Deleuze in Children's Literature

Abstract

Gilles Deleuze proposed changing the primary question that we ask of a book from an interpretive to a pragmatic one—from “What does it mean?” to “Does it work and, if so, how?” It is with this latter question in mind that Deleuze called attention to the habit of some people of reading a book twice or three times. That practice suggests that we do not read books to acquire new information; if so, one reading would be enough. We read books, Deleuze argued, to experience particular emotions (or what he called “intensities”). The experiences of fear, sorrow, happiness, nostalgia, and other intensities constructed by fiction writers are more complex and singular than the words that refer to them, and it is those experiences that we are eager to repeat. I am not sure there are many adults matching Deleuze's description of the repetitive reader (though certainly there are many repetitive film viewers or music listeners). I know a lot of children, however, who will read a single story twenty, fifty, or a hundred times. They are “ultra-Deleuzians,” who, despite knowing the denouement of a story, laugh or experience sadness or fear at the same moment on each reading.Unfortunately, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are the only children's books on which Deleuze himself ever commented. (He enjoyed the wordplay and the invention of nonreferential terms, such as “frumious Bandersnatch.”) In her new book, Newland explains how Deleuze saw Carroll's fictions as working. But she also expands Deleuze's undertaking by putting some of his concepts (“Aiôn,” “becoming-animal,” “rhizomes”) to work in relation to other children's books, such as Nurse Lugton's Curtain by Virginia Woolf, Contes 1, 2, 3, 4 by Eugène Ionesco, and El hombre que lo tenía todo todo todo (The Man Who Had It All All All). This last, by the Guatemalan Nobel laureate Miguel Ángel Asturias, is not translated into English, but there is a good French translation, illustrated by Deleuze's friend Jacqueline Duhême, who has published a children's book about Deleuze. The philosopher did take part in the conception of the project, though L'oiseau philosophie did not appear until shortly after he died.It is only at the end of Newland's book that we learn that Deleuze was “fond of telling children stories.” The daughters of his PhD supervisor, Maurice de Gandillac, recall him telling them around 1956, the year of Deleuze's marriage, tales of an ever more extravagant “Monsieur Idiot.” It seems that these stories were invented, even improvised, by Deleuze, but the title brings irresistibly to mind the series Mr. Men, written by Roger Hargreaves. Deleuze's stories could not have been taken from that series, since the first book, Mr. Tickle, appeared only in 1971. Still, even if a Mr. Idiot never shows up in the Mr. Men series, there are similar characters: Mr. Nonsense, Mr. Nosey, Mr. Mischief, Mr. Funny, Mr. Muddle, Mr. Forgetful, Little Miss Contrary, Little Miss Stubborn, Little Miss Dotty. . . . That series, I believe, would appeal to a Deleuzian philosopher. Children's books that show a drawing corresponding to a word (“this is a car”) induce a referential understanding of words, but Hargreaves wanted to explain to his child, Adam, words that could not be designated indexically. To explain a concept like “nonsense” or “contrary,” one image is not enough; a whole story must be invented. In that case, language is not merely referential but expressive, since it produces, or induces us to invent, new characters and situations. Hargreaves's series, moreover, makes the Deleuzian notion of the “conceptual character” interestingly problematic. An analysis of Mr. Men along these lines, fully realized, would constitute another case of a “Deleuzian reading of children's literature” and demonstrate yet once more the richness of the approach put forward by Newland.