Winter 1997
Volume 23, Number 2

To write is not to recount one's memories and voyages, one's loves and griefs, one's dreams and phantasms. It is the same thing to sin through an excess of reality as through an excess of the imagination. In both cases it is the eternal daddy-mommy, an Oedipal structure that is projected onto the real or introjected into the imaginary. In this infantile conception of literature, what we seek at the end of the voyage, or at the heart of a dream, is a father. One writes for one's father-mother. Marthe Robert has pushed this infantilization or "psychoanalization" of literature to an extreme, leaving the novelist no other choice than that of the Bastard or the Foundling.5 Even becoming-animal is not safe from an Oedipal reduction of the type "my cat, my dog." As Lawrence says, "if I am a giraffe, and the ordinary Englishmen who write about me ... are nice, well-behaved dogs, there it is, the animals are different.... The animal I am you instinctively dislike."6 As a general rule, fantasies simply treat the indefinite as a mask for a personal or a possessive: "a child is being beaten" is quickly transformed into "my father beat me." But literature takes the opposite path and exists only when it discovers beneath apparent persons the power of an impersonal--which is not a generality but a singularity at the highest point: a man, a woman, a beast, a stomach, a child.... It is not the first two persons that function as the condition for literary enunciation; literature begins only when a third person is born in us that strips us of the power to say "I" (Blanchot's "neuter").7 Of course, literary characters are perfectly individuated and are neither vague nor general, but all their individual traits elevate them to a vision that carries them off in an indefinite, like a becoming that is too powerful for them: Ahab and the vision of Moby Dick. The Miser is not a type, but on the contrary his individual traits (to love a young woman, and so on) make him accede to a vision: he sees gold in such a way that he is sent racing along a witch's line where he gains the power of the indefinite--a miser ..., some gold, more gold.... There is no literature without fabulation, but, as Henri Bergson was able to see, fabulation--the fabulating function--does not consist in imagining or projecting an ego. Rather, it attains these visions, it raises itself to these becomings and powers.

5. See Marthe Robert, Roman des origines et origines du roman (Paris, 1972); trans. Sacha Rabinovitch, under the title Origins of the Novel (Bloomington, Ind., 1980).

6. D. H. Lawrence, letter to John Middleton Murry, 20 May 1929, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton, 7 vols. (Cambridge, 1993), 7:294.

7. See Maurice Blanchot, La Part du feu (Paris, 1949), pp. 29-30; trans. Charlotte Mandell, under the title The Work of Fire (Stanford, Calif., 1995), pp. 21Ü22. "Something happens to [the characters] that they can only recapture by relinquishing their power to say 'I'" (Blanchot, L'Entretien infini [1963; Paris, 1992], pp. 563Ü64; trans. Susan Hanson, under the title The Infinite Conversation [Minneapolis, 1993], pp. 384Ü85). Literature here seems to refute the linguistic conception, which finds in shifters, and notably in the two first persons, the very condition of enunciation.

Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) was professor of philosophy at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-St. Denis). His books include Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), Difference and Repetition (1968), and, with Félix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972, 1980). This article is taken from his final book, Essays Critical and Clinical (1993), a translation of which is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press. Daniel W. Smith is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at the University of Chicago. He has translated Deleuze's Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation (1991) and Pierre Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (forthcoming). Michael A. Greco is a photographer and freelance translator based in Paris.