Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History

257 Pages·2010·1.15 MB·English

by  Ronald Bogue

PLATEAUS • NEW DIRECTIONS IN DELEUZE STUDIES
Series Editors Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook
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The concept of fabulation makes a late appearance in Deleuze’s career and
in only limited detail, but by tracing its connections to other concepts and
situating them within Deleuze’s general aesthetics, Bogue develops a theory D
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of fabulation which he proposes as the guiding principle of a Deleuzian L
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approach to literary narrative. U
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Fabulation, he argues, entails becoming-other, experimenting on the real, IA
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legending, and inventing a people to come, as well as an understanding of
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time informed by Deleuze’s Chronos/Aion distinction and his theory of the A
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three passive syntheses of time. In close readings of contemporary novels U
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by Zakes Mda, Arundhati Roy, Roberto Bolaño, Assia Djebar and Richard A
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Flanagan, Bogue demonstrates the usefulness of fabulation as a critical tool, I
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while exploring the problematic relationship between history and story-telling N
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which all five novelists adopt as a central thematic concern. The time of
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fabulation in these novels is shown to be a time shaped by a complex D
interplay of succession and simultaneity, amnesia and anamnesis, trauma T
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and transformation. E
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Ronald Bogue is Distinguished Research Professor of Comparative Literature C
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and Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of R
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Georgia.
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Cover image: © iStockphoto.com/Marco
Rosario Venturini Autieri
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Edinburgh University Press barcode in
22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF b
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www.euppublishing.com rg
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ISBN 978 0 7486 4131 4
Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History
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Plateaus – New Directions in Deleuze Studies
‘It’s not a matter of bringing all sorts of things together under a single
concept but rather of relating each concept to variables that explain
its mutations.’
Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations
Series Editors
Ian Buchanan, Cardiff University
Claire Colebrook, Penn State University
Editorial Advisory Board
Keith Ansell Pearson
Ronald Bogue
Constantin V. Boundas
Rosi Braidotti
Eugene Holland
Gregg Lambert
Dorothea Olkowski
Paul Patton
Daniel Smith
James Williams
Titles available in the series
Dorothea Olkowski, The Universal (In the Realm of the Sensible):
Beyond Continental Philosophy
Christian Kerslake, Immanence and the Vertigo of Philosophy:
From Kant to Deleuze
Jean-Clet Martin, Variations: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, translated
by Constantin V. Boundas and Susan Dyrkton
Simone Bignall, Postcolonial Agency: Critique and Constructivism
Miguel de Beistegui, Immanence – Deleuze and Philosophy
Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature
Ronald Bogue, Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History
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DELEUZIAN FABULATION AND
THE SCARS OF HISTORY
2
Ronald Bogue
Edinburgh University Press
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For Jarrett Hedborg,
the good brother
and illustrious founder of the Swedish-Hawaiian school of design
© Ronald Bogue, 2010
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
22 George Square, Edinburgh
www.euppublishing.com
Typeset in Sabon
by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 4131 4 (hardback)
The right of Ronald Bogue
to be identifi ed as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
1 The Concept of Fabulation 14
2 Becoming- Prophet: Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness 49
3 Becoming- Child, Becoming- Untouchable:
Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things 74
4 Becoming- Memory: Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet 108
5 Becoming- Woman, Becoming- Girl: Assia Djebar’s
So Vast the Prison 132
6 Becoming- Fish: Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish 173
Conclusion 223
Bibliography 237
Index 245
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Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to Lyndall Ryan for graciously answering ques-
tions about Tasmanian Aboriginals; to Thomas Cerbu for assistance
with Thomas d’Arcos; to Naomi Norman for sharing her expertise
on Dougga; and to Michael Burriss for reviewing the chapter on
Bolaño. Many Deleuze scholars have been supportive of this project
and enriched my understanding of the issues related to fabula-
tion, including especially Constantin Boundas, Mary Bryden, Ian
Buchanan, Gregory Flaxman, Gregg Lambert, Adrian Parr, Daniel
Smith, Charles Stivale and Doro Wiese. Many thanks as well to
Carol Macdonald at Edinburgh University Press for her interest in
the project and her invaluable assistance in seeing the book into
print.
And, as always, my enduring gratitude to Curtis, Laura, Cameron
and Svea, who have kept me company throughout the course of this
improbable line of fl ight.
vi
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Introduction
For the last twenty-fi ve years, I have been studying the philosophy
of Gilles Deleuze. In an initial effort, when Deleuze was not as well
known as he is today, I tried to provide a general introduction to
his thought and that of his frequent collaborator, Félix Guattari.
In a subsequent series of books, I offered an assessment of the rel-
evance of Deleuze and Deleuze-G uattari for understanding the arts,
especially those of music, painting, cinema and literature. In the
course of these investigations, I gradually became aware of a faint
yet persistent anti-n arrative strain in Deleuze’s thought, or at least a
predilection for disruptions of conventional narrative and a valorisa-
tion of the visual image over the verbal story. This struck me as odd,
since Deleuze wrote three brilliant books on creative writers (Proust,
Sacher-M asoch, Kafka) and frequently discussed works of literature,
many of which have a strong narrative component. I pursued this
question further in essays devoted to the concept of fabulation, the
vague outlines of which Deleuze articulated late in his career, and after
that inquiry, I felt convinced that Deleuze could be of little assistance
in the analysis of the properly narrative aspect of literature. My views
were altered, however, when I read Jay Lampert’s groundbreaking
Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History (2006), which sug-
gested a means of integrating two different theories of time found
in Deleuze: his notion of the three passive syntheses of time from
Difference and Repetition (1968); and the opposition of the times
of Chronos and Aion, fi rst voiced in The Logic of Sense (1969) and
later developed as part of his and Guattari’s pronouncements against
history in A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Lampert’s conclusion was
that, all appearances to the contrary, Deleuze and Guattari did have
a philosophy of history, and that it could best be understood through
the integration of these two temporal models. Although the problems
of history and those of narrative fi ction are not identical, the ques-
tion of the temporality of events and their recounting is common to
both domains, and Lampert’s analysis of the three passive syntheses
struck me as particularly useful in approaching the questions I had
1
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deleuzian fabulation and the scars of history
been exploring. With an expanded sense of Deleuze’s thought about
time, I returned to the concept of fabulation and saw emergent in
that concept, when combined with insights drawn from Lampert’s
work and from Deleuze-G uattari’s writings on ‘minor literature’, the
outlines of a viable Deleuzian approach to narrative.
While pursuing my interest in Deleuze over the last quarter
century, I have also been teaching courses in world literature, includ-
ing a regular offering titled Contemporary World Literature. My
objective in that course has been to examine works written (or at
least made newly available in English translation) within the decade
preceding the semester in question, and to select texts by male and
female writers from as many parts of the globe as possible. As I
have accompanied my students in this selective review of contempo-
rary world fi ction over the years, I have encountered a widespread
concern with the problem of history in writers whose themes, styles
and methods otherwise differ markedly. Whether assigned by critics
and blurb writers to the category third-w orld, magical realist, post-
colonial, realist, modernist, postmodern, feminist, or what have you,
these writers exhibited a profound concern with the myriad histori-
cal forces that have come together to shape their particular cultures.
And in most of these writers, this historical labour has entailed an
accounting of great suffering and an effort to fi nd in that suffering
the elements of a usable past – that is, a past that is true to what
happened but capable of engendering new possibilities.
As my views of fabulation began to take shape, I increasingly saw
resonances between Deleuze’s concepts and the practices of these
writers. It seemed logical, then, to test the viability of fabulation as
a critical tool by conducting analyses of some of these contemporary
narratives that grapple with the problem of history. I knew that I
wanted to deal with Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness, Arundhati
Roy’s The God of Small Things, Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet, Assia
Djebar’s So Vast the Prison, and Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book
of Fish, not only because they are extraordinary works of art by
major contemporary writers, but also because the problem of history
is explicitly thematised in all fi ve novels. But my initial plan was to
examine a larger corpus of texts that focus on history, devoting no
more than ten or twenty pages to each novel, in that way demonstrat-
ing the geographic, cultural and stylistic range of works that could
be illuminated by the concept of fabulation. Among the novels I
had hoped to include were Toni Morrison’s Paradise, Günter Grass’
Crabwalk, Sylvie Germain’s Magnus, Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are
2
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Introduction
Wearing Me Out, Haruki Murakami’s The Wind- Up Bird Chronicle,
Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Mia Couto’s
The Last Flight of the Flamingo, Ignacio Padilla’s Shadow Without
a Name, Bharati Mukherjee’s Holder of the World, and Maryse
Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. It soon became clear,
however, that the short chapter plan was not viable and I decided
to limit my study to the novels of Mda, Roy, Bolaño, Djebar and
Flanagan.
My decision was based on several considerations. First, it would be
easy enough to gesture vaguely toward a given text and cite elements
that exemplify selected aspects of fabulation, but that would provide
little evidence that fabulation signifi cantly illuminates the novel as a
whole or that the multiple components of the theoretical apparatus
function together in a meaningful manner when tested in actual criti-
cal analysis. Only a close reading of a small corpus would meet these
ends. Second, the subtle and inventive treatment of history in these
novels cannot be appreciated without familiarity with rich sets of
data specifi c to each novelist’s culture. Even well-i nformed members
of any one of the novelist’s native audience might easily be unaware
of all the historical materials the author is bringing to bear on the
work, and it seems highly unlikely that many individuals would have
expertise in the history of the nineteenth-c entury Xhosa; the Mar
Thoma Christian culture of Kerala, India; the Tlatelolco Massacre
during the UNAM occupation in Mexico and the Pinochet coup in
Chile; the discovery and decipherment of the Libyco- Berber script,
the French occupation of Algeria and the post- independence Algerian
violence of the 1990s; and the fate of convicts and Aborigines in early
nineteenth-c entury Tasmania. Hence, extensive background infor-
mation would be necessary in each analysis in order to understand
how the novelist is engaging history and how that engagement is
assimilable within the concept of fabulation. Finally, the audience of
this book would be unnecessarily restricted were it to consist solely
of readers who are intimately familiar with all fi ve novels. It could be
argued that there is no point in reading about novels one has never
read, but I believe that such is not the case, that with adequate syn-
opses, representative citations and careful descriptions of a work’s
structure, themes and style, readers can profi t from – and enjoy – an
analysis of a work they have yet to read. But of course, providing
such expository information necessarily lengthens an analysis and
further precludes the possibility of short chapters. (If those who have
read any of the novels fi nd the expository material tedious, I beg their
3
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