnival of violence as well as anyone: “The scariest thing about Blood Meridian is that it is a euphoric and exhilarating book, rather than a tragically alienated one, or a gloomy, depressing one” (“Very Life” 156). Nonetheless, the echo remains. Although Orville Prescott’s New York Times review “Still Another Disciple of William Faulkner” (Arnold and Luce 1) speaks to the facile (although certainly correct enough) link between McCarthy and Faulkner, the resonant echo is between McCarthy and Hardy. In the following five passages it is not simply the diction and the vocabulary that create the uncanny echo, but rather the

The Moral Singularity

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transformation of the world into affect, into a kind of nonhuman field of singularity that penetrates and carries off the human world. After this season of congealed dampness came a spell of dry frost, when strange birds from behind the North Pole began to arrive silently on the upland of Flintcomb-Ash; gaunt spectral creatures with tragical eyes—eyes which had witnessed scenes of cataclysmal horror in inaccessible polar regions of a magnitude such as no human being had ever conceived, in curdling temperatures that no man could endure; which had beheld the crash of icebergs and the slide of snow-hills by the shooting light of the Aurora; been half blinded by the whirl of colossal storms and terraqueous distortions; and retained the expression of feature that such scenes had engendered. These nameless birds came quite near to Tess and Marian, but of all they had seen which humanity would never see, they brought no account. The traveller’s ambition to tell was not theirs, and, with dumb impassivity, they dismissed experiences which they did not value for the immediate incidents of this homely upland—the trivial movements of the two girls in disturbing the clods with their hackers so as to uncover something or other that these visitants relished as food. (Tess 283) They crouched in silence eating raw meat the Delawares had killed on the plain with arrows and they slept among the bones. A lobeshaped moon rose over the black shapes of the mountains dimming out the eastern stars and along the nearby ridge the white blooms of f lowering yuccas moved in the wind and in the night bats came from some nether part of the world to stand on leather wings like dark satanic hummingbirds and feed at the mouths of those f lowers. Farther along the ridge and slightly elevated on a ledge of sandstone squatted the judge, pale and naked. He raised his hand and the bats f lared in confusion and then he lowered it and sat as before and soon they were feeding again. (Meridian 148) That night they were visited by a plague of hail out of a faultless sky and the horses shied and moaned and the men dismounted and sat upon the ground with their saddles over their heads while the hail leapt in the sand like small lucent eggs concocted alchemically out of the desert darkness. When they resaddled and rode on they went for miles through cobbled ice while a polar moon rose like a blind cat’s eye up over the rim of the world. (Meridian 152)

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Close under the eaves of the stack, and as yet barely visible, was the red tyrant that the women had come to serve—a timberframed construction, with straps and wheels appertaining—the threshing-machine which, whilst it was going, kept up a despotic demand upon the endurance of their muscles and nerves. A little way off there was another indistinct figure; this one black, with a sustained hiss that spoke of strength very much in reserve. The long chimney running up beside an ash-tree, and the warmth which radiated from the spot, explained without the necessity of much daylight that here was the engine which was to act as the primum mobile of this little world. By the engine stood a dark motionless being, a sooty and grimy embodiment of tallness, in a sort of trance, with a heap of coals by his side: it was the engineman. The isolation of his manner and colour lent him the appearance of a creature from Tophet, who had strayed into the pellucid smokelessness of this region of yellow grain and pale soil, with which he had nothing in common, to amaze and to discompose its aborigines. What he looked he felt. He was in the agricultural world, but not of it. He served fire and smoke; these denizens of the fields served vegetation, weather, frost, and sun. He travelled with his engine from farm to farm, from county to county, for as yet the steam threshing-machine was itinerant in this part of Wessex. He spoke in a strange northern accent; his thoughts being turned inwards upon himself, his eye on his iron charge, hardly perceiving the scenes around him, and caring for them not at all: holding only strictly necessary intercourse with the natives, as if some ancient doom compelled him to wander here against his will in the service of his Plutonic master. (Tess 319) That night they rode through a region electric and wild where strange shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the horses’ trappings and the wagonwheels rolled in hoops of fire and little shapes of pale blue light came to perch in the ears of the horses and in the beards of the men. All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear. The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning lit the desert all about them, blue and barren, great clanging reaches ordered out of the absolute


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night like some demon kingdom summoned up or changeling land that come the day would leave them neither trace nor smoke nor ruin more than any troubling dream. (Meridian 47) These phrases—“half blinded by the whirl of colossal storms and terraqueous distortions,” “like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear,” “eyes which had witnessed scenes of cataclysmal horror in inaccessible polar regions of a magnitude such as no human being had ever conceived,” “who had strayed into the pellucid smokelessness of this region of yellow grain and pale soil,” “the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black”—that might have come from the same pen are a kind of symptom, an outward sign of a deeper affinity. We are faced with two men writing at the very farthest points, but of the same scale. And we might call these opposite points “singularity” and “morality.” In A Thousand Plateaus, one of the names that Deleuze and Guattari reserve for singularity (and there is more than one name that designates singularity) is the term coined by Duns Scotus—haecceity. There is a mode of individuation very different from that of a person, subject, thing, or substance. We reserve the name haecceity for it. A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a subject. They are haecceities in the sense that they consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected. (261; emphasis in the original) The haecceity belongs to the semiotic “that has freed itself from both formal signifiances and personal subjectifications” (263). Haecceities, for Deleuze and Guattari, are those nonhuman becomings that penetrate the human, making it intersect with the world, with forces, with time, with relations. They are, in fact, all that the human is: “you are nothing but that” (262). The singular, then, is never defined by the personal; it is not circumscribed by those recognizably humanistic values: dignity, morality, individuality, emotion. Blood Meridian, as Shaviro points out so convincingly, is a novel full to brimming with singular movements and relations. Shaviro’s Deleuzianism is clear from his description of the novel’s achievement. “Blood Meridian is a book, then, not of heights and depths, nor of origins and endings, but of restless, incessant horizontal movements: nomadic

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wanderings, topographical displacements, variations of weather, skirmishes in the desert” (147). We will return presently to Shaviro’s invocation of Deleuze, most especially the Spinozist (“Very Life” 148) Deleuze of the pre-Anti-Oedipus years. Suffice it to say, for the moment, that resonances abound between Deleuze’s language of nomadism—of the plane of consistency, of topographical movements, of the war machine, of smooth space—and the planar world in which McCarthy’s ragged violent travelers pursue their tangent. McCarthy (at least insofar as he articulates a philosophy through Judge Holden) and Deleuze are surely both philosophers of force, and as such, share a Nietzschean disdain for the merely moral calculus of human being. But isn’t Tess characterized by these very human values? There is little argument that Tess is a novel centered on moral questions. The blight upon this blighted star (25–26) is certainly a moral one; it is the blight of suffering (her father’s cough), of endless work (her mother’s perennial washing), and ethical failure (her father’s drunkenness). The novel is built upon questions of purity (and whether Tess has truly lost hers), of sin and redemption, of moral choice, of the hypocrisy of social mores. Even the ever-present issue of Hardy’s loyalty to Darwin and evolution is inf lected, in the criticism, with the moral question. In “Darwinism and Initiation in Tess,” Elliott Gose addresses the issue of Tess’s victimization both by Alec D’Urberville and by society, and concludes that “[t]hrough his feeling for man’s place in the evolutionary scale of progress and regress, and his insight into the ritual necessities of man’s relation to nature, Hardy makes Tess appealing not as a victim of society but as a human being caught in the ebb and f low of history, environment, and self ” (432). Peter Morton, in “Neo-Darwinian Fate in Tess of the D’Urbervilles” is just as ready as Gose to tie the issues of Darwinism to the moral questions of the novel. The social order in Tess is oppressive only because human institutions mirror the universal callousness, just as man’s interference can only temporarily palliate the f low of suffering towards the maximum possible for his species. As for nature, not only its moral but also its aesthetic values are suspect, for the latter only bear an accidental reference to the human condition, and frequently mock it. (441) Indeed, the questions of Darwinism in the novel (as in almost any social setting in which Darwinism is debated) are almost always questions of morality: of human progress, moral development, cooperation, and


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conf lict. The moral question in Tess is the question to which every theoretical approach addresses itself sooner or later. Tess’s life truly begins when she becomes more than the “mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience” (9), but enters into the world of sin, guilt, fallenness, and shame. The overwhelming sense, by the final chapters, that she has grown far beyond Angel is a testament to complex moral growth, forged in suffering and true to itself in a way that Angel will not truly understand, but only behold with awe. So we find ourselves in a position to plausibly argue that what makes Tess and Blood Meridian such different novels is that the former is built to the scale of human morality, and the latter is built on a far grander scale, a world in which movements are ontological rather than personal, cosmic rather than individual, a world in which the ungridded desert functions as a universe, lacking nothing. But we will see that the matter is not quite so simple, and the distinction between the two novels hides another form of intimacy. In the case of Tess, we will see how this intimacy provides the very conditions of possibility for Tess’s moral world. In the case of Blood Meridian, we will see how McCarthy sets a standard of judgment to which Deleuzianism must submit. In the past ten years there has been at least one convincing Deleuzian reading of Hardy—David Musselwhite’s “Tess of the D’Urbervilles: ‘A Becoming Woman’ or Deleuze and Guattari go to Wessex” in 2000, later published in Musselwhite’s Social Transformations in Hardy’s Tragic Novels: Megamachines and Phantasms in 2003, and at least one such reading of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Steven Shaviro’s powerful essay “ ‘The Very Life of Darkness’: A Reading of Blood Meridian” in 1999. We will deal first with Musselwhite, who undertakes one of the most audacious readings of Tess in recent years. The insight to which Musselwhite works—that Tess is a nomadic subject in the Deleuzian mold—is based on two insights of the early Deleuze, the distinction between what Deleuze calls “regimes of signs” and the distinction between the sadistic and masochistic economies of desire. For Musselwhite, two of the key regimes Deleuze elaborates— the despotic signifying regime and the authoritarian post-signifying passional regime—describe Tess’s relationship to Alec D’Urberville and Angel Clare, respectively. To summarize, Alec is the despot of the signifying regime, standing at the center of the system, pulling all meanings to this center in which he resides, reinforcing his meanings and his omnipresence through trickery and deceit, and necessitating a scapegoat to take the burden of what cannot be accommodated by the

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system (Musselwhite “Tess” 502–503; Deleuze Plateaus 117). Angel, in contrast, is the authoritarian of the passional post-signifying regime. His relationship with Tess is characterized by a point of subjectification, an idea on which Tess becomes fixed (in this case, Angel’s transcendent nature), a double turning away (the separation of Tess and Angel after her wedding night confession), an internalization whereby the subject becomes self-regulating, and a line of f light that is embraced in a positive sense (Tess’s incessant movement that subjects all points to the intensity of movement itself ). This system is based not upon trickery, but upon betrayal. (Musselwhite “Tess” 505; Deleuze Plateaus 121–122). In addition to the despotic and passional regimes, Musselwhite discusses the sadistic and masochistic economies of desire, concluding that both “can be seen as indictments and mockeries of the pretensions of the notion of a moral law” (510) since both stage a reversal of the moral law, the sadist by resexualizing the prohibiting image of the father, the masochist by doing the same with the desired but disavowed mother. In terms of these regimes—despotic, passional, and sadistic/masochistic—Musselwhite sees in Tess three movements of a kind of impersonal intensity that correspond to (1) The nomadic subject who transcends the mechanisms that try to control her (512), (2) a becoming-imperceptible that transforms Tess’s tragedy into a moment of Nietzschean joy (514), and (3) a movement of becoming that undercuts Tess’s unitary subjectivity (514). Musselwhite concludes by pointing out the various places in Tess where she seems to dissolve into the landscape, mingle with mists, perceive sounds through a kind of synesthesia (515). He reaches the Spinozist peak to which the argument has been aspiring. It is these minglings which seem to dissolve the boundaries of the human and the non-human, the animal and the vegetable, the material and the spiritual worlds so as to constitute an almost Spinozist composite nature . . . In such a commingling of the natural and the human worlds, character and setting become inextricably fused the one into the other to produce what Deleuze and Guattari call “haecceities”—a “haecceity” being a kind of experiential spacetime event. (515) Tess’s “purity,” Musselwhite argues, is not a result of a moralistic notion of virginity, but is far more a precipitate of her status as haecceity, her


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“affective capacity for love and to be loved, . . . her molecular sympathies and intensities” (516). The affective intensity of the Hardy passages we have seen, the strange birds f lying from polar regions, the fiery otherwordly engineer, now begin to make a different kind of sense. What I want to draw attention to here is not simply that there is a strong Deleuzian reading of Tess as a nomadic subject, a nonhuman haecceity, but that the moral world that defines Tess in the classic criticism is itself dependent on this presence of singularity in the novel. The scenes we have called attention to in the novel stand out, create a jarring effect, as symptomatic points often do. Even the strongest Deleuzian reading (and it would be harder to imagine a stronger reading than the one Musselwhite has provided) finally addresses itself to the moral question of Tess’s “purity,” her inability to be finally defined by the moral hypocrisy that surrounds her. She is moral, in other words, not because she subscribes to a certain code, meets a certain social or religious standard, but because she moves at the transcendental level, the level on which these very standards depend. One gets caught in moral codes to the extent that one is defined as human. If there is something upon which the human depends to constitute itself (for Deleuze, haecceities, singular movements, and relations of force), then this something forms a kind of vital grounding for those very codes. However, those codes provide a kind of translation of the singular into the human world. Without the human world of moral codes, personalities, emotional captures, the singular remains unframed. It has nothing to push against. If, as Deleuze strongly maintains, force is nothing but the differential relation of forces, then it is the relation between the human world (however deluded that world may be about its own consistency and independence) and the nonhuman world of singularity, affect, and haecceity that constitutes both the human and the singular. They are real because of the relationship; they do not come preformed to it. In more “readerly” terms, it would be hard to imagine Tess as such a powerful character if she were not taken up in some extra-being, something that steps just outside of the bounds of the mundane human world, and equally hard to imagine her not struggling, not articulated against this very world. If it is plausible that Tess is an expression of the intimate relationship between the human world and the singular movements that make it up, it is also plausible that this relationship is not always the same. We see in Tess a consistently moral world occupied by a movement of singularity. From a Deleuzian perspective this occupation is to be expected, since there is nothing but singular movements. It is a provocation of Deleuze to ask

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whether or not this world of singularity may be other than an ontologically primary movement captured only secondarily; if the singular, in fact, ought not to be prioritized. Blood Meridian is caught up in this very problem. If Tess draws a world in which the movement of singularity breaks through a humanly meaningful world, Blood Meridian does just the opposite. It is the movement of singularity, the relations of affect that seem to create a world where even the figure of the human is rendered uncanny and grotesque, as in the early scene of the Comanche massacre of Captain White’s band. The Comanches are A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools. (52–53) This passage, along with the others we have seen, is not a departure from the language of the novel, but is its guiding voice. Shaviro puts it best when he says “Language no less than the desert f loor is a space which comprehends everything, but in which the complex intrication of heterogeneous forces fatally leads to unwelcome encounters and deadly confrontations” (155).


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Shaviro’s essay, as I have said, is the most powerful Deleuzian/ Spinozist reading of Blood Meridian available. The particular strength of Shaviro’s argument rests in the conjunction he perceives (and to some degree communes with) between the language of McCarthy and that of Deleuze. Shaviro convincingly argues for Blood Meridian as a novel of the very movements, relations, and forces that Deleuze spent a lifetime articulating. Blood Meridian rejects organicist metaphors of growth and decay, in favor of an open topography (what Deleuze and Guattari call “smooth space”) in which the endless, unobstructed extension of the desert allows for the sudden, violent and fortuitous irruption of the most heterogeneous forces . . . [T]he entire book consists of nothing but . . . fatal encounters, lethal congruences of incompossible but converging vectors. The riders trace a fractal path upon the surface of the earth; they define an intradimensional space in which the extremities of night and day intersect, a permeable membrane for the incessant transactions of life and death. (147–148) There is little to dispute in Shaviro’s insistence on the novel as a series of vectors, heterogeneous movements, smooth spaces. Indeed, such a philosophical reading is particularly apropos for a novel in which the philosophical justification of violence—that sometimes speaks Nietzsche almost word for word (250)—is thrown down as a gauntlet again and again. One almost suspects that if Shaviro had not written this essay, it would have had to have been written by someone. My dispute with Shaviro, then, is not in the reading of the novel as an open space of singularity, but with the function of morality in this singular world. Of course I am far from the first to argue for the insistence of moral questions in Blood Meridian. Edwin T. Arnold, in “Naming, Knowing and Nothingness: McCarthy’s Moral Parables” argues that “there is also evident in [McCarthy’s] work a profound belief in the need for moral order, a conviction that is essentially religious. There is, in addition, always the possibility of grace and redemption” (46). It is interesting to contrast Shaviro and Arnold’s readings. Whereas evidence of the singular movements that Shaviro describes abound, Arnold’s final statement on the moral dimension of the novel is that the kid ultimately fails to make a moral choice, to confront Judge Holden, but that “moral choice remains; the judge can still be faced” (65). Leo Daugherty, in “Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy,”

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provides a more completely articulated philosophy—a description of Manichean Gnosticism—to ground his claims for the moral import of the novel. Daugherty’s key point in his description of the Gnostics is that “they saw [evil] as something so big that ‘evil’ is not really an applicable term—because it is too small. For them, evil was simply everything that is, with the exception of the bits of spirit emprisoned here. And what they saw is what we see in the world of Blood Meridian” (162). Daugherty insists on the boy as the figure who possesses this spark of the divine, a spark that gives the boy a moral center. Daugherty even goes so far as to compare him to another young American figure of moral choice: Blood Meridian centers upon what can be reasonably thought of as a fraternity of male shepherds who kill the sheep entrusted to them. One of the shepherds is the kid, who feels the “spark of the alien divine” within him through the call of what seems to be conscience. He thus “awakens” a bit, attaining in the process a will outside the will of his murdering shepherdic subculture and the archon who runs it. The kid reminds us here of Huckleberry Finn, who, in the crucial act of saving his friend Jim from slaveholder justice, similarly defies the will of a pernicious subculture . . . Both these boys are a little bit awakened by the spark of the divine, and both extend acts of fraternal mercy when they are “not supposed to.” (164–165) We will see in a moment how this “little bit” of awareness that the boy is granted is characteristic of the critical and theoretical problem he poses. Daugherty can only take his argument so far, precisely because this little bit of divine awareness is all that he can argue for. And while it could be argued that the kid is no “tragic hero,” it seems clear enough that some tragic heroes do not really fill any formulaic bill, most notably Antigone; all that’s needed is a dumb kid possessed of a spark of the divine who’s outside the will of some Yahweh or other and meets his or her fate at said nemesis’ hands at the end. (171) We do not need to go too far in speculating on how many infants killed by their own parents, how many reckless teenagers gunned down by drug dealers, how many adolescents sacrificed to the worship of fast cars


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would fit Daugherty’s measure of tragic heroism. But Daugherty is not alone in his inability to locate the kid as a presence in the moral world of the novel. It is a problem he shares with Shaviro and Arnold. Each has enormous difficulty in explaining, in terms of character, theme, plot, the clearly moral position the kid occupies. Daughtery cannot progress beyond the little bit of the divine he grants the kid. Arnold cannot but locate the kid’s morality in a moral choice he is never able to make, but that can, in some possible world, be made. It is Shaviro, however, in whose essay we see most clearly what a stumbling block the kid is for a moral reading of Blood Meridian, but Shaviro, as well, who leads us to a clue as to the kid’s function in the story. Shaviro’s achievement lies in the fact that he focuses on the boy’s blankness, his strange affectlessless in the world of violent affect. The kid keeps his distance from the claims both of destiny and of agency; he offers the world only a sort of passive resistance, a silent, obstinate rejection of all finalities and of all melodramatics. Even as he behaves as a good fellow to his comrades, and participates uncomplainingly in the most violent, barbaric actions, he seems to retain the detachment of an observer. (151) But Shaviro’s greater value here is in the jarring analogy between the kid and Moby Dick’s Ishmael, jarring because the self-consciousness (or perhaps simply consciousness) that makes Ishmael the very type of the observer is nowhere in evidence in the kid, in whom Shaviro cannot even find an “inner life” (151). It is understandable that Shaviro is looking for a model for the kid’s detachment. If he is not a full participant, the argument goes, he must be an observer. To be sure, the kid does not participate (and it is this very lack of participation that draws the judge to him), but even less does he observe, since he presents no interiority into which an observation might settle. He is neither participant nor observer. He is, if anything, a hesitation in the novel’s world. For all their dissimilitude, Shaviro, Arnold, and Daugherty agree that the kid is not of the world in which he moves. But none are willing to grant him exceptional status in this world, most emphatically not Shaviro. What is at stake for Shaviro’s Deleuzianism (and indeed for any Deleuzianism) is the kid’s ability to stand against the world of singularity, a world that makes claims, not to totality, but certainly to monistic immanence. How is the kid to stand outside a movement that claims even exteriority as one of its own productions?

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In the introductory chapter to A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari establish the role exteriority will play in the unfolding world of nomads, territories, mileus: The plane of consistency . . . is the outside of all multiplicities. The line of f light marks: the reality of a finite number of dimensions that the multiplicity effectively fills; the impossibility of a supplementary dimension, unless the multiplicity is transformed by the line of f light; the possibility and necessity of f lattening all of the multiplicities on a single plane of consistency and exteriority, regardless of their number of dimensions. The ideal for a book would be to lay everything out on a plane of exteriority of this kind, on a single page, the same sheet: lived events, historical determinations, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations. (9) Shaviro’s stark claim that “there is no interiority, no intentionality, no transcendence” (150) is what leads him to refuse any kind of Deleuzian absolution to the kid: “the kid’s evasive blankness marks a deferral not an exemption from the all embracing game of war. He can refuse its communion, but not its claim to be ‘the truest form of divination’ ” (152). There is, in Deleuzian terms, the plane of consistency and the immanent productions of its surface. There is no space in which to stand against its movements, its affects, its haecceities, its relations of force, its events. But in these same terms it is also impossible for the boy to be defined by such movements. He is not embraced by the all-embracing game of war; he marks, as Shaviro observes, a deferral in the game. He does not refuse moral absolutes any more firmly than he refuses what Shaviro calls the cheerfulness, the euphoria, the exhilaration, and finally the vitality (156–157) of darkness and death. There is no Nietzschean affirmation in the kid, no giddy embrace of violence. Indeed, the kid’s violence is almost farcical, juxtaposed with murdered infants, tortured and violated bodies (e.g., the early description of his fight in the mud with Toadvine). The kid, in short, is a kind of bone in the throat of the novel’s Deleuzianism. He is not convincingly a figure of moral convention (a role—certainly necessary to a novel the full array of whose Nietzschean armament is aimed at the piety of the weak—taken on by the ex-priest, whose protests are brushed aside by Judge Holden, and for whom the Judge is a mystery akin to the divine), but he is also not (like Hardy’s Tess) a figure whose human being is drawn by its singular movements. The kid is resistant in a way that echoes the Hegelian


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“the spirit is a bone.” In The Fragile Absolute, Slavoj Zizek makes clear how this “bone,” this scrap of the real, functions in the constitution of the subject. [W]hen Hegel praises the speculative truth of the vulgar materialist thesis of phrenology “The Spirit is a bone”, his point is not that the spirit can actually be reduced to the shape of the skull, but that there is a spirit (subject) only in so far as there is some bone (some inert material, non-spiritual remainder/leftover) that resists its spiritual sublation-appropriation-mediation. Subject and object are thus not simply external: the object is not the external limit with regard to which the subject defines its self-identity, it is extimate with regard to the subject, it is its internal limit—that is, the bar which itself prevents the subject’s full realization. (28–29) If we are to translate this insight into the world of Blood Meridian, we will see that it is the kid who resists appropriation and mediation. It is for this reason that he serves as a kind of traumatic caesura in the violent movement of the novel. But like the Lacanian Real, his irruption in the world is both founding and destabilizing: “The role of the Lacanian real is . . . radically ambiguous: true, it erupts in the form of a traumatic return, derailing the balance of our daily lives, but it serves at the same time as a support of this very balance” (Zizek Awry 29). My point here is not that the novel’s violence is traumatic, but that the kid’s resistance to the movement and affirmation of his world is the true trauma. A world, in short, does not need to be peaceful and stable to be vulnerable to trauma; it only has to be a world. And, like the world of daily life, the violent planar world of Blood Meridian, in which death and destruction are the constitutive elements, can itself be traumatized, indeed must be traumatized in order to constitute itself. And it is the kid who functions as this traumatic point, that which will neither be translated into the terms of the world, nor given a place within it. It is only Judge Holden who recognizes the kid as this f law in the fabric of smooth space, this catch in the velocity of the war machine. When they encounter one another after the kid has scorned his one chance to kill the judge, the judge grants to the boy the uniqueness that the dance of war will not confer upon any participant, victim or killer: He looked down the hallway. Dont be afraid, he said. I’ll speak softly. It’s not for the world’s ears but for yours only. Let me see you. Dont you know that I’d have loved you like a son? . . .

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The judge smiled. He spoke softly into the dim mud cubicle. You came forward, he said, to take part in a work. But you were a witness against yourself. You sat in judgement on your own deeds. You put your own allowances before the judgements of history and you broke with the body of which you were pledged a part and poisoned it in all its enterprise. Hear me, man. I spoke in the desert for you and you only and you turned a deaf ear to me. If war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay . . . Only each was called upon to empty out his heart into the common and one did not. Can you tell me who that one was? It was you, whispered the kid. You were the one. (306–307) The boy speaks more truth than he knows. What seems like a ref lexive denial is the sign of a deeper affinity. The judge and the boy are both essentially untouched by their experiences. The boy’s strange affectlessness, his seeming absence from much of the slaughter, his blankness at the judge’s pronouncements, his child’s face that is “curiously untouched behind the scars” (4), all speak to his ontological virginity. But the judge is himself untouched by the very movements of affective displacement, singular eruption, and immanent violence that he affirms. He survives the most violent and deadly encounters, not just with human antagonists, but with the desert itself, to which he seems curiously indifferent. After the massacre at the ferry, the judge appears to the kid and Tobin, leading the idiot boy and looking “a pale pink beneath his talc of dust like something newly born” (282). Tobin tells the kid a story of how the judge appeared to them out of the desert sitting “on a rock in the middle of the greatest desert you’d ever want to see. Just perched on this rock like a man waiting for a coach. Brown thought him a mirage” (124). Even by the end of the story as he dances after having killed the kid, he is described as looking “like an enormous infant” (335), his experiences having left no trace upon him. The kid and the judge, each is granted a kind of deferral. The kid from the violent communion that judge affirms, the judge from the violent death that is the very substance of this world. It is important to remember that Glanton’s violent band that travels the desert, dealing death with casual indifference, is itself subject to violent death at the hands of others (and of each other); ambushed, shot, tortured, decapitated, their immersion into the world is as much a willingness to die


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as a willingness to kill. But the judge himself is not subject to this ultimate condition. As the novel concludes with the judge dancing the great vital dance of life and death, and the narrator reports “He says that he will never die” (335), we are left with the sense that this may be far more than a casual boast. The judge’s dance, this Spinozist reel, gives the lie to Shaviro’s insistence that “we are granted no marks of distinction, no special dispensation, but only the ever-renewed immanence of the dance, embodied in the grotesquely pirouetting figure of the judge” (157). By elevating the judge to the apotheosis of this world, Shaviro grants the very distinction he denies to all others. But who can be granted a deferral? What world grants none? The kid refuses the dance; the judge is the very form of the dance. This world of violent immanence turns on a passive blankness (the boy), and is expressed by a voice that claims the ability to speak for it, and not be subject to all of its conditions (the judge). The point here is that there is no world that is exempt from these figures of indifference and expression, for such a world would be nothing but a kind of chaotic set of drives, a rotary movement of termless relations much like the world (or the primordial state that precedes the world) described by Slavoj Zizek in his discussion of Schelling’s Ages of the World, a state of primordial drives, rotary motion, undifferentiated pulsing (14). Clearly, the world of McCarthy is not such a world, just as Deleuze’s plane of consistency is not. But I want to argue that the next step in Schelling’s scheme, the contraction of the primordial vortex into the world, depends upon the same movement on which the Deleuzian world depends. How, then, can this phenomenalization of God, this pronunciation of the Word in him that magically, in an unfathomable way, dispells the impenetrable darkness of drives, occur? It can only occur on condition that the rotary motion of drives that precedes the Beginning is itself not the primordial, unsurpassable fact . . . [H]ow can a Word emerge out of this vortex and dominate it, confer on it its shape, “discipline” it? Consequently, this ultimate Ground of reality, the primordial vortex of drives, this Wheel of Fate that sooner or later engulfs and destroys every determinate object, must be preceded by an unfathomable X that in a way yet to be explained “contracts” drives. (15; emphasis in the original) There is nothing that precedes the vortices of drives. However, Zizek argues, it is the very status of this nothing that is at stake, and it is this “nothing” that serves as the very will that comes to dominate the

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seemingly indomitable movement of drives, through actively willing nothingness. [P]rior to Grund, there can only be an abyss (Ungrund); that is, far from being a mere nihil privativum, this “nothing” that precedes Ground stands for the “absolute indifference” qua the abyss of pure Freedom that is not yet the predicate-property of some Subject but rather designates a pure impersonal Willing (Wollen) that wills nothing . . . The pure potentiality of the primordial Freedom, this blissful tranquility, this pure enjoyment, of an unassertive, neutral Will that wants nothing actualizes itself in the guise of a Will that actively, effectively, wants this “nothing,” that is, by the annihilation of every positive, determinate content. By means of this purely formal conversion of potentiality into actuality, the blissful peace of primordial Freedom thus changes into pure contraction, into the vortex of “divine madness” that threatens to swallow everything, into the highest affirmation of God’s egotism, which tolerates nothing outside itself. In other words, the blissful peace of primordial Freedom and the all-destructive divine fury that sweeps away every determinate content are one and the same thing, only in a different modality: first in the mode of potentiality, then in the mode of actuality. (15–16; emphasis in the orignal) We hear in Shaviro an echo of this destructiveness in his description of the judge, for whom the game of war “must end, not in the victory of one, but in the sacrificial consumption of everyone and everything” (156–157); we hear it in the judge himself who claims that “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent” (198). These two modes of contraction, wanting nothing in the sense of being absolutely indifferent to anything, and wanting nothing in the sense of a pure will to nothingness are embodied respectively in the kid and the judge. The kid exempts himself from the world in his utter affectlessness of not being touched, of having no particular desire that reaches for anything in the world. The judge exempts himself from the world by posing himself as its suzerain whose “authority countermands local judgements” (198). And ultimately these two figures are the great moral figures of the story. The reason that much of the criticism of Blood Meridian poses the kid as a moral figure in spite of the fact that his most moral acts (refusals to kill when the opportunity is presented to him) seem far below any traditional code of morality, the reason that, despite the difficulty of


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providing evidence of morality, the kid still insists as a moral figure is that his very indifference, his distance from the world is the expression of his moral function in the story. The kid is not a moral figure for anything he does, for his “spark of divinity” or for his refusals, but because he is the indifferent neutrality to which the world addresses itself. It may even be seen as the kid’s great moral triumph that he forces the judge to speak a moral language when the judge indicts him for this very neutrality. “No assassin, called the judge. And no partisan either. There’s a f lawed place in the fabric of your heart. Do you think I could not know? You alone were mutinous. You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen” (299). Years later, the judge repeats the accusation: “Only each was called upon to empty out his heart into the common and one did not” (307). For all the power of the judge’s world, for all of its omnipresent will, it is a world from which one can fall away, although this falling away has been only accomplished by “one.” Finally, it is this morally shaped project, this morally shaped deferral (however devoid it may be of moral content) that molds the world around it. Far from the indifferent drives of Schelling’s primordial being, the plane of consistency becomes properly ethical, brought into being by the minimal distance it enacts to the vitality, the freedom, the very horrifying joy it produces. We see, then, two novels in which the questions of singularity and morality intertwine. Tess of the D’Urbervilles demonstrates the power of singularity to produce the human world of morality, or purity, of redemption. It is a diagram of the irruption of the singular into the human world, and the irruption is the diagram of the forces that make up the seemingly closed world of the human. Blood Meridian draws a world where these singularities seem exposed in their nakedness, unbounded by the claims of the human. But, as the figures of the judge and the kid illustrate, morality reasserts itself in the very distances from the world of force that are required to bring that world into existence. Moral claims do not assert themselves as great overcodings that hold all under their sway, but as the minimal distance from the world of singularities that are the condition of the appearance of that world. It is surely a Deleuzian lesson that even the world of singularity cannot present itself as an ontological totality, that it is not a term that precedes the relations into which it enters; it is rather a world whose relations are its doorway to being.


CH A P T E R

SI X

Absalom, Absalom! Time and the Virtual

The human bears an easier relationship to potentiality than to virtuality. We might even say that the human is only properly to be spoken of as human so long as it remains within the limits of potentiality. Once that limit is exceeded, once we are in the realm of the virtual, we are also in the realm of the nonhuman. In fact, one of Aristotle’s most important definitions of potency is also a kind of de facto description of the human. In The Metaphysics, Aristotle explains how the human (only one example of the many instances of potentiality and actuality he employs, but the one in which, for obvious reasons, I am interested) must be moved by its own principle. For example, is earth potentially a man? No, but rather when it has already become a seed, and perhaps not even then . . . [T]he seed is not yet potentially a man; for it must be placed in something else and change. And when it is already such that it can be moved by its own principle, it is then potentially a man; but prior to this it has need of another principle. It is like the earth, which is not yet potentially a statue, for it needs to be changed and become bronze. (153) When there is an outside inf luence, a movement across a threshold, a becoming-other, potency is not yet at work. The human may become many things—warm, angry, old, mobile—but it can never, from potentiality, attain a state that is other than human, just as what is not human can, from potentiality, never become human without some active principle of change being added to it. Yet as true as Aristotle’s definition may be, it still leads us to trouble living in a world of becomings,

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of transformations that are the basis of change, creativity, newness, a world where coming into existence is itself the passing of a barrier. In such a world, we are forced to imagine a relationship between the human and the nonhuman, as Lyotard says in the introduction to the essays that make up his book The Inhuman. “What if human beings, in humanism’s sense, were in the process of, constrained into, becoming inhuman . . . ? What if what is ‘proper’ to humankind were to be inhabited by the inhuman?” (2). Lyotard speaks of constraints, of the human, constrained into becoming nonhuman, and, up until now, I have spoken of the nonhuman as that which simultaneously makes up the human while surpassing it, so that perhaps “constraint” is not so bad a word to describe this process. It is, after all, the power of the nonhuman that surpasses those particular captures of force we call “personality,” “psychology,” or “morality,” constrains them to be what they are. But it is just as easy, and certainly revealing in a different way, to see humanity, being-human, as itself a constraint. It is around this issue—constraint, limitation, restriction—that humanity and potentiality belong together. The human, to state it simply, is a trap. It becomes human by trapping the forces around it, by turning the forces of nature (as Spinoza might use the term) to human ends: language, identity, community. This trapping is not itself to be criticized. In fact, it bears a closer relationship to virtuality, to change across thresholds, than to potentiality. When—to return to Aristotle’s example—the human traps earth, the incipient forces of the world that it turns to its own ends, it must cross thresholds to do so. Something nonhuman must become human, as the result of human or natural work, the work of human forces (i.e., the power to conceive); something is added to earth to make it change in the direction of the human. But the human does not just capture forces (indeed, all of nature could be accused of that). It becomes a trap (and therefore ethically problematic) when it functions as a tautology. The example Aristotle gives us can in some senses be seen as tautological. The human is what is moved by its own (human) principle. The seed cannot be said to be potentially human until it is, in some sense, actually human, growing on its own after the moment of conception; that is, it is “not thoroughly worked” as Aristotle would say, but is at least to some extent already developed, already human. And certainly, insofar as the human is fascinated by itself as human, it must always function as this kind of tautology. Those values that are most highly praised are the human values. They are praised because they are human, and they are human precisely because they are praiseworthy

Time and the Virtual

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(it is in this sense that the term “inhuman” becomes pejorative). The absurdity of this position becomes more apparent the more the human tries to cast its net wider and wider to include all that is admirable. (I imagine an unsympathetic reader taking issue with every one of my examples of the nonhuman—affect, virtuality, events—by saying “but that too is human, that too is what the human is capable of ” until the human has become identical to “what exists and is laudable, interesting, or lovable” and the familiar face of the human looks out on us from every crevice of reality.) Sometimes the tautology is more subtle. We might find terms that only have meaning in relation to the human and become fascinated with them. It is, for example, usually in terms of the human that psychology, motivations, ethical decision making, even history, have any meaning. We do not say “human history,” “human motivation,” “human psychology” only because the human is already understood in these terms (and if I am going to discuss animal psychology or natural history I cannot specify them simply as “psychology” or “history,” but must name them specifically) and to speak in these terms is always to commit oneself to a kind of tautological trap—the human is explained by human motivations, which are in turn explained by their reference to the human. Why are humans so interesting? They have character, personality, psychology in a way that animals and things do not. But why are character, personality, psychology so worthy of study? Because they illustrate the complexity of the human. There are many ways of stating this tautology, but they all come down to the same idea: the human is self-justifying; it assigns value to itself with reference only to itself. What is left out is everything that goes toward making up the humanity of the human, what Aristotle calls “another principle” that sets the world into motion, that pushes or pulls it into the sphere of the human. This other principle is what I call the nonhuman, and it is what Aristotle explicitly differentiates from potential. But there is no reason to place our contemporary definition of potentiality at Aristotle’s door. Our own understanding of potential, our commonsensical vision that makes its way into our literature and our ideology, resembles some of Aristotle’s definitions. We see potential as that which transforms a being while allowing them to remain that being. We do not see potential as the crossing of the threshold of substance (we tell our son that he may grow up to be anything he wants to be until he tells us that he wants to be a lion). Transformations are still a matter of magic, and when they are scientific (when our son wants to grow up to be a woman), we greet this not as a matter of potential, but as almost a kind of sorcery that has made a mockery of our notion of potential (and

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the debates about our power over nature are actually debates about our power over potentiality and substance). Potential is, after all, also a trap in the same way that the human is a trap. Potency demands first and foremost that a thing remain essentially what it is (which is why Aristotle so often seems to be talking not about potentiality, which he describes in some places as a limitation on substance, but rather virtuality, the principle of change that can be added to material to make it cross thresholds, what Aristotle calls the soul, that set of active capacities that directs change and growth in the human and that seems both what is most human and what is most nonhuman). The human is filled with potentiality. It can learn, grow, build, but only on the condition that it remain essentially itself. What remains unrealized in the human is always some aspect of itself, and here we come up against the most inescapable exigency of potentiality: it must always remain subordinated to actuality. The actuality that a potential becomes must resemble that potential. It would be absurd, for example, to say that my potentiality to learn a language actualizes itself in my ability to ice skate. It can only actualize itself in my eventual ability to speak a language. For all of its dynamism the circle of actuality-potentiality is, for us, a closed one—a tautology in the same way that the human is a tautology—and a vision that sees all change in terms of actuality-potentiality will be stymied in the face of becoming, change, creativity. It is for this reason that I say that humanity and potentiality can be seen as traps. Not that they are always and necessarily traps. For each, one condition must be met. The human becomes a trap when it becomes a tautology, self-generated and self-justifying, when it cannot trace itself back beyond a certain threshold and cannot project itself into an open future. Potentiality becomes a trap when it ignores virtuality, when it sees itself as the final arbiter of change. And in both cases—that of humanity and that of potentiality—the limits of the trap become apparent when we consider the issue of time. The relationship of humanity-potentiality-time can be constructed in ways very different from that of humanity-virtuality-time. Is time itself a trap for the human, or is it open to an unknown and creative future? Is the human within a kind of enclosed time that gives history a type of brute wholeness, a power to invade the present? Or is the relationship of the human to time not so much a relationship of containment—the human inside of time—as of transformation—the human itself becoming time? And how does the human’s relation to time structure its relation to history? I will bring together three names—Faulkner, Bergson, and Heidegger.


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For all three the issue of time, its openness, its direction, its relationship to the human is at issue. In Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! the issues of time, history, creativity are quite literally a matter of life and death, and we may see in the meeting of these three writers the way fiction can expose the commitments of philosophy and philosophy may find itself in fiction. Faulkner—untrustworthy as ever in his 1952 interview with Loic Bouvard—makes his most direct, and misleading, reference to Bergson, a reference that will contribute to, or at least encourage, a reading of the Faulkner-Bergson link in terms of an unproblematized presence. “There isn’t any time . . . In fact, I agree pretty much with Bergson’s theory of the f luidity of time. There is only the present moment, in which I include both the past and the future, and that is eternity. In my opinion time can be shaped quite a bit by the artist; after all, man is never time’s slave” (70). The present that “includes” the past and future—the present, in other words, for which the relation to past and future involves no movement of opening, projection, ecstasis—stands, in Faulkner’s off hand remark, beside yet opposed to the definition of time as f luidity, the movement of duration in which presence is never simply present, but continually passing. Stasis or movement; tableau or qualitative change. These are the extremes between which much Faulkner criticism stands paralyzed. The present is either, as for Robert Dunne, in “Absalom, Absalom! and the Ripple Effect of the Past,” the static point from which the historian reconstructs the past (56), or the elision of past, present, and future, as for Clarke Owens (45–46), in which movement itself remains undefined. For Sartre, it is this very stasis, this suspension of time, in which Faulkner’s characters are trapped. As for Faulkner’s concept of the present, it is not a circumscribed or sharply defined point between past and future. His present is irrational in its essence; it is an event, monstrous and incomprehensible . . . Beyond this present there is nothing, since the future does not exist. One present, emerging from the unknown, drives out another present . . . The other characteristic of Faulkner’s present is suspension (l’enfoncement). I use this word . . . to indicate a kind of arrested motion in time. In Faulkner, there is never any progression, nothing which can come from the future. (226–227) If it is, then, the future that breaks (or could break) the stasis of the petrified present for Sartre, it is not surprising that he should invoke Heidegger (231) in his discussion of futurity as possibility, although

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he describes a future that does not reach out to the uttermost possibility of death—“Man is not the sum of what he has, but the totality of what he does not yet have, of what he could have” (231–232)—and Heidegger takes all possibility to be delimited by the most extreme possibility: death. It is here that we see the beginnings of the opposition of Heidegger to Bergson. For Heidegger, Dasein’s existence is based on a Being-toward-death, an always unactualized possibility to which Dasein projects itself and from which it is thrown back to itself in an ecstatic return (Concept 13E). Death is a possibility-of-Being which Dasein itself has to take over in every case . . . As potentiality-for-Being, Dasein cannot outstrip the possibility of death. Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein. Thus death reveals itself as that possibility which is one’s ownmost, which is non-relational, and which is not to be outstripped (unüberholbare). As such, death is something distinctively impending. (B&T 294; emphasis in the original) Possibility, for Heidegger, reveals itself as the possibility for Dasein’s not-being. The future-as-possible is, for Dasein, Being-as-finitude. And it is only with reference to this possible future that Dasein can engage with its past as “authentic historicity” (19E). It is around three concepts—future, possibility, and past—that the encounter between Heidegger and Bergson must be staged. Although, for Bergson, the present surpasses itself both in the act of creativity toward the future and in the ontological leap into the past that is the beginning of recollection, there is not the same ecstatic projection and return that characterizes Dasein’s presence. Perhaps what makes Heidegger’s definition of time and possibility so much his own is precisely the idea of ownmostness, the assertion that my death is mine, that it cannot be appropriated by any other person—and indeed cannot really be experienced by myself either. It is the possibility, not the actuality, of my death that is “ownmost.” The fact that I am thrown forward to the possibility of my death is the beginning of authenticity (and in fact inauthenticity is the state of being mired in the world of “they” or “one,” the expectations of other people, however abstractly conceived). Heidegger’s description of this Dasein that throws itself forward and is thrown back upon itself in a realization of its finitude makes sense in Heidegger’s own terms but the world that Dasein inhabits is a strange one. Dasein throws itself forward to the possibility of its own death. The death of others is experienced


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only ontically, only as an empirical fact. It seems that the encounter with the dead takes on no particular definitive power in Dasein’s selfunderstanding. The existentiell possibility of the other’s death can, in short, never be ownmost possibility. Although I am not prepared to argue that “common sense” should be the final arbiter of difficult and complex questions, there is nonetheless much that can be gleaned from the everydayness of lived experience (and it is of course lived experience that both Heidegger and Bergson pay the highest tribute to); and if we are to make the novel a source of understanding of the relation of the human to that which surrounds and sustains it, we must admit that there is a great deal of complexity within the seeming straightforwardness of a novel’s narrative. So, as readers of novels, and as people who have taken their lessons to heart, we might at the very least have some objections to Heidegger’s description of Dasein as this kind of isolated being whose primary relationship is with itself (even in its ecstatic state, it goes outward in order to return). Just as we do not look forward in fear only to our own deaths (the kind of dread that Heidegger associates with inauthentic Being), but also to the deaths of others we love, so we might argue that the authentic resoluteness, the taking up of the possibility of the ownmost and uttermost death, must also ontologically involve others. And our first encounter with death, usually in childhood, often around a small animal life that has simply stopped silently in the rush of normal life, is something we remember and something that leaves its mark upon us in a definitive way. Far more than an empirical fact, death resonates with me, ties me to others in the very possibility of severing my ties with them, and ties us to the dead in their very departure. If death is, as Heidegger argues, “the possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all,” then how can we argue that this possible impossibility fails to involve others ontologically? Death concerns all; it provides meaning as concerning all. The very possibility of an ethics is based on the knowledge that others must die and that their death involves me. In Cities of the Plain, Cormac McCarthy articulates this relational death in a way that could almost have come from the pen of Levinas: Every man’s death is a standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love that man who stands for us. We are not waiting for his history to be written. He passed here long ago. That man who is all men and who stands in the dock for us until our own time come and we

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must stand for him. Do you love him, that man? Will you honor the path he has taken? Will you listen to his tale? (288–289) And it is appropriate that such a sentiment should be expressed in a novel, rather than in a philosophical treatise, because it is as a novel reader that I hesitate at Heidegger’s assertions of death-as-possibility as something that can be appropriated to myself (and even though it is a possibility that remains in possibility, it nonetheless may be claimed as ownmost). Whether in Heidegger or in Bergson, time is always filled with content, indeed time is nothing but this being-filled. For either thinker, time as empty homogeneity is the basis of faulty thinking and inauthentic decision making. But the question becomes this: what exactly is the content of their respective conceptions of time? And if we are to perform something of a reversal of roles here and make these two philosophers stand before a novelist (it is always so much easier to make the novelists answer to the philosophers and the theorists) which conception of time, death, possibility, authenticity and creativity will strike us as the most true, the most moving, even the most beautiful? Futurity-as-possibility, possibility as delimited by the uttermost possibility of death, the ontology of the past, the virtual coexistence of past and present: all of these issues are complicated to another degree when we force Bergson and Heidegger to contend on new ground—Faulkner. For it is in Faulkner—more specifically in Absalom, Absalom!—that these issues are given artistic form, and the artistic project itself makes possible a rethinking of Bergson’s “creativity” and Heidegger’s “authenticity.” Even without the mediation of Heidegger or Bergson, Absalom, Absalom! founds itself on a richly conceived understanding of time, an understanding that, far from aiming for the stasis of an established idea, willingly engages with all of the contradictions, paradoxes, and difficulties that discussions of temporality always lead to. It is, of course, impossible to refer to every movement of temporality set loose by Faulkner in the tortuous retellings and reconstructions that make up Absalom, Absalom!. Three moments should suffice to show both the depth of thought that Faulkner brings to the conceptualization of time, and the contradictory nature of that conceptualization as it runs like a tracery through the novel. The passages, as we shall see, have a curious resonance with either Heidegger or Bergson, or hover between them; more importantly they are a kind of response to the two thinkers and demand a response from them.


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The first is Judith’s monologue (reported, or rather speculated, by Mr. Compson) upon giving Charles Bon’s letter to Quentin’s Grandmother. and then all of a sudden it’s all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it provided there was someone to remember to have the marble scratched and set up or had time to, and it rains on it and the sun shines on it and after a while they dont even remember the name and what the scratches were trying to tell, and it doesn’t matter. And so maybe if you could go to someone, the stranger the better, and give them something—a scrap of paper—something, anything, it not to mean anything in itself and them not even to read it or keep it, not even bother to throw it away or destroy it, at least it would be something just because it would have happened, be remembered even if only from passing from one hand to another, one mind to another, and it would be at least a scratch, something, something that might make a mark on something that was once for the reason that it can die someday, while the block of stone cant be is because it can never become was because it cant ever die or perish . . . (127–128; emphasis in the original) What is remarkable about this description is its linking of a definition of memory that is like that of Bergson, with an understanding of the authenticity, the truth, the privilege of death-as-possibility that is closer to Heidegger’s Being-toward-death, but with one crucial difference. Memory, in this passage has a double nature. On the one hand, it is, like Bergsonian memory, not preserved in a memory, someone’s memory, but remembered in the very act of passing from one hand to another, one mind to another, not to exist in that mind, but to exist as the act of passing (both the passing from one place to another, and the passing of the “becoming-past”). We are reminded of Deleuze’s observation that “recollections do not have to be preserved anywhere other than ‘in’ duration. Recollection therefore is preserved in itself ” (Bergsonism 54; emphasis in the original). But at the same time, recollection is indeed preserved in something, but not something—a stone, a surface (even the surface of memory)—that has only the brute presence of an object. The stone, as Judith says, cannot be an is in the ontological sense, because it can never become was. In that one word —“can”—we read death as possibility. Authentic memory is a recording that makes a mark upon no surface, or upon a surface that can never be present, that can only

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constitute itself as the still and always unrealized possibility of dying. But it is not in the ownmost possibility of death that this memory inscribes itself. It must be inscribed in the act of passing between two mortalities. It is not my death (however possible or actual it may be), but the possibility of the other’s nonbeing that allows for the memory to pass into a past that is never really gone. Just before we hear of this act of passing, Faulkner tells us that the presence of others is the inescapable truth of history. Because you make so little impression, you see. You get born and you try this and you dont know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they dont know why either except that the strings are all in one another’s way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug . . . (127) For better or worse, the world is inhabited by others; and these others do not merely dwell alongside of me. They penetrate me, they—in their difference—are in intimate contact with me, so that my very future depends upon their taking the mark of my penetration, not as objects, not as rocks upon which I chisel the truth of myself, but as time-driven beings, themselves in the process of passing away. The death of the other is my future insofar as my future can have a face, a name, and, more importantly, an evolution. And it will perhaps shed some light both on Bergson and on Faulkner if I address, at this point, the charge of psychologism that is sometimes leveled against Bergson, the accusation that Bergson always employs a kind of reduction to conscious states. Duration, in fact, is often described by Bergson as the melding of perceptions within a consciousness. Duration is a kind of lived perception, experienced rather than abstractly measured. It seems then that we can accuse Bergson of never leaving the realm of the human, the conscious, indeed of making the human the standard by which all must be measured. But it is also clear that, for example, in Creative Evolution, the never pastness of the past, its inclusion, carried along virtually in the present is the very possibility of creation. Far from a conscious or human process, duration here is the very materiality of evolving life. It spans all life, and all of life’s myriad solutions to the problems of existence. The individual consciousness


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is already caught up in a greater process that is neither wholly conscious nor entirely (or even mostly) human. In the same way, in Matter and Memory, Bergson argues again and again that memory is not held within one human brain, but that the brain serves rather as a kind of telephone exchange that complicates and redirects the movements it receives. Memory is not stored in the brain, but rather in itself, virtually. It belongs to no one and is not recorded as a kind of writing on a surface. The leap into the past, into memory—or the coming forth of memory to meet the present—is never a merely psychological event. It is a leap into ontology, into a past that is not mine and not of the conscious mind. Bergson counters Heidegger’s ownmostness of death (and time) with this duration and this memory to which it is impossible to lay claim. If we come to Absalom, Absalom! understanding the boldness of Bergson’s conceptualization of memory, we will perhaps be able to bypass a question that is so often posed, and that admittedly presents itself quite naturally, about the narrative voices of the novel. We can spend a lot of time trying to untangle the knotted voices that tell and recreate Sutpen’s story. Miss Rosa, Mr. Compson, Shreve and Quentin, and at times a seemingly neutral narrator. We can see how each tells the story from their own perspective, adding, subtracting, speculating, interpreting, until each comes up with a quite different set of events and motivations—although all with stories that seem strangely to mesh in their contradictions. But we are perhaps posing a false question if we ask about the relationship of these voices to each other and to the real events of history. Absalom, Absalom! is perhaps better seen as a book where the voices are secondary to the unfolding of memory. Not someone’s memory, but a kind of virtual memory that unfolds itself in the present, or rather we might say the voice of a virtual narrator who is not a particular character. The speakers in Absalom, Absalom! all convey the sense that they are caught up in voice larger than theirs and even when they speak as “individuals” their speaking is underpinned by a narrative voice, an unfolding of time that is not annihilated in its unfolding (it is a characteristic of the virtual that, unlike the potential, it does not disappear in passing the threshold to actuality). Each voice is the realization of a virtual past, turned toward a real historical moment. Its creativity is the creativity of duration, the interpenetrating of the past and the present pushing toward an indeterminate future. The voice of history, then, does not have to be the relentless voice of an inescapable past that bears down on one with the brute reality of an avalanche. It is

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rather virtual, belonging to no one, multifaceted, coming into the present to meet up with a moment or a mood that calls for it. It does not come as an enemy or an avenger. For Bergson, the past comes because it has been in some sense summoned. These are precisely the two faces of the past between which Quentin is caught, the past as overwhelming nightmare and the past as virtual memory as we see in the next passage. In this passage, which traces Quentin’s thoughts as he sits reconstructing and rearranging the story of Sutpen’s design with his companion Shreve, the past begins to take on a movement of its own: “[T]he Bergsonian revolution is clear: We do not move from the present to the past, from perception to recollection, but from the past to the present, from recollection to perception” (Bergsonism 63). Maybe we are both Father. Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn’t matter: that pebble’s watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-space, to the old ineradicable rhythm thinking Yes, we are both Father. Or maybe Father and I are both Shreve, maybe it took Father and me both to make Shreve or Shreve and me both to make Father or maybe Thomas Sutpen to make all of us. (261–262; italics in the original) Faulkner speaks here, without naming it explicitly, of repetition, a power that, like the power of Dasein to project itself onto its future, both establishes a present and opens it to its ecstasy. In the same sense as Dasein’s self-projection, repetition creates a present moment that is open in its presence to the past with which it coexists. This openness, for Deleuze, is the genesis of the virtual image. Duration is indeed real succession, but it is only so because, more profoundly, it is virtual coexistence: the coexistence with itself of all the levels, all the tensions, all the degrees of contraction and relaxation (détente). Thus, with coexistence, repetition must be reintroduced into duration . . . ; a repetition of “planes” rather than of elements on a single plane; virtual instead of actual repetition. The whole of our past is played, restarts, repeats itself, at the same time,


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on all the levels that it sketches out. (Bergsonism 60–61; emphasis in the original) This virtuality has two aspects for Quentin. In one aspect, he experiences time as a series of differentiated levels, each one containing the whole, but distinguished by “a different temperature of water. A different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered.” Images from the past do not simply repeat themselves in the present. It is not, in other words, a matter of local analogies—Quentin’s incestuous desire for Caddy in The Sound and the Fury is not simply a repetition of one aspect of the Sutpen family drama, Henry’s ambiguous protectiveness toward his sister, which Mr. Compson names as the true seduction in the Henry-Judith-Bon triangle. The past, when it repeats itself, repeats itself as a whole, but as a whole in which certain points—Henry and Bon riding to Sutpen’s Hundred on Christmas Eve, Bon’s shooting, Sutpen’s murder by Wash Jones—become singularities around which other memories revolve. In other words, memory, laden with the whole of the past, responds to the appeal of the present state by two simultaneous movements, one of translation, by which it moves in its entirety to meet experience, thus contracting more or less though without dividing, with a view to action; and the other of rotation upon itself, by which it turns toward the situation of the moment, presenting to it that side of itself that may prove to be the most useful. To these varying degrees of contraction correspond the various forms of association by similarity (Bergson Matter and Memory 168–169). Yet there is, of course, always a difference within this repetition. The same event sets loose effects, but those effects are actualized on different surfaces—different temperatures, different molecularities of feeling and experience. The past moves into the present by a process of differentiation. The virtual image itself becomes actualized by a series of divergences. The virtual image does not repeat itself, does not become actualized, by identification with a present perception. Rather it is actualized in a different image, or even a set of different images in the present. This is the second aspect of Quentin’s meditation on time: the virtual image that actualizes itself in the present. Thomas Sutpen becomes, for Quentin, the image that actualizes itself in a series of speakers: Quentin, Shreve, Mr Compson, even Miss Rosa. But it is not by a process of resemblance that Sutpen is actualized as a present image. Quentin does not resemble Sutpen; he is not the likeness of Sutpen returned to the world. Rather Sutpen, as virtuality, sets loose a number of effects each of which may

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be actualized on its own line into the present—each of which may “make up” a present being. And it is this process of “making up,” of creativity, of imagination, that characterizes the third passage we will examine. The past comes into the present. But the agency of this coming is neither an active past that overcomes a passive present (as Quentin believes history to be) nor a dominant present that reaches back to a dead past; creativity, imagination, is the process whereby this duality is overcome by a movement of ecstasis. The present and the past lose themselves in one another in moving toward a future that is defined as the continuity of creativity. What happened “actually,” what was or was not ever present, is deliberately lost. They stared—glared—at one another. It was Shreve speaking, though save for the slight difference which the intervening degrees of latitude had inculcated in them (differences not in tone or pitch but of turns of phrase and usage of words), it might have been either of them and was in a sense both: both thinking as one, the voice which happened to be speaking the thought only the thinking become audible, vocal; the two of them creating between them, out of the rag-tag and bob-ends of old tales and talking, people who perhaps had never existed at all anywhere, who, shadows, were shadows not of f lesh and blood which had lived and died but shadow in turn of what were (to one of them, at least, to Shreve) shades too, quiet as the visible murmur of their vaporizing breath. (303) The murders, the loves, the betrayals from which Quentin and Shreve weave and reweave their stories are indeed ghosts and shadows only if we confer onto the present a brute reality that would isolate itself both from its past and from its future. To ask whether a past was once present is to ignore the more difficult question of whether the present itself is fixed, isolated—in a word, present. The past, it is true, seems to be caught between two presents: the old present that it once was and the actual present in relation to which it is now past. Two false beliefs are derived from this: On the one hand, we believe that the past as such is only constituted after having been present; on the other hand, that it is in some way reconstituted by the new present whose past it now is. (Deleuze Bergsonism 58; emphasis in the original)


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The stories, the retellings, and recreations that make up Absalom, Absalom! bespeak a power of the past, a persistence that can never be forgotten and that seems to insist with an intrinsic power. The past, as virtuality, actualizes itself in the present. Perception does not escape the power of a recollection that forces its way into presence. Yet, simultaneously, the past must be invoked by the process of creativity, of imagination, which, reaching back, places into the past those very images whose intrinsic power sets creativity to work in the first place. Presence is driven by a force from the past (and a presence that sees itself only as such is the subject of obsession); the past receives its power from the present; and the process of creativity, of indeterminate continuity toward the future, makes this intermingling actual. For Bergson, there is a kind of parallel paradox: the virtual inscription of the past in the present. When an action is chosen, made actual, in the sensori-motor system of brain-body, that action has first undergone a kind of complication. The brain receives an action and delays its reactions by multiplying it along a highly complex set of pathways. The response to the action is rendered highly indeterminate and one possibility is turned into actuality. The other possibilities do not cease to be real, however. They are inscribed in the actualized response, virtually. Every actuality, in other words, is heavy with virtualities that are perfectly real, though unactualized. It is what Faulkner calls the “might-have-been which is the single rock we cling to above the maelstrom of unbearable reality . . .” (149–150). And when Miss Rosa describes the terrible moment when she returns to Sutpen’s Hundred after Henry has killed Bon, the house itself becomes the locus of virtuality: “the dim upper hallway where an echo spoke which was not mine but rather that of the lost irrevocable might-havebeen which haunts all houses . . .” (137). The virtual coexistence of layers of the past (which would have to contradict each other were they to all become actual at once) is exactly what we see happening in the retellings of the Sutpen story, and the larger story of the South’s defeat. A curious kind of historical reversal occurs in which the actual past ceases to have any meaning except insofar as it is surrounded, penetrated, and filled with virtualities. The virtual is the very content of the actual. And it is, surprisingly, far more robust that the actual in its historical life. It is the virtual that makes its way into the present, that is the real survivor of history. In this sense, Faulkner and Bergson are functioning as two sides of a coin, Faulkner showing us what Bergson describes. We see, then, in Faulkner, at least three distinct conceptions of the relation of time, memory, and creativity: (1) Memory is that which, belonging to no one, depends on the possibility of another’s death to

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inscribe itself, though that inscription will not take the form of an objectified presence; (2) the past, in its entirety, sets itself loose into the present, and follows a path of differentiated development from its virtual image to its divergent actualization or actualizations; (3) creativity is simultaneously the act whereby the past emerges from its shadowy realm, the very creation of the intrinsic power of that realm, and the force of the indeterminate future. It is the reality of the virtual filling the actual with meaning and resonance. The Heideggerian critique of Bergson bases itself on an accusation that Bergson does not understand the movement of the past in the present, and that his unfolding into the future does not explain anything, does not give a sense of completion and authenticity. The contradiction between Heidegger and Bergson seems irreconcilable, as Laurent Giroux demonstrates. We see more clearly now why, from the ontological perspective occupied by Heidegger, Bergson’s duration cannot truly be originary time: It is that, seeking to surpass purely homogeneous succession, it fails equally on two points: 1) It preserves the past in the present, but does not explain the being-past which characterizes the existant and founds the very possibility of the conservation of the “past”; 2) it opens onto the future, but this future is indefinite and is always conceived as not-yet (now): duration does not take its measures as a consequence of defining the meaning which the future confers on the present and the past—for Bergson it is the past-present which, on the contrary, throws all its weight against the future—nor the meaning of its intrinsic finitude. (95; My translation) What Giroux fears in Bergson is a kind of invasion of brute presence into the world of the possible, an invasion that will weigh down the Heideggerian possibility that is the source of all authentic engagement with death. Not only does Bergson fail to integrate into his system the intrinsic finitude (an unfolding towards an end) of human duration, which necessarily determines and modifies the sense of the future, but the past as described remains ontologically unrecoverable as past . . . It is, claims Heidegger, that which remains in the present in the form of a baggage that accumulates and grows without end and that we drag with us. From this perspective, the being-past


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or the have-been that characterizes the existant is sacrificed in the name of a spiraling present that explains nothing. (117; My translation) Giroux’s first critique—that Bergson does not explain how the past exists as past—seems to stem more from his particular reading of Heidegger, or more properly, his misreading of Bergson. The past is not, for Bergson, preserved under the aspect of presence. Giroux’s statement “the past is there (virtually), therefore it is there as present” (118; my translation) demonstrates a still active misprision that fails to see the present as always passing, always in a virtual coexistence with the past. How would a new present come about if the old present did not pass at the same time that it is present? How would any present whatsoever pass, if it were not past at the same time as present . . . The past and the present do not denote two successive moments, but two elements which co-exist: One is the present, which does not cease to pass, and the other is the past, which does not cease to be but through which all presents pass. (Deleuze Bergsonism 58–59; emphasis in the original) We are left, then, with the problem of the future. Clearly both Heidegger and Bergson see the present as ecstasis, standing always outside of itself, but it is the nature of this movement, the existential possibilities that it sets loose, and the limits established by it that differentiate the two. For Heidegger the issue will always be the status of the future, of the uttermost possibility of Death, that throws Dasein back upon itself and its own finitude. The Being-toward-death will always be problematic and Heidegger takes pains to assure us that he is not speaking of Death as an actualized moment that must be awaited, but as a possibility. if being-towards-death has to disclose understandingly the possibility which we have characterized, and if it is to disclose it as a possibility, then in such Being-towards-death this possibility must not be weakened: it must be understood as a possibility, it must be cultivated as a possibility, and we must put up with it as a possibility, in the way we comport ourselves towards it. (B&T 306; emphasis in the original) “Thus, authentic Being-toward-death can be a matter neither of dwelling (sich aufhalten) on death, brooding and pondering over when and

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how it will come, nor of awaiting it (Erwarten), since in both cases the possibility character of death would be weakened in favor of actuality” (Sallis 131). Giroux’s most serious critique of Bergson—that he does not understand the intrinsic finitude of the authentic Being-toward-death, and consequently falls back on a conception of time that explains nothing— rests on an understanding of death as possibility. Indeed, John Sallis offers the strongest possible reading of the role of possibility in Heidegger’s conceptualization of death: “Everything turns here around the character of death as possibility, death as having the character of possibility” (127). But it is precisely here that Heidegger gives way to a Bergsonian critique. Strangely, it is not in directly challenging the Heideggerian Being-toward-death that Bergson can be invoked most powerfully as a critique of Heidegger, but rather in the Bergsonian distinction of virtuality and possibility—the same possibility upon which much of the Heideggerian ontology rests. For Heidegger death impends, indeed it is something “distinctively impending,” but something that never has the character of actualization (verwirklichung); to await death is to look away from it as possibility toward its eventual actualization. If possibility is removed from death, if death becomes something that can be awaited, that simply takes on the nature of the actual—if death is, in other words, something that eventually will be present—the Being-toward-death founds a “firm” rather than an ecstatic sense of self; a self, however, whose Being-toward-death takes on the nature of preoccupation, brooding, and eventually self-destruction. In Heidegger’s words, “death reveals itself as that possibility which is one’s ownmost, which is non-relational, and which is not to be outstripped” (Being and Time, 294). That is to say, it is by idealizing and investing my own death that I both preserve meaning in the world, and create a firm sense of myself. I imagine that my death can be “proper,” that somehow it can belong to me. Which comes down to saying that I belong to it. The correlate of a life filled with care (Sorge) is the suicidal narcissism of such a being-towardsdeath. (Shaviro Passion and Excess 24) The weakness of Shaviro’s argument here is only its failure to recognize the idea of death-as-possibility. Shaviro does, however, provide an (albeit overstated) understanding of the dangers of the idealization of death as actuality. It is, then, death’s nature as possibility that saves


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it from being nothing more than a morbid idealization. But what is the nature of this power of possibility that is able to hold even death in a kind of suspension? Bergson argues that it is nothing more than a kind of mirror image of actuality, and not what ontologically precedes that reality. The possible is therefore the mirage of the present in the past; . . . we are convinced that the image of tomorrow is already contained in our actual present, which will be the past of tomorrow, although we did not manage to grasp it. That is precisely the illusion . . . Thus in judging that the possible does not presuppose the real, one admits that the realization adds something to the simple possibility: the possible would have been there from all time, a phantom awaiting its hour; it would therefore have become reality by the addition of something, by some transfusion of blood or life. One does not see that the contrary is the case, that the possible implies the corresponding reality with, moreover, something added, since the possible is the combined effect of reality once it has appeared and of a condition which throws it back in time. (Creative Mind 101) To put this critique into more Heideggerian language, might we not say that the illusion Bergson describes is the very type of the inauthentic encounter with death and temporality. It is a deliberate self-deluding, a trick played both upon consciousness and upon time itself. But there is especially the idea that the possible is less than the real, and that, for this reason, the possibility of things precedes their existence. They would thus be capable of representation beforehand; they could be thought of before being realized. But it is the reverse that is true . . . [I]f we consider the totality of concrete reality or simply the world of life, and still more that of consciousness, we find there is more and not less in the possibility of each of the successive states than in their reality. For the possible is only the real with the addition of an act of mind which throws its image back into the past, once it has been enacted. But that is what our intellectual habits prevent us from seeing. (99–100) Deleuze asks: “If the real is said to resemble the possible, is this not in fact because the real was expected to come about by its own means, to ‘project backward’ a fictitious image of it, and to claim that it was possible at any time, before it happened?” (Bergsonism 98). This “at any

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time” reminds us of Heidegger’s description in Being and Time of “what is peculiar in death’s certainty—that it is possible at any moment” (302; emphasis in the original). But what if this possibility is indeed the mirror image of reality? What if the “authentic” existential experience of Death-as-possibility is a “projection backward” of the “ ‘only’ empirical” (301) certainty of death derived from being in the presence of others’ deaths? The death of the other occurs; it is experienced as an actuality (a being-alongside), and this actuality, this realization, is projected into the past and imagined to have been able to happen at any moment. It is difficult to deny that the death of others is a formative experience, that it can mediate my relationship with everything around me, with my future and my past. It is perhaps not my death, but it is nonetheless more than empirical, more than the observation of a leaf falling, or a glass shattering. Heidegger is clear in Being and Time that the death of the other cannot be appropriated by me, that death must always be ownmost at the same time as “uttermost.” But my own death can be appropriated by me: “The end of my Dasein, my death, is not some point at which a sequence of events suddenly breaks off, but a possibility which Dasein knows of in this or that way: the most extreme possibility of itself, which it can seize and appropriate as standing before it” (Concept 11E). And this appropriation is carried out by Dasein’s authentic anticipation that makes the “possibility [of death] possible for itself as its ownmost potentiality-for-Being” (B&T 309; emphasis in the original). But what if this anticipation itself has its genesis in the being-alongside the death of the other (since death becomes an issue for the self only in this moment—we cannot say that the sense of death is part of any essence of Dasein since Dasein is lived and not given)? What if the possibility that is made possible is only, as Bergson has indicated, the illusory double of the real that is experienced empirically? We would have, as a consequence, an authentic experience of deathas-possibility based on an inauthentic (or at least questionable) concept not of death, but of possibility. Faulkner poses many questions for a reader of Heidegger. What is the power of death? Can it indeed be kept at bay by assigning it always to the realm of the possible? What is the status of others’ deaths, and what is the status of death for a society that comes limping and defeated out of a great conf lict (a question that Faulkner and Heidegger have both been forced to address)? If we take Faulkner as a commentary on Heidegger we might say that death is in fact never my ownmost possibility, in that it is neither kept safely in the realm of the possible nor can it be appropriated by me. All of the deaths in Absalom,


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Absalom!—Henry’s Murder of Bon, Wash Jones’ murder of Sutpen, Ellen Coldfield’s pathetic uncomprehending end, her father’s bizarre death nailed up in his attic, Henry’s final demise in the f laming ruin of the Sutpen mansion—have something in common. They all reach out to Quentin and demand a response. The deaths taken in themselves are almost without content, overwhelming in their incomprehensibility. But Quentin bears a kind of responsibility for them, an obligation to address them in some way. Faulkner shows us that, to say the least, death is dangerous ground. It cannot be contemplated with impunity. It cannot be kept at a distance; it is not merely impending. It not only can happen at any moment, but does. And simply because it does not happen to me does not reduce its ontological import. In Faulkner, there is, then, a kind of Heideggerian nightmare: a death that not only can be surpassed, but that is surpassed; there is the other side of death, that Heidegger has again and again ruled out-of-bounds, a realm that can only be the brute actualization of disaster. Moreover, it is a death that I must nevertheless claim, whose ownmostness cannot be denied. Just because the death that happens is not the end of my own time, it does not excuse me from sharing some of the intimacy of the death with my own being. In Faulkner it is not my death, but the deaths of others that gives my life a shape. But how to address this death? The address of death is the address of time, in the double sense of the genitive. It is both the address that we make to time (and death) and the address that time itself makes. Faulkner’s address to time is, as he said to Loic Bouvard, “Man is never time’s slave.” It is as much as to say that man is never death’s slave. But insofar as the human faces death as something actual and outside of it, it must also face time as that in which it is caught. This is, of course, for Heidegger, the most inauthentic form of existence that a human can undergo. The human, by becoming temporal, by indeed becoming-time, escapes the nets of inauthenticity. But again, the power of becoming-time for the human depends, in Heidegger, upon a certain conception of death-as-possibility. If death can happen to others in a way that concerns me, if its brute reality is more real to me than the simple eradication of a thing, then it must be something far more dangerous than Heidegger admits. The life that projects itself forward to its ownmost death to be thrown back upon itself in an authenticating limitation might be swallowed up by this death, might not be able to return to itself. But the address of time is also the address made by time itself, the voice that only seems to be the isolated human voice ( just as I have said

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that the voices of Absalom, Absalom! are better heard as the voices of an unfolding temporality than as the separate voices of individuals trying to make sense out of a shadowy history). The human speaking in its becoming-temporal is set into the nonhumanness of time, and this is a time that intimately concerns others. In Heidegger the turning away from the other (from “das Man”) takes the form of the ownmostness of my death, and this “ownmostness” has the unmistakable tone of rejection, of casting-off. My death is mine, concerns me alone, and no other can share in it; by the same token your own death is yours and cannot be appropriated to my experience, and especially cannot help to establish me in any relation to the unfolding of my own temporal being. In Faulkner, on the contrary, the individual human lives in a net of relationships, of intertwined lives and of deaths that demand meaning and lend some of their meaning to those who come within their range. The issue seems to me to center always on the death of the other in Faulkner; but there are two ways to consider this death of the other. The first is to focus on death, the second to focus on the otherness of the other. And there is implicit in two of Bergson’s most important working concepts, creative evolution and duration, an appeal to otherness and a consequent recasting of the idea of death that may shed some light on both Faulkner and Heidegger. Creative evolution, in Bergson, is an idea based on the promise of continuity, the unfolding of a development in which the entire line of the development is the virtual home of each of its parts. The living being reaches always outside of itself. It is widely known that Bergson initially discovered duration as identical to consciousness. But further study of consciousness led him to demonstrate that it only existed in so far as it opened itself upon a whole, by coinciding with the opening up of a whole . . . For, if the living being is a whole and, therefore, comparable to the whole of the universe, this is not because it is a microcosm as closed as the whole is assumed to be, but, on the contrary, because it is open upon a world, and the world, the universe, is itself the Open . . . If one had to define the whole, it would be defined by Relation. Relation is not a property of objects, it is always external to its terms. It is also inseparable from the open, and displays a spiritual or mental existence. Relations do not belong to objects, but to the whole, on condition that this is not confused with a closed set of objects. (Deleuze Cinema 1 9–10)


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Indeed, the individual is nothing if not opened onto the world. If the individual (and the individual’s brain and body) do not exist as part of a set of images, they do not exist at all: The brain is part of the material world; the material world is not part of the brain. Eliminate the image which bears the name material world, and you destroy at the same time the brain and the cerebral disturbance which are parts of it . . . My body is, then, the aggregate of the material world, an image which acts like other images, receiving and giving back movements . . . (Bergson, Matter 19) Images are essentially relational. Each image acts on every other, and my body functions as a kind of relay. It does not produce the world, but rather brings it together in a way that can actualize a particular duration. The past is never-past, the present always in the process of passing. At the beginning of Creative Evolution, Bergson gives us a description of duration in which the pressing of the past into the present is continuous with the pressing of duration creatively into the future. And this duration, though personal, is also opened onto what is larger than personal. What are we, in fact, what is our character, if not the condensation of the history that we have lived from our birth—nay, even before our birth, since we bring with us prenatal dispositions? Doubtless we think with only a small part of our past, but it is with our entire past, including the original bent of our soul, that we desire will and act. (5; emphasis in the original) “[F]or a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly. Should the same be said of existence in general?” (7). The rule of consciousness is the rule of the universe itself: “The universe endures. The more we study the nature of time, the more we shall comprehend that duration means invention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new” (11). And this creation which “is not only something new, but something unforeseeable” (6) is how life responds to the challenges, the limitations that confront it. To be unable to create, to be incapable of finding that specific solution to that specific problem of existence is tantamount to brute and actual

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death. Each organism that continues on its line of development is the answer to a specific problem (the eye, for instance, is an answer to the light problem—what is to be done with light?). And for Bergson, as well as for thinkers on virtuality such as Deleuze and Levy, the virtualactual circuit is always set in motion as a response to a problem, the unfolding of a ramified branch of difference that will overcome a limitation or use a part of an environment. In the same way, memory, for Bergson, the virtual coexistence of past and presence, is filled with the image and the voice of otherness. The brain, far from storing memories that are therefore its own, organizes and complicates impressions from a sort of luminous world around it. And this is the very nature of duration as well, whether considered as the underlying power of evolution or as a description of the complexity of conscious perception. There is always something else occupying the place where an actuality resides. Where I am is not only myself, but all those images organized by the central image that is my body, not only in the form of memories of actual events that have passed out of presence, but virtual memories of all of those images, movements, and possibilities that were not chosen but that still resonate within me. “The idea of a virtual coexistence of all the levels of the past, of all the levels of tension, is thus extended to the whole of the universe: this idea no longer simply signifies my relationship with being, but the relationship of all things with being. Everything happens as if the universe were a tremendous Memory” (Bergsonism 77). What Bergson describes as memory, duration, coexistence of past and present is a near perfect model of the fictional world, and to the extent that fiction sheds light on our definition of the human, so does Bergson’s work with its description of experience and its surrounding inexperiencable field. Bergson tells us (as does Faulkner) that each moment is f illed with every other moment. Each life is—must be—filled with the other lives that move along with it. Even if Bergsonian duration and concept of evolution has debatable scientific validity (and it is a debate that Bergsonism will likely win), it has an ethical one, an ontological one, and consequently, a psychological one. Bergson’s definition of duration and evolution, as I said earlier, recasts death in such a way that it truly is held in a kind of virtual suspension. Death cannot be the final word for duration for two reasons. One reason is that the past is held in the present. History (as well as memory) does not pass away like a brute object exploded by the violence of time. In persisting virtually, memory escapes the


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exigency of death, which only holds sway over what makes a claim to existence, to being. The other reason is that, by opening onto an unknown future, a future that has not yet been determined, duration sets the individual death that is my own into a larger field, a movement where the indeterminacy of a concrete duration into the future overwhelms what is only a kind of abstracted individual death. I, in short, may die, but something other will persist, the open whole that is more me than myself. In Bergson, nothing is solely mine, not my memories, not my perceptions, and finally not even my death. In this light it is not surprising that one of the great ethical thinkers of the century, Emmanuel Levinas, has praised the Bergsonian idea of duration as “one of the most significant, if largely ignored, contributions to contemporary philosophy” (Face to Face 13). It is not surprising that Levinas would have such affection for Bergson. Duration, creative evolution, memory all ultimately unfold in a world where ontology is always an ontology of otherness. Outside of being, outside of the self, outside of the personality, if Bergson’s world does not force an ultimately ethical philosophy upon us, it at least lays the groundwork in a way that nothing else does. But the mineness of my own death stands as a great blockage and limitation on this movement toward an indeterminate future. The contemplation of death without the contemplation of otherness is the ultimate danger. As I have said, death is dangerous ground, even for thinking, even for a thinking grounded in possibility. The critique of Heidegger made so often—that he taken by a kind of Nordic death obsession—is surely wrong. Death, the Heideggerians will tell us, is that which allows for the resolute freedom of Dasein. By acknowledging its own finitude Dasein can care for the world, can find a completeness that the denial of death will never allow. Ironically, though, it seems that Heidegger’s being-toward-death is perhaps the greatest denial of death of all. It denies, for each Dasein, the ontological import of all deaths but one, its own. And within the scope of my own death, the ethical and ontological demands of others’ deaths cannot come but as a great disaster. My own death might be held in the suspension of its own always-impending possibility, its own never-to-be-realized, but not so of the deaths of others, friends, loved ones, enemies. These deaths can be either of no consequence ontologically and ethically to me—no more than the disappearance of a wave crashing on a shore—or they can make some special claim upon me, a claim of meaning and acknowledgment that others demand of me. Blanchot, in The Unavowable Community, offers one of the most

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eloquent challenges to the notion of the Dasein for which death-aspossibility is non-relational: What, then, calls me into question most radically? Not my relation to myself as finite or as the consciousness of being before death or for death, but my presence for another who absents himself by dying. To remain present in the proximity of another who by dying removes himself definitively, to take upon myself another’s death as the only death that concerns me, this is what puts me beside myself, this is the only separation that can open me, in its very impossibility, to the Openness of a community. (9) And surely a fictional world that based itself on an isolated and nonrelational sense of the ontology of the “being-there” of the human could not find the momentum to continue on its way; its own duration would shatter into isolated moments between which there could be no connection, no movement. As a reader of fiction, as one engaged in thinking through the materiality of the novelistic world, I cannot but see Heidegger’s Dasein as isolated from contact with others (just as the Volk of Heidegger seem to have no responsibility toward cultural others). The concern with death does strike me as centering on a self that never leaves itself, or rather leaves itself only to return to itself. Heidegger’s Dasein, if expressed fictionally, might be a character whose finitude becomes self-enclosing. “Death,” as one Heidegger commentator says, “is also a nonrelational possibility. To confront it under that aspect is for Dasein to understand that the issue of its ownmost Being is its own responsibility; it means acknowledging that the opinions of others and the distractions of material objects are ultimately inessential to the task of being authentically itself ” (Mulhall 119). But others are here. Their deaths are here, but their lives as well. What I will insist on, however, is that Heidegger, by playing always on such fraught ground, gives us a model of what can go wrong in the contemplation of death, life, and the history that elides my own life with the lives of others. What I am calling the Heideggerian mistake (though perhaps not one committed by Heidegger—the arguments will continue) is the failure to address the really meaningful death, the death of the other, as addressing me. If the other’s death becomes isolated from his otherness, if I see only a death, then that death will become the great specter that haunts me. It will become the brute image of a death that was supposed to remain uttermost, beyond the realm of the actual, but that has now abducted


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me beyond the uttermost point, to a realm that can only be disastrous. The death-as-possibility that is supposed to be the beginning of authenticity will become rather the gaping void that swallows me. If I address the death of the other, however, as making a claim upon my own life, as being part of the continuity of my own duration (though it is a continuity that can only progress as the unfolding of difference, and through points of indeterminacy), I will unfold the present that I live as a movement into an unknown future that is still to be created. I will put something into motion that, contrary to Heideggerian language, will outstrip my death. Whether or not Heidegger confuses the possible and the actual, whether or not he makes of death a brute obsession or a catalyst of authenticity, whether or not he closes the self or opens it, whether or not he is concerned with the death of the self or the alterity of the other, it is clear that Quentin Compson is a model of the man caught between these alternatives. Quentin, who sees himself as “older at twenty than a lot of people who have died” (377) is trapped by the past because he lives toward a death that is not only more brutally present than possibility, but that is also, according to Sartre (and for readers of The Sound and the Fury for whom Quentin’s suicide is a given), already accomplished: “he is already dead” (230). Death is not experienced, for Quentin, as possibility (if, in fact, this possibility is ever more than an illusion), but as a fait-accompli; and for this reason, the past takes on an oppressive weight, an inexorable violence from which he finds it impossible to escape. It is worth noting here that Quentin’s horror at the past is not simply the inauthentic regard of death as actuality. It is not the deaths of these isolated others that eviscerates Quentin’s being, but the meanings of these deaths. This is the becoming-monstrous of the very meaningfulness that Heideggerian authenticity promises to the resolute Dasein. “Wait, I tell you!” Quentin said, though still he did not move nor even raise his voice—that voice with its tense suffused restrained quality: “I am telling” Am I going to have to hear it all again he thought I am going to have to hear it all over again I am already hearing it all over again I am listening to it all over again I shall have to never listen to anything else but this again forever so apparently not only a man never outlives his father but not even his friends and acquaintances do. (277; emphasis in the original) For Quentin, there is only one past, relentless, ineluctable, and unchanging, although the stories that Quentin hears and tells are far

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from similar. The Sutpen of Miss Rosa’s telling, the creature of more than human dimensions, becomes, according to Mr. Compson’s telling, the still-innocent (though with a malignant innocence) man driven by a life-changing insult in childhood, and fades almost into the background as Shreve and Quentin recreate, or create, the story of Judith, Henry and Charles Bon. We have, as Bergson has said, the virtual coexistence of endless layers of the past (Bergson’s famous time-cone), each layer containing the whole of the past, and each co-mingling with the present by an act of contraction and turning whereby dominant recollections turn toward the present: different recollections, different emotions, different characters (who may nevertheless share the same name). But for Quentin this difference is subsumed always to a sameness that closes off the creative force of the virtual past. There is much of the past that follows Quentin, but in two senses. Quentin sees himself almost as stalked by the past, by the demonic Sutpen, by the ruin of the South, by Henry Sutpen’s shame and agony over Bon. This is the past as brute presence, the past that is haunted by death and disaster, that which, Mr. Compson tells Quentin, cannot be revivified, no matter how one arranges its elements (and so Bergson would agree, you cannot constitute duration with its elements or its moments). But there is another kind of past that follows Quentin: the one in which he serves as a continuity, the one that he brings into existence with his speculations and attention, and the one that, pushing into the present, wishes to push further and on into a future. The past is a transformation, not a burial, of Quentin and Shreve as they allow it to traverse them. Shreve ceased again. It was just as well, since he had no listener. Perhaps he was aware of it. Then suddenly he had no talker either, though possibly he was not aware of this. Because now neither of them were there. They were both in Carolina and the time was forty-six years ago, and it was not even four now but compounded still further, since now both of them were Henry Sutpen and both of them were Bon, compounded each of both yet either neither . . . (351) It is not simply a matter, for Quentin, of “coming to term with the past” as we might phrase it in our contemporary psychological terms; any past that is real and concrete will be a kind of trap for him. Quentin’s hearings and retellings of the Sutpen story are never aimed at establishing what really happened, but rather at reaching what Miss Rosa has


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called the might-have-been, what we can call the virtuality of the past. Quentin is not to be a spectator of the South’s story. To be merely a spectator is to die of outrage along with Rosa, or to die meaninglessly chewing the ends of old schemes like Sutpen, or to die long long after death should have come like Henry. It is only transformation, the existence of all the virtualities of the past—the most painful as well as the most glorious—that can allow Quentin to see his future as open, and not merely as a repetition of the sins and horrors of the past. And this is not to say that the future, however open, may not bring sins and horrors of its own. It is not the pain and the darkness of history—not its particular content—that Quentin struggles with. It is rather the foreclosure that it imposes on the future, on the unfolding of the different. It is not horrifying to Quentin that the South faces pain, decay, loss; but it is unbearable that the South faces the same as it has faced, that the horrors are always the same horrors. This, for Quentin, is the difference between time and history. Time is what can unfold, what can speak in the human’s voice. History is what we see in looking either way, the past or the future. It functions to throw me back, not into an authentic contemplation of my mortality, but into a dark despair that has stopped believing in the very existence of the future, a despair that no longer feels the unfolding of time within itself, a despair in which duration is no more than a myth. When Quentin says that perhaps we are all Sutpen, when he lives in a kind of intimacy with the Bon and Henry of his story, we sense something new in the miasma of defeat and pain: Shreve and Quentin undergo the mutual interpenetration that characterizes duration “both their breathing vaporized faintly in the cold room where there was now not two of them but four, the two who breathed not individuals now yet something both more and less than twins, the heart and blood of youth” (294). The particular content of Quentin’s history is certainly bloody and violent, filled with deaths sudden and shocking and treacherous, but it is the lives of those others—Sutpen, Bon, Henry, Judith— that make a demand upon Quentin. The might-have-been that always haunts even the most horrifying reality pushes forward into the present and into the future. The voice of Miss Rosa, mortified and furious, is one of the voices of the world of might-have-been. She does not even allow herself to fantasize about a life for herself, a husband, a home, and a land not in ruins. Her rage is the very voice of the might-have-been. Her intimacy with the Bon-Judith-Henry triangle—though she never actually participates in it, not even to see Bon’s dead body—is the sign of the

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incipience of the might-have-been even in the most arid, the most discouraging, of realities. Miss Rosa is, as Quentin’s father says, “a ghost” and it is Quentin’s job to more than just listen to her like a proper gentleman. It is to acknowledge her and to be taken up in the movement of which she is the latest incarnation and he is the next; it is also to be present for the last chapter of Rosa and Henry’s final encounter in the Sutpen mansion, to come face to face with Henry, who has been so far removed from the actuality of Quentin’s life that he is almost a mythical figure. The duration of which Quentin is a part becomes a concrete duration in this moment. Quentin is always engaged in a becoming-temporal. He must immerse himself in duration, and in its movements of differentiation. He must allow the unactualized virtualities of the past to take up their place within him, however dire the horrors he will be made to face. This is his act of creativity, and it is an act that implicitly points to the future. The present swells with the weight of the past, but it is only by putting himself in the whole past, the virtual past, that Quentin will have the freedom of an indeterminate future. The strange demonic innocence of Sutpen, the love between Bon and Henry that strives against culture and family, the quiet and furious “undefeat” of Rosa, Clytie, and Judith, all are virtual elements that occupy Quentin as much as death and betrayal do, and all can point the way to a future. But, as we know, Quentin has no future. Becomings, as Deleuze reminds us, often fail. One is frozen, held back, stopped in the middle of an ongoing movement. Quentin makes the Heideggerian mistake of taking death as a possibility, ownmost, impending, never-to-arrive, and finally never concerned with the otherness of the other. The deaths of others become shadows that fall across his perception. Time is frozen in a series of overwhelming moments that cannot be rearranged in any order, cannot be given life and movement into the future. Quentin dies because he forgets. He forgets the power—creativity—that is required to bring the stories of Sutpen, Charles Bon and Henry, Rosa, Judith and Clytie into recollection. He forgets the power of differentiation by which these stories may be told. He forgets, in other words, the power of the virtual, of difference. For it is only in the projecting backward of the possible—the illusory mirror image of the real—that we are trapped by our own actual “bloody mischancing of human affairs” that never seems to change. [W]e see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation


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of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable—Yes, Judith, Bon, Henry, Sutpen: all of them. They are there, yet something is missing; they are like a chemical formula exhumed along with the letters from that forgotten chest, carefully, the paper old and faded and falling to pieces, the writing faded, almost indecipherable, yet meaningful, familiar in shape and sense, the name and presence of volatile and sentient forces; you bring them together in the proportions called for, but nothing happens; you re-read, tedious and intent, poring, making sure that you have forgotten nothing, made no miscalculation; you bring them together again and again nothing happens: just the words, the symbols, the shapes themselves, shadowy inscrutable and serene, against the turgid background of a horrible and bloody mischancing of human affairs. (101) Nothing happens. Nothing changes. In the projection into the past of actuality (that we then mistake for possibility), we imagine ourselves, our own struggles, lying dormant in potentiality. Our own present becomes mirrored in this past and we are caught in a repetitious sameness, tedious and horrifying. The possible, becomes for us, in other words, the “sterile double” of the actual. It becomes that which closes off the movement of a virtuality that proceeds precisely by difference. every possible is not realized, realization involves a limitation by which some possibles are supposed to be repulsed or thwarted, while others “pass” into the real. The virtual, on the other hand, does not have to be realized, but rather actualized; and the rules of actualization are not those of resemblance and limitation, but those of difference or divergence and of creation . . . While the real is the image and likeness of the possible that it realizes, the actual, on the other hand does not resemble the virtuality that it embodies. It is difference that is primary in the process of actualization—the difference between the virtual from which we begin and the actuals at which we arrive. (Bergsonism 97; emphasis in the original) The movement of the virtual is change, evolution toward an indeterminate future: “Evolution takes place from the virtual to actuals. Evolution is actualization, actualization is creation” (98); “evolution does not move from one actual term to another actual term in a homogeneous unilinear series, but from a virtual term to the heterogeneous

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terms that actualize it along a ramified series” (100). The virtual past, the past that coexists with and opens the present, is composed, as Mr. Compson says (though from the perspective of the effete exhaustion of the ruined South), of “simple passion,” “simple violence,” “volatile and sentient forces”; virtual elements, in other words, that can actualize along divergent lines. The act whereby these virtual forces come into the present is creativity, the continual unfolding of difference. The simple repetition, the morbid preoccupation with the past, is not a creative act of imagination, but marks precisely the failure of the imagination to overcome illusion. It is in this light that we should hear Quentin’s final words in Absalom, Absalom! when asked by Shreve why he hates the South (“I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!”). We should not smugly read this declaration as the bad psychoanalyst might (“You keep insisting that you don’t hate your mother. Let us speak of why you hate her”). Rather, we should see the desperation of the cry as the attempt to articulate a truth. What Quentin hates is not the South, not the decay or the death or the defeat. He works and reworks the incipiencies and forces that make up the South with what can only be called love. His hatred is for history, not for a place, and, more specifically, for the history that forecloses the future, that imposes its sameness on past, present, and future, and that is deaf to the voice of the different, the virtual. Quentin is not a frustrated optimist. He is the closest thing we might see in literature to a human cut off from the nonhuman (in this case the nonhuman movement of virtuality, of time). Creativity is never a matter of simple presence, but an ecstasis, a standing out from the present in a continuous movement of difference, which means, of time. Like Quentin, we are readers and storytellers. Unlike Quentin, however, we do not need to see the tales that make up Absalom, Absalom! as one story. We do not need to be haunted by ghosts all the more powerful and terrifying for their unreality. We do not need to see our disasters as inevitable by projecting them into the past as unrealized possibilities. And we do not need to make death the supreme possibility. Death, if we speak of it at all, will become virtuality, actualized not in an event, but along a series of lines that do not lead to exhaustion or demise.

CH A P T E R

SE V E N

Riders of the Virtual Sage: Zane Grey, Cormac McCarthy, and the Transformation of the Popular Western

It is hard to imagine the evolution of the American novel into its first great movement—the American Renaissance—without the vulgar and transgressive power of the popular to set it into motion and to give it its stores of images, themes, plots, character types, and resentments. A profane energy resonates in Whitman’s democratic embrace of the masses, in Melville’s rough-edged metaphysics, in Hawthorne’s perverse communities. Indeed, the link between popular culture and “serious” art has become a starting point rather than a point of contention in cultural studies. The echo of crime reportage in The House of the Seven Gables, the rhythms of jazz in the novels of Ralph Ellison or James Baldwin, the textures and voices of sensational fiction and anime in the bold work of Quentin Tarantino have all been convincingly argued for. What I wish to add to these arguments is the distinction between two forms of inf luence, one based on potentiality—which I will describe as the inf luence of transportation—the other based on a concept introduced and elaborated by Gilles Deleuze in Difference and Repetition—the “virtual,” which I will describe as the inf luence of transformation. Potentiality is best described as a form of transportation—especially in the case of literary inf luence, although Aristotle himself cannot escape the metaphors of displacement between states—because in the movements of literary inf luence we are often gratified to see an idea, a character-type, a social conf lict, leave a setting in which it cannot unleash all of its force of meaning to another where it rises to a more

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stringent set of expectations. We will take a few moments to clarify this transportation of potential, as it will provide the necessary contrast for our later discussion of virtual transformation. To be more specific, let us look at one of the canonical American novels of the nineteenth century, Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, and, later, one of the arguably greatest American novels of the late twentieth century, Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing, the second novel in his Border Trilogy. The former I assert depends upon a relationship with popular culture that must be characterized as “potential”—that is, it is able to borrow from popular culture images, characters, and attitudes that can still be recognized as popular images even on the other side of the transportation that Hawthorne carries out. McCarthy’s The Crossing, however, does not realize the potentialities of popular culture, but rather makes popular elements undergo a kind of ramifying problematic mutation, a transformation that must be characterized as “virtual.” We must understand the difference between the virtual and the term with which it is too easily confused, the potential. The virtual in many ways has a wider scope than the potential because it can cross the space of difference. Perhaps the best elaboration of the limitation of the potential is Aristotle’s in Metaphysics. His two great examples of the limitations of the potential are the transformation of wine into vinegar (see chapter one) and of the human seed into a human being (see chapter six). But Aristotle also offers one of his characteristic rough-andready analogies to illustrate the relationship (and, as we will see, the relationship of priority) between the potential and the actual. What we mean is clear by induction from individual cases, and we should not seek a definition of everything but should also perceive an object by means of an analogy; thus, as that which builds is to that which is capable of building, so is that which is awake to that which is asleep, or that which is seeing to that which has its eyes shut but has the power to see, or that which is separated from matter to matter itself, or the finished product to the raw material. Let the term “actuality” signify the first part of each of these differences and “the potential” signify the second part. (151–152) The potential, then, is in most important senses the same as the actual. To be capable of building but to be not actually building at the moment is a difference only of contingent circumstances, as is the difference between being awake and asleep—a chance noise will bring about the

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actuality of consciousness—and the difference between having one’s eyes closed and then having them open. Aristotle, in this series of analogies, requires nothing more of the potential than that it be a contingent suspension of actuality. Even the relationship of matter to what is separated from it, and the raw material to the finished product reminds us that matter is the matter of a form (and is not to be found without this form), and raw material is the raw material of a certain finished product (and we may say that the skill that transforms the raw material into the final product must, by definition, be actualized). A slightly weaker way of drawing this relationship (and the stronger and weaker senses taken together cover a wide range of meanings that Aristotle assigns to the term potential) is to say that the link between the actual and the potential is one of resemblance. The potential may not be the same as the actual (since it is at least numerically different from the actual that precedes it), but it certainly bears a relationship of similarity. Actuality is prior in time to potentiality in this sense, that there exists another thing of the same species, but not numerically the same as the thing in question, which is prior in time to the latter. What I mean is this, that prior in time to this individual man who now exists in actuality and to this corn and to this animal that sees, there was the matter and the seed and that which could see, and these were potentially this man and this corn and this seeing animal, but not yet in actuality; but prior in time to these potential things there existed in actuality other things from which these things were generated. For it is always by a thing in actuality that another thing becomes actualized from what it was potentially. (154) And, to the actual thing from which it springs, the newly realized potential (i.e., the new actuality) will bear a relationship of similarity. “The baby,” as we never tire of observing, “has her mother’s eyes.” The potential, then, does not so much change into the actual as reach it. It begins in the actual, gets its ticket punched, and then finds itself back again in the land of the actual, as strict as a train on rails. The virtual contrasts with the possible on these two main points— sameness/difference and resemblance/disjunction. Certainly, the process of actualization of the virtual is far more unpredictable than the movement from possible to real. One name for this unpredictability is creation: “The virtual . . . does not have to be realized, but rather actualized; and the rules of actualization are not those of resemblance and

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limitation, but those of difference and divergence and of creation” (Deleuze, Bergsonism 97). Creative, transformative, and non-actual, the virtual presents a new set of problems for the human, language, and literature, or rather it turns these three into problems rather than simply facts. If the human is an actuality springing from virtuality, if, as Deleuze says, “[a]n organism is nothing if not the solution to a problem” (Difference 211) then we must trace back the human to the nonhuman forces that have followed a ramifying line of differentiation to cross, perhaps only for a moment, the threshold of humanity (on their way who knows where). If language is caught up by virtuality it may be that we must also follow the line of actualization back across the threshold of language, to the non-linguistic or pre-linguistic forces that are contained in it. And perhaps most importantly, virtuality brings the truism of the novel—that it must begin with and elaborate a problem—to a new level. If the novel is a problem, then just as “[t]he virtual possesses the reality of a task to be performed or a problem to be solved,” (212), so the novel becomes a great virtuality and criticism becomes the problem of differentiating the virtualities contained in the novel, of bringing the novel beyond its own thresholds, of making the novel into the most perfect diagram of the forces and events that intersect with it. Hawthorne, then, can be characterized as a writer of potentiality/ possibility because his relationship with popular culture can be characterized by the two great defining points of the possible: sameness and resemblance. I will let two texts argue further for me. The first is from Hawthorne’s description of Phoebe in Seven Gables, the second from Joseph Boughton’s description of Helen Marston and her brother in his Solon Grind Her figure, to be sure,—so small as to be almost childlike, and so elastic that motion seemed as easy or easier to it than rest, would hardly have suited one’s idea of a countess. Neither did her face—with the brown ringlets on either side, and the slightly piquant nose, and the wholesome bloom, and the clear shade of tan, and the half a dozen freckles, friendly remembrances of the April sun and breeze—precisely give us a right to call her beautiful. But there was both lustre and depth in her eyes. She was very pretty; as graceful as a bird, and graceful much in the same way; as pleasant about the house as a gleam of sunshine falling on the f loor through a shadow of twinkling leaves, or as a ray of firelight that dances on the wall while evening is drawing nigh. (Hawthorne 6)


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The sister lay down her lute—rose smilingly, and bent over the shoulder of her brother. No beam from lovely tapers ever fell upon a picture more exquisitely lovely than that now presented by the figure of those orphans. Pre-eminently interesting were the pale features of that stricken boy. His eyes were large, and deeply blue, while his broad and intellectual forehead was slightly fringed with ringlets of thin brown hair. And yet, still more beautiful the countenance of that lovely one who bent over him, whose rosy and rounded cheek nearly touched his, and whose profuse curls of light brown hair fell softly upon his shoulder, and mingled with his own. How like each other they were in all save health and fulness of feature—and two bright smiles, each the counterpart of the other, that now parted the lips of both, gave to the interest of the picture its loveliest finish. (Boughton 80) It is in the portrayal of women that we can see most clearly the ref lection in Hawthorne of Popular Culture. This is, of course, not to say that Hawthorne is bound by the sentimental limitations of popular culture (Hester Prynne is far more than a sentimental character) but rather that he borrows from sentimental imagery in a way that can be easily recognized. Not just in appearance, but in personality, his Phoebe resembles Boughton’s Helen Marston (and a host of other female characters in sentimental literature): they are both pious, innocent, nurturing, angelic, what Leslie Fiedler calls “monster[s] of virtue.” I cite the earlier passages just to give a more concrete sense of the echoes between nineteenth-century popular culture and the American Renaissance. The link between the two has already, of course, been firmly established by several critics including Fiedler himself in his classic Love and Death in the American Novel. But the link between Hawthorne and Boughton extends beyond their similar imaginings of women. In his well-known study of nineteenth-century popular culture Beneath the American Renaissance, David Reynolds discusses the use of what he calls the oxymoronic character of the hypocrite in Solon Grind and The House of the Seven Gables: In the city mysteries novel [the oxymoronic character] appeared variously as the churchgoing capitalist, the reverend rake, the pious seducer. A typical oxymoronic character is the title character of Joseph Boughton’s Solon Grind; or, The Thunderstruck Hypocrite (1845). A hard-hearted capitalist who maintains the pretense of piety even while he drives poor families to suicide . . . When

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Hawthorne portrays Jaffrey Pyncheon as a sherry-swigging temperance advocate . . . he was vivifying cultural paradoxes which in real life had produced various schools of immoral reformers and which in popular literature had appeared as particularly ironic mixed characters. (86–87) When I say that Reynolds uses the language of potentiality, I mean that he clearly sees the model for the relationship between high and popular culture as a kind of upward mobility, a change of residence from an impoverished neighborhood of sensational pleasures and strident resentments to one of historical awareness, psychological depth, and political analysis. The energies of popular culture are not transformed, but bolstered. For instance, what Hawthorne adds to the popular awareness (and in adding unfolds its potential) is the idea of history, specifically of American history and the plunder of the land from those who cannot protect it. Solon Grind’s theft of the Marston’s land does not take on the same historical resonance as Colonel Pynchon’s fatal theft of Matthew Maule’s acres. And Matthew Maule’s curse—the only recourse available to the poor man who cannot appeal to even-handed social justice—is far more than the vindictive curse that is placed on Hannah in George Thompson’s popular novel Gay Girls of New York. But Hawthorne’s sophistication is predicated on there being a store of ideas, of beliefs, of emotions, or images ready to be taken to the next level. In popular culture political ideas think themselves emotionally and sometimes chaotically. In Hawthorne the same political ideas think themselves rationally, fully, and with a wider scope historically and philosophically. Hawthorne brings a potentiality to its realization by transporting the popular to where it, in essence, mixes in better intellectual company. Indeed, potentiality is little more than the already known, the already-there. One needs only add existence to it, much as one adds water to dehydrated food. The potential, therefore, has one great and fatal f law. In transporting some potentials to actuality, we necessarily leave others behind (either for the moment of forever). The movement from potentiality to actuality is just that: a movement, not a transformation and not the creation of anything new. We must hope that the store of potential from which we draw our actualities is full and deep, because each actualization brings it a step closer to exhaustion. How different is the virtual! And, in fact, how splendidly the virtual unfolds the different. In virtuality one proceeds from a starting point along an ever ramifying line of differenciation (as Deleuze has named the


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actualization of virtuality into species and distinguished parts) (Difference 207). In virtuality we begin, not with a set of discrete entities, discrete potentials, which are already proto-realized (in that existence does not change their nature), but with a set of singular points that are defined essentially by their relationships of difference: The reality of the virtual consists of the differential elements and relations along with the singular points which correspond to them. The reality of the virtual is structure. We must avoid giving the elements and relations which form a structure an actuality which they do not have, and withdrawing from them a reality which they have . . . When it is claimed that works of art are immersed in virtuality, what is being invoked is not some confused determination but the completely determined structure formed by its genetic differential elements, its “virtual” or “embryonic” elements. (209) We may catch echoes here, and not accidentally, of Saussure’s description of the structure of langue: “In language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms” (88). For Deleuze, the reality of the structure is the interplay of differences and of differenciation. Saussure’s system is one of the first great thinkings of language as virtuality. It is but a small step from reading Saussure to seeing in the linguistic artwork—the poem, the novel, the story—the workings of a set of differential elements. From the level of the phoneme, to the word, to the sentence, and finally to the fully actualized work of art, we can trace out levels of difference, and in doing so we will, at the very least, be working from a model not restricted by possibility, not caught in the redundancy of the possible-real circuit. The model for the actualization of a virtuality is not the addition of existence to a shadowy realm of potential, but the solution of a problem. Finally, to the extent that the possible is open to “realization”, it is understood as an image of the real, while the real is supposed to resemble the possible. That is why it is difficult to understand what existence adds to the concept when all it does is double like with like. Such is the defect of the possible: a defect which serves to condemn it as produced after the fact, as retroactively fabricated

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in the image of what resembles it. The actualization of the virtual, on the contrary, always takes place by difference, divergence, or differenciation. Actualization breaks with resemblance as a process no less than it does with identity as a principle. Actual terms never resemble the singularities they incarnate. In this sense, actualization or differenciation is always a genuine creation. It does not result from any limitation of a pre-existing possibility . . . For a potential or virtual object, to be actualized is to create divergent lines which correspond to—without resembling—a virtual multiplicity. The virtual possesses the reality of a task to be performed or a problem to be solved . . . (212) The “problematic” of the virtual gives us a new approach to the relationship between the popular and the literary, and allows us to trace out how certain singular elements of the popular, set into a problematic field, are the points of departure for unfoldings that can never be traced back to an unproblematic essence. It is this kind of virtual problematic unfolding—transformation—that provides an alternative model for the relationship between the literary novel and the popular novel. We will begin with one of the great classics of popular western writing: Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage. We will end with Cormac McCarthy’s great problematically western novel The Crossing, the second volume of his Border Trilogy. And in between the two we will see unfolding before us a line of true creativity, and a link between the popular and the literary that can only be described, in the best Spinozist sense, as ethical. Grey and McCarthy: The Singularity of Genre If we are to see the problems endemic to a genre—the western—we must first begin with the problem of genre itself. Riders of the Purple Sage is an example of the western, indeed, one of the most popular examples. And as an example, it stands in the problematic relationship of all examples to what they exemplify. Examples are both singular and general. In The Coming Community, Agamben establishes the example as a kind of paradoxical singularity that serves a function of commonality. the example is characterized by the fact that it holds for all cases of the same type, and at the same time, it is included among these. It


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is one singularity among others, which, however, stands for each of them and serves for all. On one hand, every example is treated in effect as a real particular case; but on the other, it remains understood that it cannot serve in its particularity. (8–9) We may take this description a step further and say that the example cannot serve in its particularity insofar as it is an example of an essence. Its particular features, its elements, cannot stand for all of the elements of every example of the genre (if, for instance, one character in Riders of the Purple Sage is a conf licted Mormon woman, not every case of the genre must contain a conf licted Mormon woman). But nothing can serve as an example unless it is made up of particular features, singular points. So the genre is caught in this middle state between the singular and the common. But if the genre is seen as a set of differential relationships set into a problematic structure, it can serve in its capacity as singular/common, since the problems are not potentialities, not essences that simply need to be brought into the light. The problematic structure is virtual, made up of embryonic elements that only come into existence according to the problematic relationships in which they subsist. Indeed, since problems can only be relationships of singularities, singular points, they have no actuality as generalities. They do not cut across cases of a genre because they belong to the singular points of each case (the trials of the rebellious Mormon woman, the purpleness of the sage, the hunt for the lost family, the hidden valley, the underrated but superior horse, the disguised adopted daughter of the rustler). Our instinct may be to complain that in using the single example of Riders of the Purple Sage, I have not made a case for the transformation of a genre, just of one particular example of genre. This critique would be unanswerable if the goal here were to provide an exploration of the potential of the genre (since one example cannot exhaust the potential of a genre, the store of what is possible, which must be calculated by a process of addition: this possibility plus that possibility plus the other possibility). The virtual, the problematic structure, however, does not proceed by a process of addition (and therefore subtraction, since each possibility realized subtracts from the store of possibilities), but of multiplication. The virtual singular points of Purple Sage are not meant to be added to the points of other westerns, since they only exist in the particular set of problematic relationships known by a particular title. If one wanted to argue that other problematic relationships existed in, say, a novel by Louis L’Amour, and that these problematic

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relationships were different from those of Purple Sage, I would welcome the observation as an insight into the ramifying differential nature of genre. Virtualites in short, do not add up as potentialites do. A virtuality is all that it is capable of undergoing, becoming, making happen that will take it beyond the limits of itself. Again, Purple Sage is not meant to serve as a kind of umbrella under which all other westerns may be subsumed, but rather as one line, or rather one singular point of a ramifying line on its way to other ramifications, which will certainly intersect rhizomatically with the ramifications of other westerns. Is it all meant to add up? No. But it is meant to multiply. With this stipulation in mind, we can look at Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage as a complex structure of singular (virtual) points that do not exist prior to the relationship in which they inhere and that constitute a structure of problems and of forces. We can then see how McCarthy’s The Crossing unfolds, through a process of difference, those virtual singularities that are both those of the western and of Grey’s particular novel. What we are tracing here is the complex entanglement of an unfolding virtuality (or, what amounts to the same thing, unfolding virtualities). We are usually at least passingly familiar with the western ethos, if we have seen even a smattering of western films and television shows, if we have been exposed to the ideal of the cowboy, if we have seen the Marlborough man. We know the terms in which it is usually discussed: the love of the land, of independence, the hero who comes from outside of the community to restore order, redemptive violence, the martial skills of the hero, the special relationship with the chosen animal (the noble horse, the loyal dog), the good-hearted woman in need of rescue, the implacable enemy bent on domination. We can multiply these elements, these familiar embryonic elements of the cowboy/western code. And the code functions as such simply because it can be recognized. But in dealing with codes we are still in the realm of the possible. The elements of the code can unfold their possibilities within given limits. The elements are already static at the moment of their recognition. In order to establish a particular feature as an element of the code it is enough to say merely that it is there, that it can be seen, recognized, that it exists. Cowboy stories have guns, they have horses, they take place in the American west; in more complex terms, they are about the American Garden of Eden, the pastoral vision of a nation, the value of individual striving and heroism, manifest destiny. We know that we are still in the realm of the possible because we can name these elements with no reference to relationship, to difference. I can establish a story


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as a western, simply by isolating familiar elements. For this reason it is simple to construct genres. It is a matter of isolating a given number of elements and finding them across a range of examples. The only question such a procedure lends itself to is the defining element, or the proper addition of elements: rather uninteresting, as questions go—if it has horses and guns, is it a western? Horses, guns, and a certain geographical and historical setting? What if we take away the horses? All addition and subtraction. But multiplication will get us so much farther. The first questions we will ask of the virtuality of a given assemblage is “what are the relationships and what is the problematic?” We will ask about the relationships and problems before we ask the question of elements, since it is only in the context of the relationship/problem that the elements emerge as elements. It is not enough to say that Lassiter, for example, is a hero. The quality of his heroism can only be established in relationship to other elements in the story that only come into actuality in relation to Lassiter’s heroism. But before we get ahead of the argument, let us find the larger problematic in which Lassiter’s heroism comes to be seen. In broad terms, we are looking for a transformation between Grey and McCarthy, a virtual transformation of the moral into the ontological. These terms are already somewhat too loose, but they will serve to move us along. Possessing Purple We can begin by asking the most naive of questions: why purple? “To her belonged Amber Spring, the water which gave verdure and beauty to the village and made living possible on that wild purple upland waste” (Grey 1–2). “Jane Withersteen loved that wild and purple wilderness” (7–8). “The glorious sunlight filled the valley with purple fire” (32). We are already in the midst of a set of problems here, some aesthetic, some moral. The writing itself shows signs of some force at work that keeps reference and reason at bay. We see “amber,” “verdure,” and “purple” following hard upon one another, almost as if the sentence itself was undergoing a kind of color hallucination, a heightened intensity of color that tries hard to remain in the real historical world, all the while rendering it as a form of cel animation (in which one could render “purple fire” spectacularly). The redundancy of the “wild . . . wilderness” is witness as well to an intensification of affect in

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Grey’s descriptions. What could seem like strained and clumsy writing may in fact be a kind of feedback effect of an intensity (a virtuality) that Grey is confronting in the environment. And the opening of the book may explain the problematic structure in which this intensity vibrates. Jane Withersteen, we are told, owns this land of almost hallucinatory intensity. But at the same time it is a matrix for movements and events of great beauty. The land is being loved as that which is beyond questions of ownership, at the same time as the ownership of the land drives the narrative forward. This is not to point out an inconsistency, a mistake in the conceptualization of the story, but a problem that inheres in the story itself and gives it its singular shape. This land must be owned, and ownership must be fought over, but it is also a land in which people disappear, fade, as much as it is an object to be controlled: “Venters moved his glance once more to the west. A horseman showed dark on the sky-line, then merged into the color of the sage” (23). “Then she left him and moved away, a white, gliding shape that soon vanished in the shadows” (26). “Then, farther out on the sage, a dark, compact body of horsemen went by, almost without sound, almost like specters, and they, too, melted into the night” (27). The elements of this problematic—ownership and beauty—have no independence from one another. Ownership of the not-beautiful is no issue in this story, in fact ownership is scarcely if ever mentioned except in terms of the beautiful, the land, the horses, even the mysterious young woman Bess. And beauty itself has no presence in the story except to the extent that it is taken as an item to be owned: Jane’s land, Jane herself, even little Fay, who can be taken and used as a bargaining chip in the blackmail/purchase of Jane Withersteen. And it is finally the f light to Surprise Valley that illustrates this problem of ownership and beauty. Jane will lose the land that she owns, will lose ownership itself, but will have a new home, a new domain of beauty in which to set herself. Domesticity reasserted. Yet this home is not to be possessed but to possess. Surprise valley will only be a home because it will be unknown and inaccessible. What makes a home—its context within a community—will be impossible in Surprise Valley. It is surely for this reason that Venters and Bess dream of life in the cities of the East. The price of Jane’s new home will be physical isolation and captivity. One does not leave Surprise Valley once the balancing rock has been rolled. This is the problematic of domesticity. In this case domesticity means to leave the home that one owns and to be owned by the new home to which one is forced to f lee. From owning the beautiful, one comes to be possessed by the beautiful.


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The Possessive Sacrifice In this problematic we see other elements and relationships emerging. To the problematic of ownership-beauty, we may add the problematic of conf lict and sacrifice. The beautiful land that is beyond ownership is a land that is being fought for. Things reach a new level of complexity when we observe that the owner of the land, Jane Withersteen, is herself an object of beauty, the ownership of whom is being contested between Lassiter and Tull. Again, conf lict emerges only in relation to beauty. Tull loves what he wishes to possess. Jane tells Bishop Dyer “Tull is hard, I know. But then he has been in love with me for years” (22). It is of course, no surprise that one wishes to possess what one loves. The problematic becomes more surprising, however, in Jane’s paradoxical response to the loving desire for ownership (which after all mirrors her own love and desire toward the purple sage). Jane is faced with losing all that she has. Lassiter himself understands the inevitability of her loss: “This all means, Jane, that you’re a marked woman . . . Jane, you’re to lose the cattle that’s left—your home an’ ranch—an’ Amber Spring. You can’t even hide a sack of gold” (195). Jane’s sacrifices and acts of generosity, in this context, take a very specific place in the complex of problems. Indeed it is no exaggeration to say that her sacrifices only emerge as elements of the problematic. There is no “pure” sacrifice to which we can assign meaning. Rather, meaning emerges from the complex of beauty-ownership-conf lict. Sacrifice, for Jane, becomes a way of not losing. And herein, of course, lies the paradox. What is lost through sacrifice is indeed lost, beyond recovery. But it cannot be stolen. Sacrifice here becomes a strategy of conf lict. Perhaps the most exemplary moment of this strategic act, more so than the gifts of gold Jane makes to her supporters, is the sacrifice of Black Star and Night, her two Arabian stallions. It is, as Venters understands, the ultimate act of sacrifice: “You’ve only Black Star and Night left. You love these horses. Oh! I know how you must love them now! And—you’re trying to give them to me. To help me out of Utah! To save the girl I love!” (348). Jane’s reply: “That will be my glory” (348). Sacrifice is not loss, but a willful making-disappear of all that can be stolen, all that can be a target of others’ desires. The problem here is, of course, the problem of loss, and the paradox of the loss that restores the very power conferred by ownership and control. The only way to hold on to what one has is the impossible act of giving it away, but in a forced choice, a choice that would not have been made outside of the context of strife and threat.

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Deleuze and American Literature The Alibi of Narrative: The Avuncular Assassin

It is best to stop for a moment and note that this complex of beautyownership-conf lict-sacrifice is essentially guided by moral considerations. What is right and wrong, what is just and unjust, what is truth to faith and what is a betrayal of faith, what is the value and meaning of loyalty. Narrative itself becomes a point of moral judgment, and a justification for violence. The moral guarantor to Lassiter’s killing of Dyer, bases itself on the reconstruction of a true narrative (as opposed to the kinds of stories, filled with gaps and mysteries that the Mormons have created to mask their double dealings). It is in the name of the lost family, a family that must finally be reconstructed by the telling of the story, that Lassiter’s violence makes a claim to justice. And it is a twofold narrative justification, as Lassiter himself is a creature of myth, of story and rumor. Lassiter reconstructs the story of Milly Erne, the story that at once provides the reasoning behind Lassiter’s execution of Dyer and allows Bess Oldring (really Elizabeth Erne) to claim her true identity, as daughter of Milly Erne and niece of Lassiter himself. It is not until the reconstruction of this identity that Lassiter’s deadly revenge takes on its full meaning. The family has been remade, the gaps in the narrative filled, and Lassiter’s acts become elements of family loyalty. In behaving just as the Lassiter of old, he becomes the familial Lassiter, “Uncle Jim.” The problematic of this transformation is twofold, however. The family is remade in narrative, but only in narrative. Milly Erne is still dead, Elizabeth Erne is leaving Utah to become the wife of Venters, the extended family is already dissolving into dyads. And Jane has cut herself off from all hope of reconciliation with her community. The story does not so much reintegrate as justify. And the very acts (the cultural rejections, the killings) that make the narrative possible are the same acts that make the world recounted by the narrative disappear in the very instant of its recounting. And Lassiter himself undergoes not so much a transformation as a return of the same. He is once again Lassiter the killer, Lassiter the terrible, who frightens Jane into moral submission. But it is only through being this killing machine, this mythic indestructible death-dealer, that he can lay claim to the romantic domestic role of lover with Jane, and the gently avuncular role with Bess. The myth, in other words, must be both dissolved and sustained in order for Lassiter to be worthy of Jane. Narrative, from one perspective, does not recreate the world; from another it is what cannot be escaped, even in the face of moral imperatives, because it is all that can recreate a world.


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McCarthy and the Unfolding of Virtualities We have now a working problematic, a set of mutually interactive and interdependent forces that give rise to what can be identified as elements of the story, none of them discrete from the others: ownership that cannot take possession of the beauty that is owned; sacrifice that acts as a hedge against loss, a forced disappearance of the world of things; and narrative that must both be asserted and surpassed to restore order and redeem the world morally. This is what we can identify as the differential structure of the problematic, and this is not a form of critique. We are not looking here for ideological slipping points or missteps, rather for the relationships that render a world in its actuality at the same time as rendering the problems, the singular points, the virtualities of that world, that allow the world to pass into something else, to differ from itself. And what is true of the world rendered is true of the genre that renders it. These problems are the problems of the Western, a set of problematic relationships subsisting in a no doubt wider field of problematic relationships that would yield up no end of singular points and movements. The question now is how McCarthy can take these virtualities of the western and transform them, not into another moral tale whose elements will resemble Purple Sage, but into an ontological tale in which the incipiencies of the Western come to actualization, come to difference. The solutions to the problematic are not solutions in terms of end points that stop the line of transformation, but solutions that will continue to transform and mutate in relation to their proper problems (just as Deleuze tells us that the eye is a solution to the light problem, not an end point of the problem, but a response that continues to respond) (Difference 211). We can begin by stating in broad terms the transformation McCarthy makes the Western problematic undergo: from ownership of the beautiful world to an impossible mapping of that world; from moral recuperation in the apparent sacrifice of the object, to the real disappearance of that object; from a recuperative narrative and a justifying myth, to the movement of narrative as inseparable from ontology, an ethical narrative that is what it speaks. These transformations are movements from morality across a threshold and on toward ontology and ethics. The Western, we may say, is bound within a moral view of the world. Characters act from considerations of justice, judgment, truth. The problems and singular points of such actions, and the sentimentality that often renders them comic,

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arise from this very incarceration in the moral viewpoint. But it is precisely in that such an incarceration gives rise to paradoxes and problems that we see the workings of incipient virtual elements awaiting transformation, differentiation. From Morality to Ontology: From Ownership to Mapping To own. We may see in such an action a number of possible transformations within which ownership remains recognizable as ownership: to master, to dominate, to hold or withhold. But McCarthy takes the issue of ownership away from itself, toward the ontology that underlies it as an incipient element: to own is to map. It does not take a great deal of imagination to see how ownership is caught up in the mapping that is its condition. Land claims (especially in the West) are claims precisely because those claims have been mapped. Border and territorial disputes are disputes about abstractions, lines drawn on national maps, boundary lines drawn on grazing and farming land. We hear of legal and economic conf licts that have to do with where boundary lines are drawn, which map is to be taken as the true map, how the map corresponds to the territory it indicates and overlays. The map is, one might say, the incipient virtual element of ownership, its ontological precondition. But it is precisely the truth of mapping that McCarthy calls into question. “They sat on the ground in the dusty square while a thin old man squatted opposite and drew for them with a whittled stick a portrait of the country they said they wished to visit. He sketched in the dust streams and promontories and pueblos and mountain ranges. He commenced to draw trees and houses. Clouds. A bird” (184). A man who has watched the procedure tells Billy and Boyd that the map is a “fantasma.” Billy stood looking at the map. No es correcto? he said The man threw up his hands. He said that what they beheld was but a decoration. He said that anyway it was not so much a question of a correct map but of any map at all. He said that in that country were fires and earthquakes and f loods and that one needed to know the country itself and not simply the landmarks therein . . . He said that plans were one thing and journeys another. (184–185)


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The impossibility of ownership comes to the impossibility of mapping, of holding onto an accurate picture of the world. It is not that such pictures can be mistaken, but that the picture, by its very nature, is not the voyage, it does not partake of a movement, but of points of stasis. The map critic tells Billy that it is not by knowing the landmarks that one is to know the land. It is noteworthy that he does not say what we might expect him to say: that it is not by knowing marks on a map that one will know a country. One may know landmarks (as they are marked out on maps or seen within a landscape) without knowing “the country,” which can only be experienced in movement, on the voyage that is more than the plan. Later in the story, Quijada tells Billy, “The world has no name, he said. The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones” (387). It is important to note here that the issue of ownership in Purple Sage is primarily a moral issue: Who has the right to what? Whose judgment about the rights to property will be paramount? How does the desire for land lead to hypocrisy and cruelty? In The Crossing, however, the issue of mapping is not a moral issue, but an ethico-ontological one. How is one to dispose oneself within the landscape? What is one capable of doing and knowing, both as mind and as body? These are not moral questions of good and evil, but ethical questions of good and bad. As Deleuze argues: Morality is the judgment of God, the system of judgment. But Ethics overthrows the system of Judgment. The opposition of values (Good-Evil) is supplanted by the qualitative difference of modes of existence (good-bad) . . . moral law is an imperative; it has no other effect, no other finality than obedience . . . Law, whether moral or social, does not provide us with any knowledge; it makes nothing known. (Spinoza 23–24; emphasis in the original) The question of ethics is the question of how a given body will arrange its movements and affects in relation to another body, either to be broken down, or to be brought to greater activity, greater understanding. So the question of mapping becomes the question of arranging movement through a marked space, a space that differs essentially from the markings that give it its coordinates. It is also, in The Crossing, the question of loss, the map we make of the world precisely because it has already been lost.

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Deleuze and American Literature The Disappearance of the World

This issue of loss brings us to the second problematic of Purple Sage: sacrifice and conf lict. Jane, as we have seen, sacrifices the very objects of contention so that she might still possess what those objects have made possible. If, for example, property has conferred freedom upon her, as the narrative progresses, the very sacrifice of that property is meant to maintain the same freedom. One gives up an object only to recoup it at a higher level. But it is a sacrifice that is made in the context of a forced choice, a recouping of freedom at the very moment when the options have been reduced to one. So it is a problematic redemption that maintains loss as a problem. There is no doubt that The Crossing is a novel of loss. Billy loses the she-wolf, his parents, his brother, his country, his world, the world of the working cowboy. Later, in Cities of the Plain, he loses John Grady Cole. These losses are a kind of response/solution to the problem of loss in the Western. In Purple Sage, loss is transformed to sacrifice, and sacrifice to a kind of transcendent fullness—Jane’s “glory.” The gesture is at the same time strangely empty because it is a choice that is brought about by outside forces. So there is fullness at one level (the transcendent) and emptiness on another (the psychological, historical—Jane has in fact been successfully ejected from the community). The Crossing (and later Cities of the Plain) reverses this order, takes the problematic into a new set of relationships. It is now the transcendent level that has been emptied out. There is no guarantee of a return on loss. Sacrifice is thus rendered void. There is only the vanishing of things that cannot be recovered, the wolf herself being the most poignant case of what is lost beyond redemption. Don Arnulfo tells Billy, The wolf is like the copo de nieve. Snowf lake Snowf lake. You catch the snowf lake but when you look in your hand you dont have it no more. Maybe you see this dechado. But before you can see it it is gone. If you want to see it you have to see it on its own ground. If you catch it you lose it. And where it goes there is no coming back from. Not even God can bring it back. (46) But at the same time there is a kind of fullness where Purple Sage gives us an emptying out. What cannot be held or possessed (or for that


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matter mapped) is lost for us but not for the world (this very world that is itself an unmappable passing). Before Billy buries the wolf he has just killed (and the killing is not a sacrifice—Billy in his defiant gesture of shooting the wolf in the dogfighting pit is losing again what has already been lost), McCarthy gives us what is surely one of the most beautiful passages in American literature: He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of a great beauty, like f lowers that feed on f lesh. What blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war. What we may well believe the power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can. But which cannot be held never be held and is no f lower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it. (127) The world cannot lose it. This vanishing is not a recuperation at a transcendent level, but a virtual point, a singular point, immanent to each life. Ungraspable, it makes itself felt in each life, in each memory. In Cities of the Plain, Billy, now an old man, speaks with a drifter about the vanishings that have made up his life. Billy says to the drifter: “A picture aint a thing. It’s just a picture.” And the drifter replies, “Well said. But what is your life? Can you see it? It vanishes at its own appearance. Moment by moment. Until it vanishes to appear no more. When you look at the world is there a point in time when the seen becomes the remembered? How are they separate? It is that which we have no way to show” (Cities 273). And this vanishing is not essentially a negation, not merely the presence of a thing and its subsequent erasure, but is a kind of virtual coexistence of the graspable and the ungraspable; as the gypsy tells Billy at the end of The Crossing, “He said that what men do not understand is that what the dead have quit is itself no world but is also only the picture of the world in men’s hearts. He said that the world cannot be quit for it is eternal in whatever form as are all things within it” (413). The world that the dead have quit may only be a picture, but the world they do not quit is far more than an afterlife. It is copresent with the life of struggle, destruction, and storytelling. When Billy asks one of the few straightforward questions in the Border Trilogy at the end of Cities of the Plain—“Where do we go when we die?”—the drifter asks a far more radical question: “I dont know . . . Where are we now?” (268).

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Deleuze and American Literature The Story of the World

The problematic of presence/sacrifice/recuperation has been transformed into a new solution (which is also its own problematic): the ungraspable, undepartable world. And it is from this world that storytelling comes, but a storytelling radically refigured from what is possible in Purple Sage. Lassiter’s final narrative, which brings together the stories, the truths, the identities that have been hidden, is defined in its problematic by three main features. First, it is essentially a moral act, this telling of the story. It justifies Lassiter’s actions, relieves Bess of her obligation to Oldring, and establishes a familial community. Second, it is essentially ineffective, only coming to be heard at the moment of parting, the moment when the family—only barely born—must disintegrate. Third, it is separate from what it describes. The story keeps enough distance from events to act as a sort of transcendent framework for them. All is brought together in the story: actions, relationships, futures, beliefs, morals. There is no question here that the story has, in essence, inserted meaning into a chaotic world. Again, we have the persistence of the moral framework, and the problem of an action that must at once be powerful (i.e., transcendent) and ineffective (what it creates holds together for only a moment before disappearing). The Crossing is a story interwoven with narratives. Dianne C. Luce’s article, “The World as Tale in The Crossing,” explores the value of storytelling in the Border Trilogy, and concludes that For McCarthy, “the thing itself ” carries connotations of truth, ultimate essence, the sacred heart of things that inspires reverence, and he implies that humans access the thing itself only by transcending the obstacles posed by artifact, language, and physical sense in moments of spiritual insight that constitute a direct and immediate apperception of the “world as given.” (208–209) But McCarthy’s move is far more radical. Luce still speaks the language of morality—“transcending,” “spiritual insight,” “reverence”— that is not far removed from Grey’s vision of narrative as restorer of moral order. McCarthy is posing a direct challenge to this all-powerful yet oddly empty picture of narrative. McCarthy answers the problem of this empty transcendent form of narrative, by giving us a narrative that is ethical rather than moral, and that is immanent to the world that it narrates. This is a moment of what we might call McCarthy’s “cowboy Spinozism.” The world does not cause narrative to arise; nor is it true


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that “the meaning of our lives that can be known and of value to us as we live is the meaning we put there by exercising our human gift for storytelling or narrating” (Luce 201–202). Meaning is not placed into life by an act of storytelling, nor does the world challenge us to find or create meaning. For McCarthy—and for his characters who speak most poignantly and powerfully—the relationship between narrative and the ungraspable world that it narrates is parallelism, what Deleuze has called a disjunctive synthesis. What is and what is told seem to communicate across a gap, but only seem because they are actually two perspectives on the same movement. The drifter under the overpass at the end of Cities of the Plain tells Billy: The template for the world and all in it was drawn long ago. Yet the story of the world, which is all the world we know, does not exist outside of the instruments of its execution. Nor can those instruments exist outside of their own history. And so on. This life of yours is not a picture of the world. It is the world itself and it is composed not of bone or dream or time but of worship. Nothing else can contain it. Nothing else be by it contained. (287) That which contains only itself, that which cannot be contained but by itself is in Spinoza’s terms substance or God. Not the God of moral rules and judgments, but the God whose attributes spring undivided from an absolute oneness. The story and what it narrates are the same, the man and his life, the seen and the spoken, the object and its action: “The shape of the road is the road. There is not some other road that wears that shape but only the one” (Crossing 230). In living one’s life, in acting, one finds a story that is not narrated after the fact, but that unfolds in the same movement as the action itself. Shortly after Boyd disappears with the girl and Billy goes in search of them, he finds himself in just such a moment of fusion: “He passed back north through the small mud hamlets of the mesa, through Alamo and Galeana, settlements through which he’d passed before and where his return was remarked upon by the poblanos so that his own journeying began to take upon itself the shape of a tale” (331). It is this taking on of the shape that is noteworthy. The journey is not simply a passive object to be rendered into a tale. Its very shaping confers upon it the power of transformation. It is a lived tale. What I have called McCarthy’s “cowboy Spinozism” is most clearly expressed in the paradoxical relationship he draws between the living of life and the writing of it (this relationship parallels Spinoza’s own paradoxical

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relationship between the thinking of substance and the acting of it, between thought and extension, whose difference is only aspectival): He said that whether a man’s life was writ in a book someplace or whether it took its form day by day was one and the same for it had but one reality and that was the living of it. He said that while it was true that men shape their own lives it was also true that they could have no shape other for what then would that shape be? (379–380) We see here the unfolding of the problematic of narrative that characterizes Purple Sage. Lassiter’s story is based on a triple structure: It is moral rather than ethical (in that one of its key purposes is to justify assassination), ineffective rather than creative (i.e., it presides over the moment of disintegration, not creation), and separate from what it relates (as it is only told after the fact). Again, this is not a weakness, but rather a problematic of narrative in Purple Sage. The narrative can establish itself and be heard precisely because it embodies this problematic. But it is also a problematic that unfolds or that can be unfolded along a line of difference. The tensions embodied in this problematic ramify along several parallel lines. If the virtual, as Deleuze says, responds to the actual, what response does The Crossing make to this problematic narrative? Rather than a moral narrative, Billy and Boyd undergo an ethical tale (in that they are not following an abstract moral standard, but are seeing what they are capable of, what conjunctions they can and cannot enter into—a properly Spinozist project), a tale that is written in the very living of it, and a tale in which the effectiveness of experience and the effectiveness of speaking are one and the same. Deleuze tells us that the virtuality, unlike the possibility, does not unfold according to resemblance; but he also tells us that the virtuality is always discernible across all of its transformations (since, unlike the possibility, it does not need to be annihilated to cross the threshold to actuality). It will not be visible as a resemblance but as a difference always differing. We can see, then, in The Crossing, the embryonic Purple Sage carried along in McCarthy’s reckless creative momentum (and why shouldn’t the unfoldings of the virtual be recklessly energetic, given the proper pressure and drive?). A conventional tale of ownership unfolds into a tale of the very impossibility of mapping the world, an impossibility that does not stop a passionate and groundless mapping. A familiar tale of strategic sacrifice unfolds into an ontological parable about the


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disappearance of the very coordinates by which loss and gain can be measured, a profound and simultaneous erasure of both the material world and the psychic world that acts as its support. A tale based on the predictably redemptive power of narrative unfolds into a story in which narrative is ontologized as one aspect of a radical monism—a narrative immanent to experience, not hovering above it. By dealing with the virtual embryonic elements of popular culture, by seeing even the most conventional forms of popular culture as series of differential elements, singular points of a problematic ready to unfold, high culture can still borrow from and transform the incipiencies of popular culture, whose energy, no less than in the nineteenth century, awaits transformation.


CH A P T E R

EIGH T

Conclusion: The Ethic of the Nonhuman

At the end of this project, I am reminded of a saying I once heard: “Every problem has a simple answer . . . and it’s wrong.” The nonhuman is a problem and a paradox; moreover, it is a problem that does not seek to empty itself into a solution, a paradox that does not reveal any inadequacy in its propositions. As Deleuze says, “The force of paradoxes is that they are not contradictory; they rather allow us to be present at the genesis of the contradiction” (Logic 74). The nonhuman is not the undoing of the human. It is not, as idea, the beginning of an analysis that will fragment the human into elements. It is not what seeks out contradictions in the human’s image of itself. It is, above all, that which gives the human its possibility. What the human values of itself, what it puts out into the world, what it defines itself as being is set into motion by the force of the nonhuman. As we have seen, the human rarely addresses itself directly or overtly as a question in the novels we have read. Nevertheless, the human poses the question of its own meaning as it addresses those ideas and assumptions—about history, personality, morality—without which the human would have no meaning, no purchase with which to rise up in to being. And what appear as contradictions in the human’s imagining and conceiving of its world are the precipitates of other encounters, other movements. Wharton poses a problem about beauty and the ethical, a problem that is solved by its very articulation. Allowing Lily Bart to be swept away by an almost predetermined fate (and a fate that makes perfect sense for the world in which she lives) does not resolve this impossible problem of beauty; but because the problem has been posed in such a way that beauty and ethics are placed on the same plane, it is no longer impossible to see them as facets of a single movement (and

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this I think is Wharton’s accomplishment: to banish the impossibility of such a relationship). From Lily’s beauty come her understanding and her blindness, her moral center and her most mercenary instincts, her destruction and her salvation. Beauty is given a power, not just to attract, please, or manipulate, but to cross over into that realm— the right and the wrong—from which it seems to be most severely excluded. The human that is drawn by beauty and by morality, that in many cases describes itself in these terms (it is quintessentially human to love goodness and beauty, the humanist tells herself, but even more so not to mistake beauty for goodness), is no longer itself when beauty and goodness are held together in an impossible embrace. In setting out the contours of the problem, Wharton ensures that, even for a modernist vision of the world, beauty is not to be so easily sundered from the idea of the good. Each of the authors we have seen, in fact, sets out the contours of a problem that is not to be unraveled, and that resolves itself into what seems like a contradiction. In McCarthy we encounter again and again characters taken up in events, and the problem is how we are to distinguish between the characters and the events that they enclose at the same time as they are enclosed by them. The contradiction between character and event, the human and what it undergoes, is the f lip side of a paradox: the human is both that which undergoes events, is contained within them, and that which contains events, slows them down, in effect, so that they may exist within a causal framework. In Faulkner, too, we see two sides of human temporality, history and time. But rather than being able to finally choose between them, we must be able to see the contradiction as the end point of the movement of time itself. Both historical and nonhistorical, time is the unfolding of the nonhuman within the human, the force that is never seen but alongside the vagaries of history, the very thing that unbinds the human from the history that gives it its definition. All of these novels lay out a complex line of problems, problems that ultimately point to one greater problem. Deleuze often describes problems as singularities that are themselves made up of singular points. If we trace out a line that intersects with a set of singularities we will have defined a problem and allowed it to reawaken our thinking, reorient our focus. This is how we should regard the problems that make up the problem of the nonhuman. Time and history, beauty, events, intensities—all are singular problems drawing the outline of the human. And so we can redefine the six concepts that we began with— affect, force, event, singularity, exteriority, and the virtual—as singular

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points along the line of the same problem, the problem of the human. If the human is a problem, and if problems are a set of singular points, then the human itself is the moving line that intersects singularities, singularities that we may properly call nonhuman, bearing as they do the greatest intimacy with the human as well as the greatest distance from the human conceived as a whole. I am insisting on the idea of the “problem” for a number of reasons. First of all because, in the problem, the human and the nonhuman can be held together. One need not be chosen over the other because no final choice is demanded. To be held together in the gravity of a single problem is really the only resolution that the human will have with the nonhuman. In addition, the problem of the human and the nonhuman is not meant to be subordinated to an answer but to reorient us as a question. Problems, far more than solutions, open our eyes. It is said that every solution is worthy of its problem and that every problem gets the answer that it merits. So we can talk about good and bad problems, problems that are more or less worthy. And this is truly the challenge of thinking. Not to get the “correct” answers, but to formulate the worthy problems, problems that carry their answers with them in the clarity and rightness of their form. We have all had the experience of reading books that are perfectly correct as far as they go, but that pose hackneyed, unoriginal, dull, or trivial questions. The difference between a bad problem and a good one is that the bad problem demands a solution that will quickly be recognized and validated. When we read the essay that portentously comes to the same conclusion as the last dozen essays of its kind, we are in the presence of a worn-out problem. A good problem is one that changes our vision, makes new things visible, breaks up the previous divisions, and installs new ones (which may themselves be replaced). The good problem is often the articulation of a mystery that has not been voiced, and in the setting out of the mystery, much comes to us, not as answers, but as singular points of the question we have posed. The nonhuman is, to me, a worthy problem for these reasons. It has received little voice—but just enough voice that it lies below the surface of much contemporary thinking. Freud, Blanchot, Deleuze, Levinas, Benjamin, while hardly ever expressing the concept (or using the term) “nonhuman,” have contributed to its crystallization by producing singular points along which the problem can unfold itself. Levinas’s “Other” who is both more than human (coming to us from a great height) and most perfectly human. Blanchot’s disaster, which lies at the heart of human experience, yet rends that experience from itself.

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Benjamin’s speculations on the affective genesis of film technique for human experience. Deleuze’s becomings, Body-without-Organs, and meaning-events. All touch the idea of the nonhuman. But what these thinkers all have in common, and a point I want to insist on, is that they are not talking of the breakdown of the human. Nor am I, in speaking of the nonhuman, talking about a kind of dissipation of the human into its constituent elements or forces. When we are finished talking about the nonhuman, the human is still standing before us. It has not been dispersed, has not been turned into a set of hydraulic forces, has not been turned into blood and earth. It stands before us. Encompassing events and taken up into events, it stands before us. Intersected by affects and forces, it stands before us. In its singularity and made up of singular points, it stands before us. Actual or virtual, as interiority or as a fold in exteriority, it stands before us. The nonhuman is only ever at work where the human is constituted; previous to that it has no meaning, no ethic. And this is perhaps the greatest paradox of all. The nonhuman is what we can value in the human, what moves and changes us in our encounter with it, what makes us say “beauty,” “freedom,” “intensity,” “good,” but is, taken in itself, none of these things. It is only when we see the human as more than itself that we see the workings of the nonhuman—and here perhaps we have a useful description of the human: “that which must be more than itself.” If we are unworthy of this encounter with the human that stands before us, if we are willing to merely break the human into elements, let it blow away on the wind, then it is an ironclad guarantee that these elements will become instruments in the exploitation or the demonization of humans. Affect, force, singularity, exteriority, when wrested from their intimacy with the human can be made to serve any purpose. When the worker is broken down into the forces she embodies, when the citizen is broken down into the instincts that sustain him, when the body is broken down into its constituent organs, manipulation and violence are not far behind. This is what we might call the paradox of mutual presupposition. The human and the nonhuman happen simultaneously. There cannot be first one then the other. We might emphasize one or the other, we might even insist on their difference, but never on their separation. Characters are as real as they have ever been; historical moments are still as determining, still as crucial. The nonhuman is not a deliberate turning away from the human. But those very questions that we consider the most historical, the most personal, are questions that arise from what exceeds the historical moment, what goes beyond the personality.

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How do historical moments change? How can they be recast or even redeemed? What is it in character that allows for radical breaks from the past? Why does a man wake up suddenly and realize his life has broken in two (as in Fitzgerald’s “The Crack Up” and Lukac’s tragic figure)? What allows a person to act as if occupied by something greater? How does a human fit herself into time? In order to ask these questions we must hold together the human that we ask them of and the nonhuman that makes of the human (human history, human character) a mystery, a problem. For all of these reasons, we must recast our understanding of novels, seeing some old ideas in a new light. The novel is, as I have said, about the human. It is endowed with the power of rendering both an historical moment and an autonomous human character. It lays out a world and makes it visible to us, and in so doing makes our own world visible again. The novel is particularly good at rendering the world to us in a familiar way. We might contrast the novel’s familiarity with what the Russian formalists have called the “estrangement” of poetry. The goal of poetry, for the formalists, is to render the world strange, jar our normal perception. Poetry makes us to some extent strangers in the world. The novel may do the same thing, but it does so in a much more roundabout way, and its detour is what differentiates it. The novel can only estrange by first passing through the familiar. (And I am aware that novels can be experimental. The worlds of Robbe-Grillet or Joyce seem to give us no purchase in the familiar—but I do not want to provide a definition of the novel that would exclude experimental novels. My project is not definitive.) Freud, in his essay “The Uncanny,” gives a special position to the literary expression of the uncanny. If the writer creates a world in which fairies, demons, spirits can appear and take part in the action, their effect on us is not uncanny, since they belong to the imaginative world of the author. But, Freud tells us, “The situation is altered as soon as the writer pretends to move in the world of common reality. In this case he accepts as well all the conditions operating to produce uncanny feelings in real life; and everything that would have an uncanny effect in reality has it in his story” (374). The novel is better equipped than any form to render the uncanny to us because the novel moves first through the familiar world, and anything that surges up from beyond the boundaries of the normal must be perceived within and through the normal. The unfamiliar resonates within the familiar, the nonhuman within the human. I have said that my project is not definitive. I am not trying to pose a definition of the novel that would sunder it from all the art forms

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that surround (and often penetrate it). Given how I have described the human/nonhuman relationship, such an attempt would be foolhardy. I will say that the novel—and especially the novels we have seen— renders the familiar and the unfamiliar better than any other form. It holds the familiar and the unfamiliar together in an embrace by which they are mutually defining. Lily Bart may undergo the kind of ethical adventure that no other character before her has, but she does it among a world of gossips and parties, manners and images that we have no trouble conjuring up for ourselves. Even the most bizarre of McCarthy’s characters, the three strangers of Outer Dark, speak, dress, and gesture like people we have seen or could see (though probably not at garden parties). His most homicidal madman is a simple creature whose failures and desires strike a familiar chord. Nor are we particularly taken aback by the cogitations of Quentin Compson, who seems too small for the world he occupies and so mirrors any reader who has ever felt overwhelmed by the world into which he has been thrown. These characters are not monsters or deviants. They are humans whose motivations we understand. They act according to desires that are known to us (even McCarthy’s Lester Ballard, the murderous necrophiliac, acts out of what surely is loneliness and estrangement). It is only in the context of this familiarity, of this workaday human experience, that the nonhuman can catch our ear. And it is the novel that depends upon this everydayness. And certainly I will not argue that no other art form is capable of doing this. Music of a certain kind can often create the most homely and familiar feeling of all; film renders the familiar world in a concreteness that cannot be matched. The novel’s difference, then, is a matter of degrees, and even its use of language—to end where I began—is a matter of degrees. Language is that which can both be occupied by forces and be itself a force; it is (unlike film) visible but not visual (i.e., it renders certain things seeable but is not itself seeable). Language haunts the material form of things, the structures of what can be seen and touched, but is still most pure in its written form when we try to see through it rather than look at it. Surely the novel is a special use of language. It may indeed penetrate other art forms and be penetrated by them (or may be a singular point that resonates with other singular points in music, painting, film), but nonetheless, it is spoken in language more than anything else can be. The novel, we might say, is a particular possibility of language. It bears with it language’s strange relationship to what is. It both encloses a world and is enclosed by the world it creates. It is both an instrument of the author and the place

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where the author runs up against an essential muteness. It is taken up in all the beliefs of its time, all the ideologies, but renders them silent. It is a diagram that is made up of the very forces it purports to represent. In the novel language crosses a boundary; it is crystallized at the same time as it is set loose, and this language takes the human along with it, simultaneously rendering it to us in all its completeness, yet setting loose all that is somehow more than the human totality.


WOR K S

CI T E D

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I N DE X

actuality and categorization, 31 and death, 142, 146, 154 157, 162–163 and diagram, 30 and event, 26, 85, 95, 98, 101, 110, 149 and evolution, 167 and exhaustion, 174 and force, 29 and human, 89 and incipiencies, 51 and nonexistent real, 34 and past, 151, 167 and possibility, 28, 154, 167, 190 and potentiality, 14, 25, 36, 89, 91, 137–138, 140, 142, 163, 170 and presence, 150 and problem, 176 and real, 36, 44, 151 and resemblance, 92, 140, 171, 176 and self-differing, 35 and virtual, 36, 44, 49, 50, 55, 66, 84, 90–92, 95, 97–98, 100–101, 110, 147–149, 151–152, 160, 166–168, 171–172, 175–176, 183, 196 and will, 134 in Bergson, 151, 155–156, 159, 167 in Lukacs, 37 in Sallis, 154 levels of, 88 outside of, 34

affect and animals, 25–26 and assemblage, 47 and capture, 56–57 and diagram, 30 and emotion, 26, 35, 42, 67, 70 and event, 29 and Freud, 65–66 and haecceities, 130 and language, 24–25 and nonhuman, 26, 119, 126, 139 and novel, 38, 45, 62 and personal, 67 and race, 65, 67, 71 and sensation, 47 and signifiers, 25 in Spinoza, 25, 43, 47, 66, 185 and virtuality, 41, 50, 52, 55 in Invisible Man, 69–73 in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 125 in The House of Mirth, 42, 48–49, 52–53, 55–57 Agamben, Giorgio Infancy and History, 12, 20, 76 The Coming Community, 15, 176 American Renaissance, 169, 173 animal and evolution, 3–4 and human, 139 and language, 20, 24 and nonhuman, 20, 26, 101, 109, 124 and semiotics, 20

206 Antigone, 128 and character, 12 Aristotle, and emotion, 3–4 and energeia, 14 and human, 138–139 and nonhuman, 169 and prime matter, 28–29, 44 Metaphysics, 36, 137, 170 Auerbach, Erich, 8 Austin, J.L., 25 beauty, 179–183, 187 and ethics, 193–194 and passional suspension, 50, 52 and sensation, 54 as affect, 47, 56 Benjamin, Walter, 72, 77, 89, 195–196 and human, 25 “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” 21 “On the Mimetic Faculty,” 23 Bergson, Henri and duration, 161, 164 and Faulkner, 141, 144, 146, 151 and Heidegger, 142–145, 152–154 and memory, 149 and past, 150 and possibility, 36, 91, 155–156 and virtual, 148, 150, 160, 172 Creative Evolution, 150, 159 Matter and Memory, 147, 158 bifurcation point, 49 Blanchot, Maurice, 28 and nonhuman, 195 and other, 161 and outside, 33–34 The Space of Literature, 34 Boughton, Joseph Solon Grind, 172–173 Brooks, Peter, 4–5 causality, 2, 86 and quasi-causality, 92–93, 97, 101, 108–109

Index character, 1–3, 6–19, 76, 79 and event, 100–101, 194 and interiority, 8–15 and narrative, 77–78 and novel, 19, 23–24 and potentiality, 15 and singularity, 31 in Invisible Man, 59–60, 64 in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 122, 124–125 in The House of Mirth, 45–47, 51 community, 71, 162, 178, 180, 182, 186, 188 in Blanchot, 161–162 in McCarthy, 94–102 complex, 36, 66, 181 Dasein, 17, 26, 142–143, 148, 153, 156, 161–163 death, 28, 33–34, 118, 168, 173, 182 and ethics, 160–166 and nonhuman, 34 and possibility, 142 in Heidegger, 141–147, 151–158 in McCarthy, 75, 130–133 Deleuze, Gilles A Thousand Plateaus, 121, 130 Bergsonism, 148–150, 153, 155, 160, 167, 172 Cinema 1: The Movement Image, 158 Difference and Repetition, 91, 169, 172, 175, 183 Foucault, 29 Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 43 The Logic of Sense, 26–27, 31, 60, 85, 87–89, 92, 97, 113, 193 What is Philosophy, 18, 24, 41, 45 Derrida, Jacques, 22, 24–25 desire in language, 4–5 difference/differential relationships, 24, 36, 43, 61, 71, 92, 109–111, 125, 149–150, 153, 166–167, 172, 174–178, 183–184, 197 Dillard, Annie, 16

Index divergence, 78, 92, 149, 167, 172, 176 duration, 141, 145–148, 152, 158–166 Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man, 59–73 emotion, 1–6, 15, 42–43, 47, 57, 59 and affect, 26 in Invisible Man, 62–71 ethics, 47, 49, 57, 72, 114, 143, 183, 185, 193 event, 26–29 and community, 98–101 and diagram, 30 and future/past, 87–88, 110 and homelessness, 95–96 and human/nonhuman, 61, 89, 95, 97, 99, 100–101, 106, 108–110, 114, 194, 196 in McCarthy, 75–115, 194 and language, 38 and problematic, 60, 87–88 and pure effect, 85, 88, 91 and sense, 85–88 and sibling incest, 91–92, 95 and singularity, 31–32, 39, 87, 89, 91, 110 and virtual, 36, 56, 90, 92, 97, 101, 103, 110 experience, 6, 8–15, 76 and event, 28–29, 44 Faulkner, William, 38, 118, 140 Absalom, Absalom!, 137–168 force, 17, 22, 24–30, 32, 34–39, 43–45, 66–67, 72, 100, 125, 127, 135, 138, 168, 172, 196, 199 Forster, E.M., 2, 7 Foucault, Michel, 30, 33, 97 Freud, Sigmund, 4, 16, 17, 195 and affect, 65–66 “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” 7 “The Uncanny,” 197 future, 37, 86–87, 96 and creativity, 151, 159 and Dasein, 147, 153

207

and event, 88, 92 and other, 146 and past, 100–101, 109–110, 141, 147, 150, 152, 156 and possibility, 142 indeterminate, 161 open, 165, 190 Gardner, John, 2–3, 14 God and humanism, 17, 21 as demon, 38 death of, 2 in McCarthy, 112–114 in Spinoza, 43, 66, 189 Grey, Zane Riders of the Purple Sage, 177–182 Guattari, Felix, 20, 75, 121, 124, 127, 130 Hardy, Thomas, 102, 130 Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 117–126 Hawthorne, Nathaniel House of the Seven Gables, 169–174 Heidegger, Martin and Bergson, 152–155 and death, 143–145, 147, 153–154, 156–158, 161–163, 166 and language, 22 and moods, 43 and possibility, 141–142 Being and Time, 43, 142, 153–154, 156 Dasein, 17, 26, 142, 162–163 The Concept of Time, 142, 156 history, 38, 146–147, 150, 168 and affect, 65, 71 and event, 73, 115 and singularity, 88, 89 and time, 140, 165 in Invisible Man, 61–64, 67–68, 70–73 homelessness, 28, 95–96, 101 Homer, 1 and Achilles, 6, 11–12 human, 1–11, 15–26, 28, 32, 35–39 and affect, 66–67 and Bergson, 146–147

208 human—Continued and event, 87, 89–90, 99, 101 and madness, 97 and morality, 125 and narrative, 76–77 and nature, 105 and plane of consistency, 56 and potential, 137–141, 170 and temporality, 157–158, 165 and Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 102 and The House of Mirth, 42 and values, 77–78, 138–139 and virtual fictions, 103 as problem, 87 as trap, 138 individuality, 8–11, 15, 17, 30–32, 34, 67, 71, 121, 123, 147, 159, 165 and ideology, 65 inwardness, 6–11, 46 James, Henry, 11, 13 Kundera, Milan, 11–12 Lacan, Jacques, 4, 5, 17–18, 131 Language and affect, 24–25, 42 and difference, 175 and event, 27 and force, 22, 38, 198 and Heidegger, 22 and human, 16–18, 25, 30 and literature, 1, 5, 9, 16, 18–19, 23, 30, 32–33, 37–38, 127, 199 and nonhuman, 20–21, 31 and revelation, 21 and sense, 86 and signification, 20–21, 77 and virtual, 172 Levinas, Emmanuel, 33–34 and Bergson, 161 and human, 35, 195 Totality and Infinity, 34 Levy, Pierre, 36, 160

Index Lukacs, George, 14, and potential, 15, 37 Lyotard, J.F., and inhuman, 138 meaning, 3, 11, 20, 30, 77, 109, 163, 189, 196 and human, 3, 16–17, 76–77, 91 and narrative, 15–16 McCarthy, Cormac Blood Meridian, 118–121, 126–135 Child of God, 96–101 Cities of the Plain, 143, 186–187, 189 Outer Dark, 79–82, 85, 92–96 Suttree, 84 The Crossing, 83–84, 110–115, 170, 183–190 The Orchard Keeper, 78–79, 101–109 mapping, 47, 49, 183–185, 190 mass and class, 68, 71 morality, 95, in Hardy, 117–118 in McCarthy, 121–123, 127, 129, 134–135 and ontology, 183, 185, 188 mythology, 97, 109 narrative, 5, 6, 8, 12, 15–16, 49, 77–85, 90, 101–106, 109–110, 182–183, 188–191 nonhuman and event, 101, 103, 108, 109 and language, 20–23, 38 and relationship to human, 23–28, 66–67, 105–106, 109–110, 115, 119, 121, 125, 138–139, 158, 172, 193–199 novel and human, 1–19, 23–26, 35–38 ontology, 20, 123, 126, 135, 142–144, 147, 154, 155, 157, 160–162, 179, 190–191 and narrative, 183–184 outside, 21, 29–35, 38, 83, 158, 161

Index paradox, 27, 80, 85, 88–89, 104, 151, 181, 189, 193, 194, 196 passional regime, 123 passional suspension, 50–52 personal, 11–12, 23, 35, 42, 45–48, 53, 56, 59–60, 62, 64–68, 71, 113, 121, 123, 138–139, 159, 196 and impersonal, 28, 31–32, 38, 61, 72, 87, 124, 134 plane of consistency/plane of composition, 45, 56–58, 122, 130, 133, 135 plot, 2–3, 5 potentiality and actuality, 91, 134, 171, 174 and affect, 26 and character, 14–15 and event, 35, 97 and genre, 177 and Hawthorne, 174 and human, 23, 67, 89, 103, 137–138, 140 and narrative, 84, 102–103, 109–110 and retrospective projection, 91 and virtuality, 52, 101, 147, 169–170, 175, 178 in Agamben, 15 in Aristotle, 36, 137–140, 170–171 in Heidegger, 142, 156 in Lukacs, 14–15, 37 in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 102 problematic, 59–60, 62, 64, 71, 88, 179, 186, 188, 191 and virtual, 36–37, 170, 176–177, 180–183, 190 race, 61–62, 73 and history, 63–65, 67, 70–72 and personal, 64 resemblance and actuality, 48 and potentiality, 36, 171, 190 Saussure, Ferdinand, 175 semiotics, 20–22, 38

209

Shaviro, Steven and Heidegger, 154 and Blood Meridian, 118, 121, 122–123, 127, 129–130, 133–134 sibling incest, 91–92 singularity and event, 31, 87–89, 101, 196 and example, 176 and human, 32, 103, 106 and individual, 30–31 and morality, 121, 125, 127, 135 and nonhuman, 41, 92, 119, 195 and personal, 31, 61 and problem, 194 and Spinoza, 66 and virtual, 103, 177–178 in The House of Mirth, 42, 56 Spinoza, Baruch, 4, 25, 47, 189 and affect, 43–44, 65–66 Ethics, 4, 43, 65 theology, 2, 23, 111 time, 37, 49, 51, 52, 56, 76–77, 87, 90, 100–101, 115, 140–147, 151–153, 157–159, 164–167, 171, 194, 197, 199 and Heidegger, 43, 154, 156 and virtual, 140, 149, 168 unconscious, 5, 7, 30, 32, 66, 86, 91, 97 virtuality and actualization, 55, 92, 97, 100, 109, 149, 151, 167, 172, 190 and affect, 50–52, 54 and beauty, 47 and bifurcation point, 49 and differentiation, 109, 152, 167–168, 174–176 and event, 91, 95, 100, 101, 103, 110 and human, 35, 106, 172 and potential, 35–38, 52, 84, 137, 140, 147, 154, 171, 174, 178

210 virtuality—Continued and problem, 92, 160, 175, 177, 179 and singular, 175, 177 and transformation, 38, 57, 169, 170, 183 in Bergson, 145–148, 151, 158

Index Watt, Ian, 6, 8–10 western genre, 176–179, 183, 186 Wharton, Edith The House of Mirth 41–58 Zizek, Slavoj, 131, 133

Deleuze and American Literature: Affect and Virtuality in Faulkner, Wharton, Ellison, and McCarthy

Deleuze and Literature

Faulkner and Postmodernism (Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series)

Correspondence and american literature

Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

Deleuze and History (Deleuze Connections)

Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture (No. 92))

Faulkner: masks and metaphors

Deleuze and Ethics (Deleuze Connections)

Deleuze and Performance (Deleuze Connections)

Deleuze and Performance (Deleuze Connections)

Deleuze and Space (Deleuze Connections)

Global Faulkner (Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series)

Faulkner and Whiteness

Faulkner and gender

Gilles Deleuze: Travels in Literature

Faulkner at 100: Retrospect and Prospect : Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1997

Faulkner and Material Culture (Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series)

Overtones of Opera in American Literature from Whitman to Wharton

Race, Work, and Desire in American Literature, 1860-1930 (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

Faulkner and His Contemporaries

Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature

Reference Works in British and American Literature

A House Undivided: Domesticity and Community in American Literature (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature (Wisconsin Studies in Classics)

Democracy, Revolution, and Monarchism in Early American Literature (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

Faulkner in cultural context: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1995

Deleuze and American Literature: Affect and Virtuality in Faulkner, Wharton, Ellison, and McCarthy

Deleuze and Literature

Faulkner and Postmodernism (Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series)

Correspondence and american literature

Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

Deleuze and History (Deleuze Connections)

Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture (No. 92))

Faulkner: masks and metaphors

Deleuze and Ethics (Deleuze Connections)

Deleuze and Performance (Deleuze Connections)

Deleuze and Performance (Deleuze Connections)

Deleuze and Space (Deleuze Connections)

Global Faulkner (Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series)

Faulkner and Whiteness

Faulkner and gender

Gilles Deleuze: Travels in Literature

Faulkner at 100: Retrospect and Prospect : Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1997

Faulkner and Material Culture (Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series)

Overtones of Opera in American Literature from Whitman to Wharton

Race, Work, and Desire in American Literature, 1860-1930 (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

Faulkner and His Contemporaries

Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature

Reference Works in British and American Literature

A House Undivided: Domesticity and Community in American Literature (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature (Wisconsin Studies in Classics)

Democracy, Revolution, and Monarchism in Early American Literature (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

Faulkner in cultural context: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1995

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