The Odorous Text: A Deleuzian Approach to Huysmans

Abstract

You are longitude and latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses between unformed particles, a set of (1) In a lengthy, key chapter devoted to the diverse modes of becoming, (2) Deleuze and Guattari are at pains to distance themselves from a schema which would differentiate between structured entities or identities on the one hand (human beings, material objects, etc.), and spatio-temporal variables on the other. In such a schema, the starting-point would be a given subject/object acting in conjunction or negotiation with the transient phenomena of space and time. For Deleuze and Guattari, however, as the above quotation illustrates, you (3) are no more individuated than is a day, a season, a climate, a wind. In pursuit of this analysis, they adduce numerous examples from art, and music, maintaining that literature and art are privileged zones in which to experience the workings of these fleeting movements or affects. This has proved to be a problematic notion for some readers. Perhaps it is not overly demanding to relate the multiple and unpredictable sounds of birds to the music of Messiaen, or the shifting lights and colours of the natural world to various forms of impressionist painting. However, is not literature prevalently an exploration of subjects/characters deploying and negotiating with affect? What is a in this context? For Deleuze and Guattari, affect is nonsubjectified in the sense that it is a pre-personal intensity which, as a mobile force, may gather up a body and allow it to pass from one experiential state to another. Thus, bodies are not so much generators of affects as assemblages formed from affects. A brief example: in Samuel Beckett's play What Where, fear in the vicinity of torture and domination forms the affect-landscape against which the transacting figures of Bam, Bem, Bim, and Bom are progressively discerned. According to Deleuze and Guattari, literature provides free play for the creation of affect precisely because it allows for the formation of impersonal forces (fear, desire, joy) which can remain immune from the stock cause-and-effect responses of quotidian existence. In everyday life, smells, sights, sounds, etc. are apprehended globally and in terms of their functionality: smell hot oil, I see a table prepared, I hear the sound of frying. Therefore, I shall soon eat dinner. In on the other hand, affect is intensive rather than extensive; it may appear in its singularity, divorced from an ordered or consistent sequence. As such, affect may be endowed with disruptive power. does not confirm a pre-existent set of suppositions or relationships--in that sense, it is nonsubjectified--but rather, it produces new and divergent movements, or devenirs [becomings]. As Claire Colebrook aptly describes in reference to Deleuze. It is the task of art to dislodge affects from their recognised and expected origins. Pinter's plays are presentations of affect precisely in those milieus where they are least expected: such as the menace or terror of marriages and bourgeois life (The Lover) or the hostility and violence of acts of charity and hospitality (The Caretaker). (4) Indeed, it is precisely the disruptive capacity of affect which Deleuze values within driving him to reject texts which are formulaic, rooted in allegory, or anchored in predetermined expectations of outcome. Instead, he turns by preference to what he calls literature, the term minor here not denoting insignificance or marginality, but, rather, attaching to writing which creates identity rather than reflecting it, and in which language remains provisional. Minor literature thus provides a site of challenge to so-called canonical or literature which assumes a majority voice. (5) This does not mean, of course, that the practitioners of such minority writing are identified by a set of shared characteristics. …