Deleuze, Style and Literature

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Deleuze, Style and Literature

John Hughes Version of record first published: 29 Nov 2010.
To cite this article: John Hughes (2010): Deleuze, Style and Literature, Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 21:4, 269-284 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2010.523616
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Literature Interpretation Theory, 21:269284, 2010 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1043-6928 print=1545-5866 online DOI: 10.1080/10436928.2010.523616

JOHN HUGHES
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This piece examines the uses of Gilles Deleuzes formulations of literary style for literary theory, and for close reading. The first part draws out the recurrent features of Deleuzes discussions, across a range of literary and philosophical writings throughout his long career. This necessarily involves my throwing the net wide, and referencing the manifold (philosophical and literary) sources and applications of Deleuzes concept of style. Notwithstanding this range of reference, however, the aim is to emphasize the underlying consistency and cogency of Deleuzes identification of style as the means of a writers original vision. As such, style entails both ethical and political critique, and releases new possibilities of individuation and becoming. The second main and more extended part of the piece explores the literary critical uses of Deleuzes ideas in relation to the stylistic and affective features of two representative texts by writers about whom Deleuze made suggestive, if elliptical, comments. These works are James Joyces early story, The Dead, and Charlotte Brontes novel, Villette. Again, the diversity of the sources is an important part of the point here, since the differences between these texts allows for an illustration of the scope (in cases of close reading, alert to the nuances and specificities of actual texts) of what might otherwise seem schematic or abstract in Deleuzes account. In this way, also, the readings allow one to revisit and emphasize again the underlying consistency, as well as versatility and fertility, of Deleuzes engagement with the idea of literary style.
I
Style was a lifetime preoccupation for Deleuze, consistently conceived as the means whereby creative and diagnostic powers of mind could intervene against culturally oppressive fictions of subjectivity. Literary art, as the activity that discloses and interprets the signs of existing subjection, was also the activity that emits the signs of new collectives: [h]ealth as literature, as
John Hughes is a Reader in English at the University of Gloucestershire. He has published widely on the literature of the long nineteenth century (particularly Hardy, Tennyson, and Wordsworth), and on literary theory. 269
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writing, consists in inventing a people who is missing (Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical 4). The ambition of Deleuzes late critique et clinique project represents an important culmination of this thinking about the entwinement of literary style with a political therapeutics. To stage a preliminary discussion of style as a culturally diagnostic and inventive tool in Deleuzes work, it is necessary to take up the question that is common to Deleuzes stylistic interrogationswhether of Spinoza or Nietzsche, or Proust or Kafka. How does a writer force openings within subjectivity and representation, dislocating mind from what is recognizable? How does he or she create what Deleuze calls a line of flight, whereby an experimental practice of literature brings about a qualitative shift in sensibility and thought, and makes available new percepts and affects, new passages of desire? For the purposes of this discussion, it is first necessary to acknowledge how central the imbrication of the literary-stylistic and the philosophical was for Deleuze. His earliest writing on Hume in 1953 turned on an empiricist crux in Humes depiction of the imaginative origins, the fictive armature, of subjectivity and society. Hume offered a sort of science-fiction universe avant la letter (Deleuze, Pure Immanence 35). Again, in writing of Nietzsche as the thinker of ethical critique and transvaluation, Deleuzes reading identified how thought for his predecessor was itself an important movement, and transmitted through figurative and stylistic means. So the poem and aphorism are essential modes of ethical interpretation, diagnostic keys to the dark chambers of human motivation:
Only the aphorism is capable of articulating sense, the aphorism is interpretation and the art of interpretation. In the same way the poem is evaluation and the art of evaluating, it articulates values. (Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy 31)
For Deleuzes Proust, the artists intelligence labors on the signs of love, art, society, or desire to extract the ideal significances enveloped within their material surface, and style is the medium through which a writer transmits his or her essentially different, and original, view of the world. Deleuzes own conception of style drew strongly on Prousts notion of art, elaborated through the meditations on Elstir, Bergotte, and Vinteuil in A lombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. Style is the capacity, Proust writes, by which a writer reveals this unknown quality of an unique world, and by which every great writer seems so different from the rest and gives us so strongly that sensation of individuality for which we seek in vain in our everyday existence (Proust 156). With Spinoza, too, the ethically liberating power of his thought is inseparable from his stylistic means,
The Ethics is a book written twice simultaneously: once in the continuous stream of definitions, propositions, demonstrations, and corollaries, which develop the great speculative themes with all the rigors of the
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mind; another time in the broken chain of scholia, a discontinuous volcanic line, a second version, underneath the first, expressing all the angers of the heart and setting forth the practical theses of denunciation and liberation. (Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy 29)
Pursuing such insights, then, ultimately involved Deleuze moving the concept of style to center stage, as an ethical and political category in literature. Particularly in Essays Critical and Clinical style functions crucially in the interests of health, effectively to condense, express, and displace culturally invested symptoms of thought and feeling. In relation to literature, Deleuzes critique et clinique thinking encompasses, as Daniel W. Smith lucidly elaborates, equivalents to the medical concepts of a symptomatology that works on the signs of a disease, the etiology that analyze its conditions, and the prognostic and therapeutic methods that contribute to treatment:
In the first edition of Proust and Signs (1964), Deleuze interprets A la recherche du temps perdu as a symptomatology of various worlds of signs that mobilize the involuntary and the unconscious (the world of love, the social world, the material world, and the world of art, which comes to transform all the others). Even in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari show how Kafkas work provided a symptomatological diagnosis of the diabolical powers of the future (capitalism, bureaucracy, fascism, Stalinism) that were knocking at the door. (Smith, xix)
Pathology and its symptoms are produced by art, by a fictive work that constitutes an impersonal, individuating perspective in passages of writing, according to the singular arrangements, the particular constellations, of percepts, affects, signs, that the writer fashions. In the 1965 essay, Nietzsche, Deleuze wrote of the revivifying aspects of style,
Illness is not a motive for a thinking subject, nor is it an object for thought: it constitutes, rather, a secret intersubjectivity at the heart of a single individual. Illness as an evaluation of health, health as an evaluation of illness, such is the reversal, the shift in perspective that Nietzsche saw as the crux of his method and his calling for a transmutation of values. Despite appearances, however, there is no reciprocity between the two points of view, the two evaluations. Thus movement from health to sickness, from sickness to health, if only as an idea, this very mobility is the sign of superior health; this very mobility, this lightness in movement, is the sign of great health. (Deleuze, Pure Immanence 58)
Art is a potentially therapeutic dimension in which an intersubjective oscillation between health and sickness becomes possible and effective.1
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On one level, this corresponds to the commonplace notion that raising a symptom to expression is a means of therapy, according to the Freudian logic (in the earlier writing on melancholy), often cited by Deleuze, that there is a repetition of the symptom that is no longer simply a repetition by the symptom. In Difference and Repetition, this becomes construed as producing a scenario in which healing, as a function of transference and repetition, rather than merely a making-conscious, can take place:
We are not, therefore, healed by simple anamnesis, any more than we are made ill by amnesia. Here as elsewhere, becoming conscious counts for little. The more theatrical and dramatic operation by which healing takes place or does not take place has a name: transference. Now transference is still repetition: above all it is repetition. If repetition makes us ill, it also heals us; if it enchains and destroys us, it also frees us, testifying in both cases to its demonic power. All cure is a voyage to the bottom of repetition. (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 19)
In what follows, though, my interest is not to expound further Deleuzes notions of style so much as to explore what the literary critic can do with them, and how they affect him or her. Accordingly, as the discussion steers away also from exegetical discussions, it also takes as points of departure Deleuzes suggestive commentsmore or less made in passingabout the two writers on whom I have chosen to concentrate: James Joyce, and Char . The challenge, as I see it, is to avoid applying Deleuzes ideas lotte Bronte schematically (while also taking a lead from them), in engaging closely with the stylistic features, the nuances and narrative scenarios, of imaginative writing. I take Deleuzes comment in each case as a rubric, in examining how style, for these writers, condenses within its own figurations an original view of the world, one coextensive with the vitality, and the powers of the virtual, that pass through the words. As the remarks about transference cited above may suggest, the connections between style and symptom are themselves inseparable from the question as to what the text does to the reader through style. As a way of approaching this, it is worth briefly underlining the force of Deleuzes own style. In the following passage from Dialogues, Deleuze speaks of the links between style and health. His passage itself enacts the larger vitalistic theme of the paragraph (Life is like that too):
It is strange how great thinkers have a fragile personal life, an uncertain health, at the same time as they carry life to the state of absolute power or of Great Health. These are not people, but the figure of their own combination. Charm and style are poor words; we should find others, replace them. Charm gives life a non-personal power, above individuals; at the same time, style gives writing an external end which goes beyond what is written. (Deleuze and Parnet 4)
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This urgency of style is worth remarking. The translation catches features all the more evident in the French, where rhythmical and reiterative motifs of sound and phrasing are bound up with the passages unfolding wave effect, and an intonation alert to its own multiplying discriminations. Syntactically, as throughout the larger passage, an insistent parataxis is the dynamo of a writing that differentiates its themes through anaphoric insistence:
Life is not your history . . . It is what makes people . . . It is a throw of the dice which necessarily wins . . . It is strange . . . Charm gives life La vie, ce nest pas votre histoire . . . Cest ce qui fait saisir les person s ne cessariment vainqueuer . . . Cest curnes . . . Cest un coup de de ` la fois que le charme donne a ` la vie . . . . ieux . . . Cest a
This relation of terms through echoic and rhythmical features, as the topic diversifies, is replicated in manifold ways in the passage. The syntax bifurcates, and ramifies serially. It multiplies clauses, phrases, words, and sonic elements in parallel:
a fragile personal life, an uncertain health, absolute power or of Great tre ` s incertaine . . . de Health=une vie personnelle fragile, une sante . (Deleuze and Parnet, puissance absolue ou de grande Sante Dialogues 12)
Though spoken, and incorporating incidental effects of the colloquial, this is a language of disciplined and successive reformulation, and dependent throughout on intense concentration and invention. Putting it another way, this style depends on its own exemplary powers of self-differentiation and self-adjustment, rather than marshalling the hypotactic devices of a more purely rational, synoptic exposition. Thus, the following words could apply to Deleuzes own prose: Style in a great writer, is always a style of life too, not anything at all personal, but inventing a possibility of life, a way of existing (Deleuze, Negotiations: 19721990 100). Deleuzes own writing brings about enlargements and shifts in our mode of being, a movement away from the self mired in habitual and oppressive social fictions of identity.
II
Turning to James Joyce, as the first of the literary writers to discuss here, Deleuzes comments on him in The Logic of Sense, or Difference and Repetition recurrently bear on the power of affirming chaos in Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. Deleuzes Joyce is breathing a Nietzschean air,
There is a point where Joyce is Nietzschean when he shows the vicus of recirculation can not affect and cause a chaosmos to revolve. To the
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coherence of representation, the eternal return substitutes something else entirelyits own chaodyssey (chao-errance). (Deleuze, The Logic of Sense 264)
These abstract comments I take as a rubric for the discussion of my first literary example: James Joyces story, The Dead, which has long been acknowledged to be itself a kind of transitional text. It was added to the original version of Dubliners before publication, but written after Joyce and his wife Nora had already decisively embarked for Europe in 1904. As we shall see, it also crucially bore within itself stylistic transitions that make it prefigure Joyces subsequent work with all its stylistic invention, metamorphic brio, and virtuousity. The departure from Dublin, moreover, as Joyce realized, was a form of exile, given the hostility unleashed against him by the first readers of Dubliners. Stylistically, the instrument by which Joyce unsparingly dissected the monstrously perverse and inhuman politico-religious culture of Dublin was a signature deadbeat naturalism. The style, seemingly as limited and featureless as the drab streets that the text repeatedly circuits, can seem itself a figure of ideological oppression, the symptom of Dublins captive spirit. Critique is implicit within each story, flowinglike a darkly purposive riverbeneath the seemingly flat-footed, commonplace, surface of the prose. Critique is evident more openly, though, in the debased epiphany with which each story ends, as it culminates in the revelation for character or reader of Dublins mechanisms for thwarting life.2 The final full stop in each tale is that of a death sentence, registering the citys endless power for imprisoning, curtailing, and extinguishing any creative or sympathetic tendency. In such ways, technically speaking, Joyces visionpositively diabolic, even secretly hilarious, in its unrelenting forensic purposetakes as its mask an impassive stylistic indirection. An example of this stylistic viewpoint can be seen at the beginning of The Dead. Claire Colebrook, in a suggestive, brief discussion of Dubliners, points out that the celebrated opening of The Dead swiftly shifts into free -bound indirect narration. Therein Joyce both inhabits and analyzes the cliche sensibility of Lily, the servant, whose words mingle with those of the narrator:
Lily, the caretakers daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat than the wheezy hall-door bell clanged again and she had to scamper along the bare hallway to let in another guest. It was well for her she had not to attend to the ladies also. (Joyce 173)
Though the passage is broadly a sympathetic one, there is a comic crease in the writing, and this mode is effectively representative of the stylistic purposes of the rest of the collection, as Joyce uses the resources of his style
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to build up an unrelenting interconnecting depiction of the captives of Dublin ideology. As Colebrook incisively puts it of this case, [f]ree indirect style repeats the nonsense or noise of everyday language (Colebrook 113). In The Dead the storys theme turns on the failures of human connection. The long, main section at the party is one of attempted, if forced and precarious, conviviality. Here the desire to connect is subject to endless excruciating short-circuiting as the characters flounder socially, betrayed by alcohol, or their fixations, resentments, or anxieties. Gabriel, who soon becomes the central figure, condenses this tendency in the story: his vanities and presumptions are exposed and played out through a capacity for mortifying faux pas. So far, everything is all too recognizable. Yet, as the narrative shifts to its close, the writing becomes far more indeterminate. As we read on, the registration of Gabriel, and of other characters, takes on a meditative depth and spaciousness that is missing elsewhere in the collection. Thus, the aunts, Julia and Kate, become less satiric targets than enigmatic centers of sympathy. They are dignified toward the close by Gabriels gathering awareness of their proximity to the death that awaits them, an anticipation of the expansions of perspective in the storys own ending. The sense of them considered sub specie aeternitas brings to mind specifically here Deleuzes discussion of the solicitude incited in Lizzie Hexam and Jenny Wren by Eugene Wrayburns near fatal injuries in Our Mutual Friend,
Between his life and his death, there is a moment that is only that of a life playing with death. The life of the individual gives way to an impersonal and yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from the accidents of internal and external life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens: a Homo tantum with whom everyone empathizes and who attains a sort of beatitude. It is a haecceity no longer of individuation but of singularization . . . (Deleuze, Pure Immanence 2829)
Of course, within The Dead, Grettas confession is the event that dislocates the story and precipitates Gabriels visionary sense of his aunts (the aunts do not themselves produce it). However, the difference in his vision of them is an important index and effect, or sign, of the decisive alteration that comes to take place in his sensibility, and that finds itself in a stylistic shift that occurs by the end of the story. Through this, Joyces tale takes on its own sense of what Deleuze refers to as pure immanence, of life uncoupled from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens. Inconsequentialitya social principle in the partys comedy of manners is transmuted as the story presses to a close into a new and profound, potentially tragic, sense of existence. What falls over the story is a sense of lost connection, and of loss itselfnow uncoupled from the social or personal. The end of the story releases a tragic perspective bound up with
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an affirmative sense of immanence, the sense that life involves destruction and loss, but that it is also renewed at every instant, outside of what human beings can control by knowledge or will. As the story closes, it erases its own presumptions to significance in a white-out in which life and death intermingle like snow and darkness. Grettas revelation to Gabriel on their journey home, as I mentioned, is the key event that precipitates this shift, narratively speaking. It is a revelation that brings about a new sense of openness and estrangement between them, and that wholly disrupts both Gabriels sense of self-possession, and that eager sense of his possession of her that had developed in the cab ride home. Instead, a new value of unknowability gathers between them, and over the tale, shrouding and obscuring everything. Gretta confesses that her abstraction, earlier in the evening, on hearing the tenor Bartell DArcy sing, was caused by the revival within her of a past scene and relationship associated with his song. Years ago a young boy, Michael Furey, had sung the same song to her one night in the rain, while suffering from consumption, just prior to her departure from Galway. Gretta confesses to Gabriel that I think he died for me (Joyce 217). As the past comes back to her, so she vanishes from Gabriel, and his world and sense of self come to dissolve. He sees his wife both as a stranger, and as if for the first time. His sensibility is unable to cohere around her hair, her mouth, her breath. It is as if she is dissolving, falling, and flaking away, like the falling snow,
Gabriel, leaning on his elbow, looked for a few moments unresentfully on her tangled hair and half-open mouth, listening to her deep-drawn breath. So she had had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake. It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life. He watched her while she slept as though he and she had never lived together as man and wife. (Joyce 21819)
Beyond resentment and conjugality now, a certain becoming-Gretta coincides at this point with her becoming unknowable, as they (and reader and narrator) are caught up by the mysterious resonances of a prose now given over to an eventual becoming-imperceptible.3 Self and world become unknown,
His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling. (Joyce 220)
In terms of the tales ethical drama, Gabriels metamorphic progress in these closing pages involves not least his generous turning away from himself, as he acknowledges his shortcomings, and his wifes freedom and obscurity to him. This acknowledgement is both critical (as a reading of his past whose
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failures he perceives) and therapeutic (as being thereby outside these past errors, and so open to a new kind of future based no longer on the presumptions of knowledge). The paragraph that follows, closing the tale, is one of the most celebrated in twentieth-century fiction, a wholly unpredicted piece of poetic alchemy that transmutes the previous sardonic-hilarious negativity of the tale and collection into something rich and strange. The passage has invited numerous conflicting readings, but my emphasis here is on its capacity to elude these netsand their trailing identifications of self, other, world and to trace a line of flight,
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. (Joyce 220)
There are residual traces of Gabriels voice, and of the earlier stylistic technique of free indirect speech (The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland). However, this passage posits such lowering cognitive, personal, moments in order to emphasize their redundancy, within its own rhythmical flights, dying falls, and spreading accumulations. The writing is a becoming-silence, becoming-snow, becoming-imperceptible that expands beyond Gabriels narrative because he has expanded beyond himself. The lyricism and poetry that pass through the writing here are an index of a style given over to a power of life, but also of destruction. The sublimity of the passage is at one with its writing an event, a transitional interval, in which death and life, loss and renewal, await each other. The moment is one that repeats the past without being repeated by it, and in this, the writing encompasses Gabriels awareness that he too is now one outside of mere chronology. As the snow falls (the oldest and newest thingobscuring and erasing human territories and identity), so Gabriel undergoes the last, and perhaps the first, genuine epiphany of Dubliners. It is the awareness that he, caught here in a new power of unknowing, is one both of the living and the dead. The revelation is that every moment, if it is turned to an active rejection of the past, has that power of transmutation. The power of
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transmutation anticipates a new impersonal future, even if, as the tale also implies, such revelations are transitory. The earlier connections that Deleuze drew between Joyce and Nietzsche can be revisited here, then, in that the temporal, political, and ethical force of this closing passage is one that invites a parallel with Deleuzes reading of the eternal return. The movement beyond the reactive is true for Gabrielno longer resentful, smug, self-absorbed or shamedGenerous tears filled Gabriels eyes . . . (Joyce 220). For the narrator too, the turn away from the merely satiric and condemnatory is implicit in the qualification (for the most part) that Joyce repeated when writing of his style in the collection: in a letter to his publisher, Grant Richards, in May 1906, Joyce wrote, I have written for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness (Joyce, Selected Letters 83). Meanness, as an ethical or economic value, is dispensed with at the end of this fiction that for an interval negates its own negations (to come back to Deleuzes identification of Joyces writing with Nietzsches eternal return):
Only the eternal return can complete nihilism because it makes negation a negation of reactive forces themselves . . . Active negation or active destruction is the state of strong spirits which destroy the reactive in themselves, submitting it to the test of the eternal return and submitting themselves to this test even if it entails willing their own decline . . . (Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy 70)
Finally, there is enough in the storys oscillations of moods and modes to suggest that Gabriels visionary sense of time and life, like the snow, is both transitory and real.
III
The hostility with which Dubliners was met with by critics is importantly s Villette. similar to the confusion and disdain that greeted Charlotte Bronte For Matthew Arnold, the novels depiction of a woman endlessly withdrawing to the margins of her world, prone to disguise and derangement, and grievously intent on obscuring her past and future, was the mark of a fiction of pure resentment. The novel, he declaimed, was full of hunger, rebellion s work an and rage (Arnold 201). Virginia Woolf, though, detected in Bronte imaginative principle of a more affirmative kind, in which her texts work a s writing, Woolf wrote, was passage between nature and passion. Bronte experimental, passionate, and elemental, and within it, nature was not observed accurately as Dorothy Wordsworth observed it, or painted . . . it, but seized as a power of transformation, in the need of some more powerful symbol of the vast and slumbering passions in human nature than words or actions can convey (Woolf 186). Similarly, Deleuze makes the suggestive
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designates a state of the winds more than a remark that Charlotte Bronte person (Deleuze and Parnet 89). Deleuzes statement occurs in the context of a description of how a writers name functions as a principle of individuation by hecceity, not at all by subjectivity (Deleuze and Parnet 89). There s work, but I are many passages suggested by Deleuzes words in Bronte want briefly to consider Villette, the most passionate and dislocating of all her novels. Within it, the narrator Lucy Snowe is a figure defined by her betrayal of every nineteenth-century protocol of novelistic form, by her ironic refusal of lucidity, and her cold indifference to readerly desires for recognizable forms of intimacy, subjectivity, or knowledge. It is worth probing how Villette can be seen in this context both as an analysis of dissociated, negative, emotion, as well as a text that levers open intervals in which the text can be shot through with anonymous, nonhuman, powers of life. The texts braiding of critique and therapy is marked in both its forms of expression, and of content. To take an example that bears on Deleuzes own remarks, in Chapter Four of Villette, Lucy sits with her employer, the elderly Miss Marchmont, one evening. Their relations to this point have been marked by reserve, but Lucy finds herself seized by the agonized and agonizing sounds made by the wind. Lucy remarks, in customarily enigmatic fashion, that it was a voice heard by every inmate, but translated, perhaps by only one:
I had put Miss Marchmont to bed; I sat at the fireside sewing. The wind was wailing at the windows; it had wailed all day, but, as night deepened, it took on a new tone, an accent keen, piercing, almost articulate to the ear; a plaint, piteous and disconsolate to the nerves, trilled in every gust. Oh hush! hush! I said in my disturbed mind, dropping my work, and making a vain effort to stop my ears against this subtle, searching 38) cry . . . (Bronte
The language takes on intensive features of sound that evoke the invasive wind, as its gusts work on the senses of the companions to disrupt the recognizable world, the integral identities, of self, place, and time. Lucy herself resists the subtle, searching cry of the wind because its powerful declamation solicits the expression of buried griefs too painful to own. However, as the passage develops, Miss Marchmont becomes excited by the weather and makes a confession that abolishes the restraints between herself and her companion, as well as sweeping away chronology itself. Not unlike the case of Gretta, its invasive sounds lead to an affect of pure time. The past returns to her, though here in a way that proves fateful: she dies later the same night. However, her death is a function of an overwhelming, fatal, incursion of life, occasioned by the wind that constitutes a new individuating plane of sympathy between herself and Lucy, as each becomes indistinguishable from themselves and from each other.
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I have explored more fully elsewhere in Deleuzian terms how within Villette as a whole the diagnostic repetition of painful unconscious emotions bound to the past is inseparable from a repetition of the future.4 It can be seen closely here, though, in the following passage where the physical and affective intensities of the wind disjoin the moments of the calendar, and transport Miss Marchmont back to the night of her lovers death, many years before:
Once more I see that momentI see the snow-twilight stealing through the window over which the curtain was not dropped, for I designed to watch him ride up the white walk; I see and feel the soft firelight warming me, playing on my silk dress, and fitfully showing me my own young figure in a glass. I see the moon of a calm winter night float, full, clear and cold, over the inky mass of the shrubbery, and the silvered turf of my 40) grounds . . . (Bronte
The inhuman voice of the wind creates a line of flight for Miss Marchmont as she hears her own desire and loss sounded within its wailing gusts. Similarly, Lucys language is physically, rhythmically evocative, taking on the alliterative marks and phrasal attributes of poetry:
I sat at the fireside sewing. The wind was wailing at the windows; it had wailed all day, but, as night deepened, it took on a new tone, an accent keen, piercing, almost articulate to the ear; a plaint, piteous and discon 38) solate to the nerves, trilled in every gust. (Bronte
To take one example, how could we account for the strange effects that the word trilled brings about? Physically, it takes on various attributes that make it traverse the border of expression and content: qualities of assonance, onomatopeia, and alliteration (a plaint, piteous, and disconsolate to the nerves, trilled). Beyond the words rhythmical prominence, also, the idea of a trill also itself suggests certain dislocating correspondencesan accord between sounds; a musical accord between physical material and cultural forms of expression; an accord between past and future (as resonances produce a new time of indefinite extension); an accord between the worlds of nature, the body and the spirit. These features of the word, though, are merely a small aspect of the many interrelated ways in which the passage presents a dynamic event of sympathetic connection, outside of the punctual logic of subjectivity. In the terms of Dialogues, the scene is an intermezzo that draws out involuntary responses and creates a bloc of becoming between Lucy and Miss Marchmont. In this context, the word trilled recapitulates and redoubles those poetic features of the passage that open the language to the fluctuations and becomings of time, of bodies, of sensation, and to the unformed virtualities of meaning in this most disruptive and disjoined of novels.5
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In Villette, such scenes mark a fiction that affectively surprises social fictions of the self, even as it resentfully subjects these to a derealizing and disintegrative treatment. Where Lucy herself embodies and articulates a recalcitrance to social norms, the novel itself maximizes a corresponding contempt for every device of nineteenth-century realism. This twin rejection of recognizable images of identity and good form, associated with the nineteenth-century English novel, is at work in Villette, in an extraordinary jettisoning of the ideas and norms of rational subjectivity complicit with fictional form. The explosion of realism in the text takes the form of a plot that is totally disjointed and obscure, shot through with deranged episodes, absurd coincidences, surreal, implausible interpolations, and with characters who change names and become unrecognizable to each other within a few chapters.6 One such discordant element is the narrative of the ghostly nun, a bizarre gothic thread in the text, subject to a dismissively banal resolution on the part of the narrator. Another is the notorious close of the novel that leaves the reader uncertain whether Lucys beloved returns (though the passage is full of foreboding). The dismissiveness of this, in relation to the reader, is compounded as the narrator contemptuously summarizes the later lives of minor characters. Yet another case (where the author appears intent on tearing up her novel, and her relation to the reader) is the narrative of the summer vacation where Lucy looks after the cretin. This is an episode that leads to Lucys own mental breakdown; a disintegration coterminous with the novels teetering on a vertiginous kind of self-destruction, as its central character undergoes a radical kind of psychic discordance and selfdisorientation. As recognizable forms and narratives of identity tend to fall away in the text, so the style intensifies affects and motifs of self-estrangement through the voice of its central character. Often capitalized terms like Memory and Imagination explicitly spin apart from each other. At other times, disorientation is explicitly identified with a derangement of the faculties, as if the writing inhabited a Kantian nightmare of subjective confusion:
Into the hands of Common-sense I confided the matter. Common-sense, however, was as chilled and bewildered as all my other faculties . . . when I could collect my faculties, I no longer knew where I was; 64) (Bronte
Beyond the texts expression of internally discordant powers of mind, the narrators critical function can be seen throughout. At one point, Lucy carries out a typology of different modes of being that in its way closely parallels (and predates by nearly four decades) Nietzsches analysis of the active and the reactive in On the Genealogy of Morals.7 This can be seen operating at many levels of the text, and it divides Lucy herself, who responds
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involuntarily to the fascinating, simulacral, diabolic, appearance of the actress Vashti:

I found upon her something neither of woman nor of man: in each of her eyes sat a devil. These evil forces bore her through the tragedy . . . 257) (Bronte It was a marvellous sight: a mighty revelation. 258) It was a spectacle low, horrible, immoral . . . (Bronte I have said that she does not resent her grief. No; the weakness of that word would make it a lie. To her, what hurts becomes immediately embodied: she looks on it as a thing that can be attacked, worried down, torn in shreds . . . Pain, for her, has no result in good . . . on sickness, on death itself, she looks with the eye of the rebel. Wicked, perhaps, she 248) is, but also she is strong . . . (Bronte
Vashti embodies for Lucy something like the transmutation of resentment, and a repetition of the future, a therapeutic becoming-active. In this way, the episode offers a scenario for the therapeutic intimations and potentials that recurrently punctuate and traverse this text. Finally, in examining the connections of the therapeutic and the symptomatic in the text, one can consider the episode where Lucy voyages to Belgium on The Vivid. Left alone on the deck, she passes the time in a tranquil, and even happy mood despite her awareness that 56). The episode her position was hazardous, even hopeless (Bronte is described by Lucy as one of peril, yet also of health and hope, and pleasure. She sits on the deck, enjoying the breeze, the waves, the 117). sea-birds, the quiet, yet beclouded sky, overhanging all (Bronte The sense of the passage, overhanging clouds notwithstanding, is of renewal, conveyed through the sensations and affects of invigorating power, beauty, tranquillity that pass through the scene. The comparison of this excursive affecting scene with the closing passage in The Dead could be sustained in that here, too, there is a sense of a moment whose precariousness is the mark of a time between times, in which symptom and therapy, critique and visionary intimations, are combined, like the clouds and the rainbow. In this case, though, all too quickly, like every hopeful visitation in the text, the sense of a new beginning is folded back into writing expressive of a symptom of resentment. So, the passage first dilates, almost rhapsodically, before the texts dissociable tendency reasserts itself, abruptly and curtly sinking the reader (Cancel the whole of that . . . ). Lucy describes the continent of Europe from the boat like a wide dream-land, and speaks of the sky grand with imperial promise:
. . . andgrand with imperial promise, soft with tints of enchantment strode from north to south a God-bent bow, an arch of hope.
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Cancel the whole of that, if you please, readeror rather let it stand, and draw thence a moralan alliterative, text-hand copy Day-dreams are delusions of the demon. Becoming excessively sick, I faltered down into the cabin. 57) (Bronte
From surveying the rainbow to debunking its own enchantments and throwing up in the cabinsuch is the world of Villette. However, in such oscillations, and the intensity of the text, there is also an exhilaration, secreted by style as a power of critique and vision, that is an index of that novelistic capacity of transmutation that Deleuze identified with literary style. Villette exemplifies this, as a text of enormous power in the critique it advances. The suggestion here has been that Deleuzes thought can help one conceptualize how the novel can be read as converting the critical to the therapeutic by the relentless counter-violence it marshals against nineteenth-century fictional norms, and the dehumanizing effects of nineteenth-century female subjectification complicit with them. The opacity and provisionality of the novels indeterminate ending is thus the mark of its untimely status.
NOTES
1. At this point, it is worth remarking a deep, though largely unexplored, correspondence here between Deleuzes work and that of Stanley Cavell. 2. For a reading of Dubliners that identifies it with the work of Sacher-Masoch, see Edward Brandabar. 3. Deleuzes ideas of becoming are perhaps most helpfully to be approached though a reading of Dialogues. s Villette, pp. 71126. 4. The Affective World of Charlotte Bronte 5. Clearly this could be further expanded through a discussion of Deleuze and Guattaris account of rhythm in the chapter, Of The Refrain, in A Thousand Plateaus (31050). 6. Penny Boumelha is eloquent on this last point, remarking that Villette is among the strangest of nineteenth-century novels to read. Its fictional world is strikingly unstable . . . It is peopled by name-changersvirtually all the major characters have a variety of names, as Marie Beck is also Modest Kint, or as the more conventional of the novels romantic heroes migrates between the names Graham Bretton, Dr John and Isidoreand by shape-changers, characters who apparently become unrecognisable to one another in the course of a few chapters, as Lucy does to her surrogate family, the Brettons (100). 7. The second part of my essay on Villette is concerned with developing this typology as it is evident in the temporal, psychological, dramatic, and linguistic dimensions of the text.
WORKS CITED
s: The Critical Arnold, Matthew. Letter to Mrs Foster (14 April 1853). The Bronte Heritage. Ed. Miriam Allott. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974: 201. Print. Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze on Literature. London: Routledge, 2003. Print.
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Brandabar, Edward. A Scrupulous Meanness: A Study of Joyces Early Work. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971. Print. Bronte, Charlotte. Villette. London: Penguin, 1979. Print. . London: Harvester, 1990. Print. Boumelha, Penny. Charlotte Bronte Colebrook, Claire. Gilles Deleuze. London: Routledge, 2002. Print. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. London: Athlone. 1994. Print. . Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. London: Verso, 1998. Print. . The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester, with Charles Stivale, and Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. London: Athlone, 1990. Print. . Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Athlone, 1984. Print. . Negotiations: 19721990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. Print. . Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life. Trans. Anne Boyman. New York: Zone, 2005. Print. . Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights, 1988. Print. Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Athlone, 1988. Print. . What is Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill. London: Verso, 1994. Print. Deleuze, Gilles, and Parnet, Claire. Dialogues. Paris: Flammarion, 1996. Print. . Dialogues II. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Continuum, 2006. Print. s Villette. Studies in English Hughes, John. The Affective World of Charlotte Bronte Literature 15001900 40.4 (2000): 71126. Print. Jacobus, Mary. The Buried Letter: Villette. Reading Woman. London: Methuen, 1986. 4161. Print. Joyce, James. Dubliners. London: Penguin, 1971. Print. . Selected Letters of James Joyce. Ed. Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking Press, 1975. Print. Lucas, John. Hardy Among the Poets. Critical Survey 5.2 (1993): 192201. Print. : The Self-Conceived. New York: Columbia UP, 1976. Moglen, Helen. Charlotte Bronte Print. Proust, Marcel, Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. 2. Trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and T. Kilmartin; and by A. Mayor, London: Penguin, 1989. Print. Smith, Daniel W. Introduction to Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A Greco. London: Verso, 1998. Print. Woolf, Virginia. Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Collected Essays Vol. 1. Ed. Leonard Woolf. London: Hogarth Press, 1966. Print.

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This article was downloaded by: [Mariela Burani] On: 19 February 2013, At: 20:14 Publisher: Routledge Informa

Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory