Chapter One: The Labors of Nomads: Introduction to Phoretic Analysis

I. "Walk into the Gap": Into the Forest of Phoresis

What we bear are our connections with the world, with each other, with the "three quarks for Muster Mark" as all Finnegans Wake. We bear (and bear with) the ricorso of intimate history that Harvey called the circulation of blood and Keats called "the Penetralium of mystery." What we bear is information, and though we may isolate systems, such as "the" cardiopulmonary or "the" linguistic, here on the ground no such isolation can exist. We are embedded, interwoven in a matrix that biologizes human communication, a situation that has been little studied by literary theorists. Interwoven, and to pull on a single thread inevitably ravels others along with it; to tell the story of the skin, for instance, inevitably invokes (t)issues of resonance, permeability, and interpenetration, all of which are subject to ambiguity and uncertainty, to "chaos."

We bear chaos by creating territories of order bounded by walls of rhythm. We confront, and sometimes defeat, chaos with our ability to make stories. With this idea, we have climbed to one of A Thousand Plateaus. From this embodied (wooly!) vista we’ll be able to survey the territory of animal narrative, not in search of types or the "how" of story, but in search of the "why," the becomingness of narrativity. This quest-narrative, this theory-making, remains open: there is no Holy Grail of positivism. Nevertheless, we will need a structured vocabulary in order to even caption sketches in the sand. So we begin by surveying the plateau itself, this "territory" described by Deleuze and Guattari.

The world is singing to itself:

A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. (A Thousand Plateaus, 311)

The image of order—shelter in a storm—out of chaos through rhythm is an ancient one, an underground stream of work songs, play songs, rhythmic euphoria and punctuation. Rhythm is territory, but what is rhythm? Rhythm here is not to be limited to the act of beating on hollow logs: rhythm is any repetitive phenomenon, what some theorists, slightly limiting the usefulness of the concept, call "information" (see further Campbell, 1982). But "information" does not tap its feet: information has a brain, but has no body: a head with wings. Bodies dwell and sustain (musical terms):

Now we are at home. But home does not preexist: it was necessary to draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile center, to organize a limited space… Sonorous or vocal components are very important: a wall of sound, or at least a wall with some sonic bricks in it… Radios and television sets are like sound walls around every household and mark territories (the neighbor complains when it gets too loud). (311)

The rhythmic ditty or the gnomic utterance may comfort or guide us by allowing us to "organize a limited space" as individuals, but it takes a chorus to found a city or build Stonehenge:

For sublime deeds like the foundation of a city or the fabrication of a golem, one draws a circle, or better yet walks in a circle as in a children’s dance, combining rhythmic vowels and consonants that correspond to the interior forces of creation as to the differentiated parts of an organism. A mistake in speed, rhythm, or harmony would be catastrophic because it would bring back the forces of chaos, destroying both creator and creation. (311)

Our plateau is not a musical landscape, but a vista from which to see the world as music. Except in music, and even there, the organizing principles of rhythm are poorly understood. Rhythm as a culturally organizing force, as a narrativizing principle, is our present landscape. Rhythm presents us with a concept of formal responsibility, an idea I borrow from Roland Barthes. The emphasis in responsibility is the call of response: "Based on hearing, listening… is the very sense of space and time" (The Responsibility of Forms, 246). From our sense of space and time "by the perception of degrees of remoteness and of regular returns of phonic stimulus" (246) we enforce a "notion of territory" (247). Sound is raw contextual material: when hunting for mates we may notice a slight punctuation in the rhythm of breathing, signaling either annoyance or arousal. Sound answers the perennial question "Should I stay or should I go?"

To bear forth our territories, to found, defend, expand them, we must attend, in the phenomenological sense of becomingness in attentive presence. That is, we create territories by listening, and attending in a state answerability (Bakhtin). Barthes writes that "We can best grasp the function of listening, insofar as territory can be essentially defined as the space of security (and, as such, as space to be defended): listening is that preliminary attention which permits intercepting whatever might disturb the territorial system…" (247).

A few things may be said about the qualities of signals that "disturb" what might be called the rhythms of the "studium." In Camera Lucida, Bathes creates narrativized territories—readings, theories—of photographs and photography based on the studium and its punctum. Studium, "which doesn’t mean, at least not immediately, ‘study,’ but application to a thing, taste for someone, a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment" (26). The studium is what Deleuze and Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus, might call a "smooth space", and it is this same smooth space that is described in metaphysical terms by the Indian philosopher Bhatrahari as the sphota. For Bhatrahari, the sphota is not created, but formally given through speech: the rhythms of speech invoke the form of the sphota, which is the meaning of which the utterance takes part. Kristeva, discussing Bhatrahari’s theory of the sphota, writes that the sphota is a totality, "‘the ontological foundation of language.’ In fact, the sphota can no longer be pronounced; it is what underlies the pronunciation and the sound of speech" (Language the Unknown, 86). This totality "appears only at the end of the articulation of all then word’s sounds,… the moment when the sounds of the morphological totality are emitted along with the meaning inherent in it" (85). Kristeva is careful to note that the theory of the sphota is closely "linked to a complex theory of the human body"; the word sphota "signifies ‘bursting, popping’", that which "gives birth to itself" (85), as words burst forth from the mouth. Bhatrahari’s "theory emerged from thinking about the real in movement, and the sphota became the minimal unity of this infinitely divisible, and because of that, transformable universe" (86). If we substitute the word "territory" for "universe" we plant our feet squarely back down on the materialistic plateau of Deleuze and Guattari. When we compare the studium with the sphota, we may see that attending to our bearings, listening for directive and invading signals, we get our first glimpse of the view from the plateau.

Returning to Barthes’ studium, we learn that this attentive gaze is what allows us to "participate in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions" (Camera Lucida, 26) in a photographic milieu, what an American linguist might call a "discourse community." "From chaos," Deleuze and Guattari write, "Milieus and Rhythms are born" into movement as "milieus… slide in relation to one another, over one another" such that each "milieu is vibratory,… a block of space-time constituted by… periodic repetition" (A Thousand Plateaus, 313). The studium is a call, the thing to which we give our attention, and we answer the call with what Deleuze and Guattari name "the refrain" and which Barthes calls the "punctum". As a force, the punctum in Barthes exhibits the same qualities as what Deleuze, Guattari, Bakhtin, and Bataille call the "centrifugal" and "centripetal." For Barthes, looking at photographs, the punctum is the "wound,… prick," or "mark made by a pointed instrument" (Camera Lucida, 26). The studium is punctuated by what Barthes elsewhere calls the "grain of the voice," a noisy interruption, as in an authorial intrusion or a musical bridge that is "a partial object" (43). Where the studium, with its sphota-like metaphysical connotations, is the stable center of the becoming territory, the punctum is an invasion of that territory.

Let us consider the example of comics to illustrate a first use of the vocabulary and ideas we have nomadically gathered from various places. The creator of the comic works in a milieu, which we can think of as the polylogical discourse community of the studium and its various punctuations. In this context, the studium approaches the idea of consciousness in that the artist’s attention is more or less intended: I am speaking of comic-making as emanating from the artist’s body as a series of repetitive acts subject to the ambiguities of punctuation, and in this, comic-making is no different from the "separate" acts that their making recombines: drawing and writing. The formal aspects of making comics, and of the printed works themselves, illuminate the ontological (psychological, cognitive) becomingness of rhythm. The territory of the comic is the page, printed or electronic. From the smooth space of the artist’s imagination (the territory of dreams, repetitive compulsions, and ambiguous heterogonies) comes the "striated space" of the panel and its gutters.

The juxtaposing of acts, of phenomena, in panels, is discussed by Scott McCloud in his Understanding Comics in terms of movement: comics are, and here McCloud is following Will Eisner, "sequential art." In panels and gutters, we immediately detect the studium and its puntae as well as the sphota "bursting" from the articulated whole of the sequence of panels. As narrative forces with a physiological basis, McCloud calls the gutters "veins" through which runs the "blood" of the empaneled story. André Breton, in his investigation of surrealist psychology, writes in Communicating Vessels of a persistent level-finding motivation driving a story-full world. The vessels of the gutters bear the blood of the stories across the gap, the punctum that Barthes locates as the answering point in a studium. Narrative possesses versus, "a turning," a movement that might best be described metaphorically as grammatical prepositioning, though the positioning, the sounding of the artistic sonar, is never "pre" but always becoming, or even more awkwardly, becoming-positioning. This is work.

I must digress for a moment to discuss phoresis, the phenomenology of bearing. Nomadically, we must ascend to another plateau, one which has not, to my knowledge, had previous visitors, though we are very near the haunts of various materialists and Marxists. For if we see a world of meaningful music from the plateau we found with Deleuze and Guattari, we now see that work must be done to pay for that production. In simple physiological terms, this work is marked by the cycles of eating, fornicating, and defecating that overlay the rhythms of heart-beating and lung-breathing. Homeostasis, the territoriality of calm and stability centered in the body, is achieved at a constant price, and it is that very price, the phoretic bearing of becoming in the world, that is the impulse to make stories that iconize the rhythms of the world into the refrains of expression.

It is possible to state this even more simply: the physiological basis of narrative is the continuing repetition of bodily rhythms. It is not that I expect the next beat, but that I anticipate my heart continuing to beat. The heart beat, as either literal phenomenon or as the metaphorically extended basis for the phenomenological relating of narratives, is a phoretic carrier wave, the studium or sphota within which, in its punctuation, begins the work of "story telling," in the literary sense, and narrativity, in its philosophical fullness. Phoresis, as the work of bearing, might be thought of as attentive bridging, for it is the gaps between the beats that require the labor of the "listener"—and this is precisely one sense of the word metaphor. A metaphor is not "one thing for another" but the syndect that bears connection between two things: the meaning of a metaphor is some third that, so to speak, "stop gaps" between two "things." A metaphor creates a rhythmic studium that dialogically binds a narrative with its subjects, the "teller" and the "listener."

Let me return now to the physiology of rhythm. Barthes writes that "Long before writing was invented… the intentional reproduction of… rhythm" had already begun. He cites "certain rhythmic incisions" "found on cave walls" and declares that these marks "may fundamentally distinguish man from animal" (The Responsibility of Forms, 248). The idea that there is some fundamental distinction of human over animal is no longer tenable, but in lieu of a lengthy discussion I’ll simply point out what seems to me a commonplace: rhythm and its marking is the dominant work of the world. Any form of co-operation requires working with rhythms: the exchanges of molecules across permeable membranes, the dances of bees, the sweet-potato washings of macaques, the homeostasis of the Earth, are all evolving labor-intensive transactions, i.e., co-operations.

Steven Pinker, in How the Mind Works, discusses rhythm and its relationship to consciousness:

Rhythm is the universal component of music, and in many idioms it is the primary or only component. People dance, nod, shake, swing, stride, clap, and snap to music, and that is a strong hint that music taps into the system of motor control. Repetitive actions like walking, running, chopping, scraping, and digging have an optimal rhythm (usually an optimal pattern of rhythms within rhythms), which is determined by the impedance of the body and of the tools or surface it is working with. (537-8)

Pinker, a cognitive scientist, use the word "impedance" in the above passage in a way that is both technically inaccurate and metaphorically precise: he scores a nomadic incision. In the physics of alternating electrical currents, impedance refers to a ratio between resistance and reactance. Obviously Pinker is not talking about an AC wall outlet, but rather the ratio of resistance between, so to speak, "the raw and the cooked": the resistant dirty floor and the re-enacting rhythm of sweeping are, in their ratio, the becomingness of narrativity.

Impedance as permeable membrane as punctuated sphota: dialogue is phoretic syndesmosis. As used in medical terminology, syndesmosis is "the articulation of bones by ligaments" (American Heritage Dictionary, 3^rd ed.), with the stem—syndesmo(s) from ancient Greek "band or ligament"—being "a combining form denoting relationship to connective tissue, particularly the ligaments" (Dorland’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary, 28^th ed.).

What I am trying to do here is cut through the (more or less) traditional semantics of narratology in order to put a body beneath the head of any discussion of narrativity in literature. I want to suggest the image of connective tissue as an alternative to narratologies of "genre" and "content": these historical bones always lie in an archeological milieu that is already a dialogue of material and "consciousness," of molecules and psyche. The psyche of narrative is the activating participant: the leaper of the gap, the personified forces attending to the studium. In terms from Delueze and Guattari as well as Barthes, psyche is a nomadic listener, and this image weaves connective tissue among molecules with bonding potential and shepherds with eyes for shepherdesses. "By rhythm," Barthes writes, "listening ceases to be purely supervisory activity and becomes creation" (Responsibility of Forms, 249). What in contemporary technological terms is called "interactivity" is definable as a studium (a game-space, for example) that is able to accommodate a "listener’s" puntae: the narrative game-space is a permeable membrane through which pass "author" and "player."

Story, finally, is not some intrinsically human facility, but, to recall McCloud’s words, is the message of the blood. The medium of circulation—blood in the body, but texts and comics and computers as well—bears its own gaps in a phoretic cloud of unknowing. This bearing is called "quantum uncertainty" in physics, "chemical potential" is chemistries both organic and in-, and in the phenomenology of life that we call "literature" provides the connective tissue that we call "story."

II. A Brief Archeology of a Few (Post)Modernist Texts

Let’s leap into the texts of the twentieth century to begin to see at work there the physiological characteristics of narrative. If, as Barthes says, "Without rhythm, no language is possible" (Responsibility of Forms, 249), then texts such as Ernst’s Une Semaine de Bonté must "fail" (to communicate, I suppose) unless it can somehow constitute itself as a sphota, that is, unless it can be attended with and listened to. In explaining this thought, I want to draw attention to this choice of text. Une Semaine telescopes two complementary vistas at once: it provides a view on the problem of the gap, these unpredictable puntae that call for a participatory response, and, as well, it gives onto the plateau of surrealism.

Collage, in particular, but assemblage more generally as well, dramatizes the formal aspects of narrative. In Ernst’s collage novel, there are at work at least two levels of collage: at the level of the individual pages, themselves detailed collages exerting the force oneric recombination, and at the level of the body through which circulate the pages of the book. Narrative arises, a story is told, in symptoms: in plights, gestures, and locations that offer a studium for the constantly punctuating differences of men with heads of animals, where the mythological is emblazoned in the very landscape, in the textual weave (the words are the same) of Ernst’s narrativity. The title, "A Week of Kindness," perhaps first suggests a Book of Hours (as its illustrations might suggest) with offerings of devotions and givings of prayer (though Une Semaine does indeed have a few of these, too), but a perusal of the content reveals it as a "little black book" of Sadean assignations.

The surrealists, and I think especially of their "Pope," André Breton, were fascinated by the idea of the gap. Une Semaine de Bonté creates itself through the manipulation of gaps: the rhythm of punctuation creates a logic that "heats" the narrative. This is possible because the studium is recognizable; however odd Ernst’ book, he constitutes its strangeness, its differences, in an tenable form: the studium is symptomatic of human experience. This assumption of a recognizable studium is that with which Ernst burdens both himself and his reader: the movement of story is carried on the backs of both tellers and listeners.

Breton called one’s ability to take advantage of chance encounters, as between a teller and a listener, a phenomenological call and response, "disponibilité," the status or active state of being available to the aleatory. In Une Semaine, the becoming-chanciness punctuates even our assumed ideas about the depiction of character in a "novel" (I’m guarded about both the status of Une Semaine as a novel and of genre). There are gaps in appearance, faces change from one page to the next; the clothing of the characters is generally dark and Victorian, but jackets, dresses, hats, and hair styles come and go from one "panel" to the next. Indeed, if this were a drawn comic, it would violate a formal principle of sequential art, that of the persistence of vision, of continuity in aspects of appearance and speech. Ernst’s work, however, is of course circumcised (he cuts an identifiable style in his hand-and-paperwork collages) by the limitations of his source materials, that of old magazines and prints available to him circa 1933.

If novelistic characters are what Ernst has created in Une Semaine, then it is the attention of the reader to the symptoms of characteristicness that create them. For example, we see a woman standing in prostration, leaning on a desk, while a gryphon gazes at her from the foreground floor (88). On the next page I see the same woman prostrate on the floor, and now the gryphon is parallel to her, roaring, before an angel, that is, a Victorian man with wings attached to his back (angelos, "messenger"). His arms are outstretched to her in offer of salvation. But is she the same woman? In fact, nothing is the same: the characters, the location, the gryphon itself, are only connected through gesture. Thus, when I turn the page (90), the man now kneeling before the two women I see as the angel in the previous image. Indeed, the situation has only slightly changed: the angel now kneels before the manifestation of his power, a disk inscribed with an oak leaf that hovers in the air. The gryphon is scuttling out of the room, behind the woman and another who has rushed in to witness. The gryphon and the angel have "lost their powers," that is, a narrative gap has been created before which the de-winged angel now kneels as the two women gaze on in awe. Ernst is investing us in the uncanny, a transference of narrative thread in the evocatively floating disk.

Not just gesture but landscape enforces circulation through the narrative. Like a video game-space, Une Semaine is composed of "virtual rooms." The "week of kindness" requires place for becoming. We notice what hangs on the walls of Ernst’s rooms, and are forced to allow him to let the landscape bear part of the telling. The crucifix that hangs above a bureau becomes part of the moving landscape that, when the gryphon threateningly enters, transfers action from one end of a room to another (86-88). We can then follow the movement of the gryphon, the woman’s response to the gryphon’s presence, into a larger housescape that is marked by the art hanging on the walls (89-92, especially the portraits of meat, 89 and 91).

When the magical token of the oakleaf-disk reappears, we realize we are following a story about a test and its rewards. Angel-man’s own wings were sacrificed in defeating the gyphon: he now stands in a redemptive posture upon the disk. At the knees, he is encircled by an oruborean ring, the hovering magic circle of reterritorialization. He appears to be attending to the rhythmic spell being cast by the angel-woman who stands before him with arms upraised (92). In the next image, the wings transfer from the woman to the man: she blesses the restorative transference with a kiss that he stoops, wings outspread, to receive (93). "But then suddenly"—the gnomic tag-line of the punctum—an exploding bat marks the trickster angel-woman’s theft of the wings, sending the naïve, horrified and defrocked male out of the room.

I could go on, but I believe even this short reading of Ernst’s visual text raises questions that can only be addressed through other texts. The first of these questions is of the relationship between the visual and textual refrain. Here the refrain stands for an entire class of motifs, gnomes, and set pieces used in music, art, and writing. From recent studies of comics, which are themselves steeped in a long history of art criticism, that is, of study of the visual refrain, we can sift from the notion of the icon a function of creation of connective tissue.

Icons require our participation (Understanding Comics, 59): just as caricature has its styles of iconicity, so too literature has its means of lending iconic participation to portrayals of time, of place, and especially of character. From this view, the act of writing a novel is a practice of sequential artistry. We learn from a study of gnomic utterances just how iconic a simple turn of phrase can be, but every utterance is full of gaps that must be bridged by the attending listener. Indeed, what make technical writing so difficult, and often a highly paid specialty, is the (often mind-numbing) effort required of the writer to fill those gaps.

David Markson’s novel Reader’s Block (1996) is as opaque as technical writing strives (but rarely succeeds) to be. Reader’s Block is a commonplace book: an apparently disjunctive series of gnomic observations, biographical details of artists and writers (especially suicides), and quotes from various sources:

Chaucer’s father was a brewer.

Pasternak’s popularity was such that if he stumbled over a line while reciting, most of his Moscow audience was generally able to prompt him from memory.

…

Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.

Charles Boyer committed suicide with an overdose of barbiturates.

7 Eccles Street.

The Carmina Burana. Any and all name of the original vagabond thirteenth-century poets long forgotten.

The soprano arias in the Cour d’Amour section can fill Reader with heartache.

The soprano arias in the Cour d’Amour section can fill Protagonist with heartache?

Poised abstractedly amid a kind of transitory disarray. Cartons heaped and piled. (Reader’s Block, 47)

"Reader" and "Protagonist" in the above passage are the nomadic subject searching for a territory in the debris of a man’s middle-aged life, that is, "Reader" and "Protagonist" are the self-conscious narrative projections of the author. The title of the novel provides a territorializing refrain: reader’s block gives to the reader what had always before been the possession of the writer: the muteness of identity. Reader’s Block, while admitting everything, refuses the one thing that would seem to make a story a story: a willing teller. This is the problem of Reader’s Block, and precisely what makes it so fascinating as a case of narrative becoming.

For Reader’s Block is a novel and a story does emerge, in spite of Reader/Protagonist’s self disavowal. It is a novel composed entirely of gaps, of fragments of information that form the grid of a sieve through which a life has drained. This endless litany—or parade, as the book is quite funny—of puntae, however, pass through the membrane of Reader/Protagonist’s own creation: the narrator creates himself from molecular litter. Reader, like a gomi boy or a bag lady, stumbles into territory of his own creation and finds himself defined, not as self, but as everything else.

What the novel suggests is that categories such as reader and protagonist are never "I" but rather we. The form of the commonplace book, with its demonstration of a life spent reading, already gives the novel narrative movement: toward death, the end of a life of reading. But of course reading is also an act of reincarnation; or, better, the dialogue never dies, it is merely we who find our way into the conversation. In writing himself into the conversation, Markson/Reader/Protagonist leads us to discover the psychological "unit," psyche, is multiple. The multiplicity of inner life, as demonstrated in Markson’s uncanny manipulation of the reader-for-psyche metaphor, need not be attributed to forces of "social construction," as the reading du jour might persuade us. Rather, as when toward the beginning of Reader’s Block, Reader/Protagonist tries on various names from the works of dead writers, a phoretic analysis would lead us to explore the idea that identities are adopted or acquired, much as languages during childhood. That, of course, is a subject beyond this essay’s scope, but the point being that narrative "closure" resembles a sort of mind reading, a telepathy that is not nearly so uncanny if one considers the "mind" of "self" to be multiple adopted others.

And again we are confronted with the image of a permeable membrane, of multiple inner lives communicating across psychic frontiers: face to face, the image of reading and osmosis. Rather than static identity, we are confronted with a dynamic exchange as a unifying observation of the world, and therein lies the elemental force of story. To form identities we tween ourselves narrativistically: Markson’s novels Springer’s Progress, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, and Reader’s Block all explore the dialogics of character, often in terms of the density of experience.

As near as I can tell, the idea of tweening comes from a practice in digital animation: given figures A and C, a computer can be programmed to generate between them a figure B. As a way of discussing a psychological process of adopting or bearing heterogeneous identities, tweening is useful because it dramatizes dialogical exchange as a signifying phenomenon of narrative. We don’t tell stories, I think after reading Markson, stories tell us. While that sentence belongs in a commonplace book, it opens onto a plateau of radical disponibilité where the line from the old Stones song, "They call me the tumbling die," is made tangible.

I am thinking of André Breton’s novel Nadja (1928, 1960), and how the puntum proliferates not just in art, but in life as well. Nadja is "based on a true story," as we say. Breton meets girl in street, there is a revelatory piercing of the "street-smart" territories of the "individuals," causing those territories to implode. In the example above, Ernst used an exploding bat to mark the signifying closure of a micronarrative; that same bat bursts above the initial meeting of Breton and Nadja. The fact that a figurative exploding bat can signify the beginning or the end of a story does not suggest any sort of meta-narrative: human trickery (Une Semaine) and human love (Nadja) are the part creators of history but only as the aliens of our own biology.

As a text, Nadja rudely invades the space so neatly carved out by Descartes and others between psychology and physiology. Split between body and mind, Breton the surrealist set himself the life task of either healing or surmounting that split. Perhaps like any sort of romanticism, surrealism invented itself in a gap, in places wild or feral. In this territorializing of energies (Breton playing Pope to the men gathered in the café each afternoon) a movement is created that entrains the rhythm of the group. The power of this entrainment cannot be overlooked: many "defectors" from surrealism later wrote of dire psychological effects that they and critics attributed to the methods of surrealism as well as Breton’s treatment of them as individuals.

Movements are as individual as taste in music, and with any mass movement we can find those upon whose nerves that rhythm grated. Nadja is the document of a test case in aleatory living: one discovers a find (un trouve) by chance; one picks it up the find, this stranger, this woman Nadja. And where does she lead? The first words of Nadja are the perennial question: "Who am I?" An answer follows hard on the question’s heels: "If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I ‘haunt’" (11). I are those who haunt me, in other words, and for Breton this means that "the objective, more or less deliberate manifestations of my existence are merely the premises, within the limits of this existence, of an activity whose true extent us quite unknown to me" (12). What stirs Breton is the thought that the "quite unknown" will return bearing messages, as by "the demon of analogy" (111) the materiality of his "deliberate manifestations" ricochet and reflect back at him. Breton enters into an interpretive delirium as he attends to the fleeting glances and turned-just-so faces of passersby during his peregrinations, and is aware, because in the case of Nadja it was true, that he sees himself as "the object of extreme overtures, of singular, special attentions" (111).

Breton aimlessly wandered the streets of Paris, often with his friends, with two aleatory questions on his lips: Do I move you? and Do you move me? In these two questions, psyche’s multiples are hard at work: the romantic notion of "I’ll complete you and you’ll complete me" (a Joni Mitchell lyric) desires to bear the "other" away into the totality of the sphota. This solicitation of difference in the subjunctive mood of disponibilité carries with it not only the metaphysical baggage (as in "something to be born") of the ancient Indian grammarian-philosophers, but the Deleuzoguattarian notion of the desiring machine that, in its nomadic subjectivity, signals its bonding potential, as a search light signaling a rave sweeps across the sky. For surrealists, this "negative charge" induced an awareness of the ghostly presence of those that haunt: the connective tissue of the multiple personality that is the "individual" is left exposed. This exposure often resulted in hallucinatory reterritorilizations of the "calm and stable center," as in René Crevel’s Babylon (1927), where, after a grueling psychological examination of "Boredom, the stepson of pride" (17) in a girl’s childhood, we are led, at the end of the novel, into a coming-of-age love scene in which the lovers become weather: "Tonight the storm will tear ravenously at the clouds as teeth tear at bellies" (154).

In the romantic wild of surrealism we find the punctum given two broadly defined sets of characteristics. In the awareness that results from exposure of the multiple and permeable self, the deconstructed Cartesian icon of selfhood scrambles to either assimilate the other (Breton in Nadja) or "dare[s] look straight into the sky" (Babylon, 148) and transcend the human altogether. Assimilation and transcendence are not limited to surrealism, or even to the various romantic movements; rather, these are stock refrains: one either becomes "available" to the "taming power of the great" (I Ching), of the wilds of the body and the world, or becomes the wild. The sense here is contained in the Latin word versus, with the Indo-European root meanings of "to turn" and "wind" (American Heritage Dictionary). One may be "blowing in the wind" or seeking "shelter from the storm" (both Bob Dylan lyrics): both are territorializing movements. A narrative turns (versus) on these pivotal gaps, on these psychological moments of leaping and indecision.

The point I’m after here is that very little of what we consider to be a uniquely human facility for story telling has anything to do with being (specifically) human. Rather, the primary elements of narrative are embodiment, gravity, and the flux of evolutionary change. This is not to say that elephants, for example, tell the same stories as we humans, or even that elephants bother telling stories (but see further Masson, 1995), or that we humans don’t have stories particular to our species and various cultures. Again it is worth emphasizing that I am not questing after meta-narratives, but rather those elements which are implied by embodiment on a gravity-bound planet. The rhythms of wind, movement, heartbeat, breath, and reproduction are the commonalities; to deny a narratology its explorative discourse within these commonalities would be to insist on remaining in a Ptolemaic universe.

It is just such a Ptolemaic universe that Virginia Woolf reterritorializes in To the Lighthouse. Far from being critically exhausted, To the Lighthouse has barely been read. For here is a work that takes as its primary theme the desire for movement. This is a novel of rhythms, and few, if any, can be said to be human. We might do better to first read the text in view of a popular myth about sharks: the shark most remain in constant movement or else it dies. This brings the traditional idea of "crisis" onto a new plateau: instead of a Ptolemaic perpetuation of human psychology at the expense of embodiment, we find in Woolf’s novel an example of thwarted animal movement. Animal here must be read in its etymological sense of "that which is animated."

The animal James is the desiring machine of To the Lighthouse. His desire to visit, to an enact an experiential movement, the lighthouse is thwarted by the wind. The shark is stopped by the vicissitudes of natural forces: we’ve gone beyond an "archeology of [human] knowledge" to a paleontology of animal wisdom ("skill," as in ability, attentiveness). We return full force to the domus-making of attentive listening: the play of territorializing forces at work in To the Lighthouse is staggering, for of course Woolf exerts all her literary skill in animating the personalities of her characters. The gale of familial desires exposes many gaps that Woolf’s narrative gives rhythmic shape in her central character: the novel proceeds from the house and only then To the Lighthouse.

Charles Baxter points out that "As the members of the family die," the Ramsays’ vacation home "is invaded by wind and rain and darkness" (Burning Down the House, 97). Let’s examine Baxter’s thesis:

In this novel the death of the spirit cannot be housed narratively in the flesh where the death occurs but must move into the dwelling place of the body, the house itself. When a writer can’t resurrect the body, she can at least resurrect the place where the body died. (96)

It seems to me that Baxter is very close to the mark here, but we need to be wary in regard the words "spirit" and "resurrect." For the movement of To the Lighthouse is not from life to death to life, but from bearing to unburdening to reassumption of burden. Consider that Woolf, in the medial "Time Passes" section, chose to bracket the by-now extra-territorial biographical details of the Ramseys and Mr. Carmichael (the first appears at page 192). Woolf punctuates the narrative voice of the house, "as if sharing a joke with nothingness" (190), in order to draw attention to the studium, the "monotony of bearing… imposed on" (65) the house. (A closer reading would demonstrate the metonymy between Mrs. Ramsay and the house that I am using in the previous two quotes.) Too, Woolf brackets these details in order to create a philosophical gap between the fates of the humans and that of the house. The one-by-one deaths of the Ramsays merely parallels the slow rhythm of "hesitation" (literally, a "break beat") that is moving the house "downwards to the depths of darkness" (208).

The domicile in To the Lighthouse is an explicitly phoretic territory, a "body without organs" (Deleuze and Guattari): to domesticate is to harness chaos as a carrier wave. To it are attached the animated nomadic subjectivities of the human desiring machines. If, at the end of the novel, the house is reinvested with subjective motive energies, this is not "resurrection," for what Woolf is showing us is the arbitrariness of, the assumptions we bear about, life and death. "Life" and "death" are a sine wave; To the Lighthouse is an oscilloscope. The gap it maps is difficult for the (Western?) human mind to grasp, but is easily bridged by the narrative persistence of objects.

III. Forwarding Motion

To return to the beginning and set out again: I have nowhere to arrive but everywhere to go. Story is movement across plateaus. Narratology is a paleography of embodiment, is the exploration of smooth and stratified spaces. The purpose of a theory—be it scientific or literary, materialistic or metaphysical—is to create a smooth space, ideally one from which the analyst may observe the strata of a particular (historical, cultural) territory. This of course is the "trap" of theory, the "prisonhouse of language" (Jameson) that is exemplified by the cartographer’s dilemma: the map can never be as detailed as the territory: a gap already exists.

The gap—I’ve hovered around it, picked it up, tossed it around, tried to show how it underwrites ideas common to many thinkers. The analytical value of the gap is its syndesmosis: the gap reveals the articulating ligature of animation. The gap bears difference, and so shifts the focus from the destructive criticism of both humanism and post-structuralism onto the connective tissue of embodiment. Indeed, the Derridean différand might be much more simply and concretely described as the movement of a gap. The tail-chasing "endless chain of signifiers" (and that is not the voice of Derrida but that of the by-now vernacular or folk voice that bears a received-Derrida) is a linguistic trick played upon the very mind the logic of which the philosopher endeavors to practice deconstruction. A trick because what is being signified is indeed not "things," nor the human predicament of the dialectical relationship between the rhythms of language and those of the world, but is rather the signification of movement.

Gravity and friction are the prime determinants of movement, and in our animation, we bear these forces upon our lives as thermodynamic truths. In this view, it seems only obvious that language, too, must bear these forces. On the one hand, the reception of thinkers such as Lakoff and Johnson suggest that this idea is often unpalatable both for its apparent naiveté (such philosophies of embodiment often appear to dwell too close to those of the pot-smoking holistic bear-huggers) and for its de-centering implications. On the other hand, that same reception (Metaphors We Live By was an academic best seller) is an expression of the desire for a further story. Because there are "a thousand plateaus" of course we must have a sequel—or an entirely new show—to literary post-structuralism.

The study of movement in literature, in story telling, is narratology. What I’ve tried to show is not a reductionist vision of "the world-as-story" but rather a more or less practical method of talking about narrative in terms of its basic components. These components (plot, character, landscape) are subject to physical laws, and just as our perceptions are persistently mediated by what we conveniently call "the brain," the components of story are subject to these laws through the media of animal expression. For "the world" is story—multiple and full of holes—and is constantly sounding the depths of potential.

The physics of literature exists in many texts in many media, and has for many centuries. Some of these places are escapees from time: the texts that form the "molar" cannon of Western philosophy; others lie buried in the ephemeral "pop culture" gomi heaps of particular, and often desperately "molecular," places and times. The aim of the rest of this study is to attend to the rhythms of embodiment wherever I can hear them, and to bring together a theory of surphysics.

Works Cited