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The Singular Continuity in Faulkner and Kafka
Abbreviations
ATP – A Thousand Plateaus
Abstract
This essay attempts critical encounters with Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, underpinned by the poststructuralist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (hereafter D&G). The work enacts encounters, for Kafka and Faulkner create such anarchic narrative universes that no interpretative schema can clarify much less to classify.
The form contorts and twists out of its shape revealing its intellectual implications that seep through other disciplines. The further literary modernity cruises away from its realist predecessors, the more urgent the need for philosophical mediators to justify its experimental nature.
The project serves a double purpose: 1) to illustrate the interplay between philosophy and literature; 2) to favour the materiality of language over representational accounts, and challenge any literary critic for whom the pursuit of meaning is paramount. To this end, we seek recourse to D&G’s conceptual paradigm, with an emphasis on their theory of minor literature as presented in their 1975 Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minor articulations, as opposed to major which reflect great literary “masters”, work to invoke new ways of expression.
In addition, they illuminate a key modality of minor practices: the complex link between sameness and difference. How do Faulkner and Kafka introduce a minor version of the major, but, most crucially, how do they dispense with the major/minor dichotomy that mirrors the dialectical image of Western philosophy?
I. Introduction – The Immanent Nature of Becoming
‘[O]ne is tempted to believe that the creature once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only a broken-down remnant […] the whole thing looks senseless enough, but in its own way perfectly finished’ (Kafka, 1993: 184). [1]
Negotiations of the inside and the outside, the mind and the world, propelled many of modern literature's concerns. The conception of language as a communicative medium was the minefield out of which modernism leaped. This owes much to the way the experience of the world was conceptualised in the twentieth century. As Donald Kartiganer eloquently puts it, existence at the time described
‘a presence of fragments often moving to no particular end or recognisable rationale.’ [2]
Language allowed modernism to foreground the ways by which external imbalances affected the faculties of the mind. Taking up on the crisis of language, poststructuralism repudiated the binary leanings of philosophy. In his insightful Chaosmosis, Félix Guattari argues that
‘in the heyday of structuralism the subject was methodically excluded from its own multiple and heterogeneous material of expression.’ [3]
Poststructuralists posited the very idea of fragments as part of the whole, which suggests that one cannot address something fragmentary without presupposing a (non-fragmentary) wholeness.
Contrary to structuralism’s tendency to wrap itself up in its own ontology and convey meaning as self-identical, D&G sought difference, i.e., movement, over time. They believed that meaning can shift in repetition as a multiplicity rather than a unity. Where the former rests on a continuum of variation and change, the latter is inherently temporal. That is, it attests to the Hegelian dogma that presents subjects as continuous entities unravelling through time.
D&G highlight the fragility of dualism marked by the illusion of transcendent absolutes related to truth. Instead of prioritising one term in the binary pairing over the other, as Hegel’s dialectics does, they value their mutual recognition. [4] The relationality they propose comprises the aporia of thinking whatever belongs to the exclusionary matrix of “difference” as being innate to what is the same.
In other words, difference (Other) resides in the same external point that one can recognise identity (Self) as internal and self-consistent. Similarly, what is excluded is essential to the composition of the norm for the non-excluded. D&G proved that, far from an inactive, parasitical obstacle, marginal sites are inseparable to central formations.
For this reason, they introduced a multidisciplinary approach that annexes other more artistic terrains like literature. Their interaction with literary discourse did not simply enabled unimaginable events to arise and save their philosophy from one-of-the-same reproductions. It also indicated the inadequacy of universality and easy identification to inhibit singular contingencies.
Consequently, singularity, as opposed to individuality, is constitutively relational (interactive) and differential, for it attends to what has been disguised or silenced.
For D&G, the connection between philosophy and literature is both synergistic and one of apprenticeship. Put otherwise, they view modern literature as a locus of philosophical novelty. Deleuze’s reading of Lewis Carroll in The Logic of Sense, served his everlasting need for a philosophy that disassociates itself from hierarchies and teleological idealisms.
A Deleuzo-Guattarian take on literary texts allows one to merit them in ways that do not limit them. ‘Whence does their philosophy procure its creativity?’ one may ask. The answer is simple: through its alliance with literature. Their philosophical agenda focuses on the following neologisms: deterritorialisation; processuality; virtuality; immanence; becoming. It should be noted that here the prefix “de-” for deterritorialisation signifies the break with a critique of literature.
As the list denotes, their theory encourages the invention of concepts for which no pre-existent reference can be retrieved. Their Kafka project can be seen as a philosophical intervention to notions of performance that prefigured much of their distinctive writing in ATP. Their methodology in Kafka is one of experimentation at the expense of interpretation. As they rightly state:
‘[w]e aren’t even trying to interpret, to say this means that.’[5]
To do otherwise is to throw Kafka in a transcendent dungeon in which his disparate energies are limited to a single category. As we shall see, experimentation helps D&G access Kafka and animate constellations – be it socio-political, ‘economic, bureaucratic and juridical’ – other than the contract of filiation. [6]
In this instance, singularity (or else, becoming cracks open the possibility to think and live differently; not the possibility that is being thought or lived, but that which becomes as the narrative progresses.
Their affinity for experimental books that formally “minoritise” a major language is the crux of this essay. In the same vein, our driving force is the three intertwined elements of minor literature that: 1) deterritorialise and displace the dominant organisations, ceasing the signifying function of language; 2) bestow a political immediacy on the individual that, in Gregor’s case, redefines representations of being-human. As Simon O’Sullivan contends,
‘a becoming animal is always political, a line of escape […] from conjugality,’
3) put forth a
‘collective assemblage of enunciation’ which equips its participants with singular affective qualities that resist the lures of representation. [7]
The a-syntactical narration of Benjy is an innovation to existence insofar as it disrupts an ordinary, all-too-figurative speech.
D&G’s theorisation of the “minor” goes hand in hand with the transformative drive of "becoming". The paradox of relationality is rooted in the way minor processes interact with major stratifications. Just as the minor is grafted onto the major, so too are the chances for its manifestation inscribed in the workings of the major.
Far from oppositional, the minor describes a language vis-à-vis the major. What differentiates the one from the other lies in performance: different tools for crafting a literary work. Kafka and Faulkner are minor writers because they use representation so that to reconfigure the major from within. They repeat literary conventions only in terms of their immanent possibility to distort them, while this destructive tendency is also productive, as it generates new modes of thinking.
For the major is equally necessary, the two authors call for a new spatiality. The reason being that, albeit canonical, their experimental novels display a
‘deterritoriali[s]ed language, appropriate for strange, minor uses.’ [8]
This allocates them in an “in-between” position, for they traverse the unexplored territory of the polarity between major and minor, and in so doing, they overcome this polarity.
II. The Territorialised Finitude of Realism
Literature has played various limiting roles in philosophy’s self-understanding. It has been thought as a reserve for existential themes, such as problems of justice and death, which professes philosophy as a propositional claim and the literary as its illustration or example. Other viewpoints concern the listing of character features with the intent to establish archetypal totalities.
The second attitude is a correlative of Arnold Bennett’s conviction that:
‘[t]he foundation of good fiction is character-creating and nothing else.’ [9]
Clearly, Bennett’s standpoint is based on the delimiting stratum of the realist form. A stratum or territorialisation in Deleuzo-Guattarian terms
‘consists of giving form to matters, of imprisoning intensities, locking singularities into systems of resonance.’ [10]
Where realism synthesise the raw materials into the finished product–namely, the origin into its endpoint–the modernist narrative parades alongside the writing process. Form cannot be discovered or conceived as in itself a self-contained building block that remains identical over time. Rather, it is created: it surges up from its virtual potentiality for infinite
‘open co-dependencies of a shared deformational field.’ [11]
The virtuality of the situation, albeit future-orientated, exceeds its finite actuality, since the latter is a given, eternal compound that paradoxically is not yet that which it will become when it changes. Therefore, the singular is implicated in the order of the general and, as such, it too has a reflexive value that facilitates change within that order.
The solipsistic closure of the realist novel as a ‘transparent window on reality’ becomes manifest in its prescription of behavioural and moral injunctions that sketch out an ideal way of living. [12] In safeguarding these general axioms, realism proves to be a discrete, pseudo-creative agent of pre-givens.
By contrast, the modernist text does not reflect a world; it has its own. In virtue of a moral compass that is nowhere to be traced, Faulkner and Kafka dive into the intensity of a situation; the effect of which is unrealisable and remains to be seen. The singular confrontation with the affective and the unexpected in their texts relates to a disjunctive sequence, which presents affect as a virtual substance beyond formal enactments. As Brian Massumi argues,
‘the virtual is the mode of reality implicated in the emergence of new potentials. In other words, [it] is the reality of change: the event.’ [13]
Therefore, Faulkner and Kafka explore language and subjectivity as events that undermine the causal, elementary character of realism. Modernist literature carves out new narrative pathways, hitherto contained by representation, which are virtually unthinkable but always produced within the actually thinkable.
In this respect, it protracts the territorialisation of affect onto representation, but this does not mean that it evades representation altogether. It simply suggests that its non-habitual linguistic manipulations are irreducible to meaning.
Just as Kafka’s animalistic tones disturb an overly human mode of being, so too Faulkner’s a-signifying register of a mentally challenged man exemplifies a poststructuralist treatment of language. However, Kafka is not some kind of an ethical zoologist, much less is Faulkner campaigning against prejudice towards disability. To the contrary: their texts are prophylactic against a fetishism of animality and mental deficiency. In both cases, meaning is a function of the way their texts signify rather than what their texts signify, i.e., the way of signifying constitutes a cardinal part of what the texts are about.
Contra literary critics and their preoccupation with what there is, Faulkner and Kafka emphasise what texts can do within their affective and intensive capacity. Their literatures are outward-bound: they sidestep closed, personal, historical, metaphorical and/or psychological narratives, exposing themselves to the revolutionary conditions of their creation. In a word, they shed light to alterity–to what has been concealed and occulted from the literary purview.
III. The A-signifying Semiotics of a “Loony” – The Rupture and Suture of Subjectivity
Grammatically speaking, the gerund in the “a-signifying” indicates a simultaneity: two actions taking place at the same time. Here, besides its allusion to a temporality of the enunciation, it also subverts its customary use and ability to stabilise the noun.
In this sense, it is a repetitive and senseless structure–hence the a- prefix–that does not assume the principle of closure within itself. Instead, it is open to interruptions. In his account of the novel’s inception, Faulkner defines “idiocy” as a ‘blind self-centeredness of innocent.’ Specifically, he writes:
‘the idiot was born and then I became interested in the relationship of the idiot to the world that he was in but would never able to cope with.’ [14]
Not only is Benjy innocent, but also innocence is what he commands from the world. He appoints this task to the person he loves the most, Caddy, but it is never fulfilled. When Caddy fails to meet this condition–the demanded innocence–Faulkner interferes with his narrative experimentation and technical oddity.
Benjy does not register Caddy as an individual but only in an outlet of association on which he attaches events as fluxes of sensory impressions. His grammatical and syntactical assaults to the linguistic imperialism forge
‘a new expressivity and a new flexibility.’ [15]
As D&G have it, he
‘pulls from the language tonalities lacking in signification […] filled with vocables that are fleeting.’ [16]
Faulkner’s affective politics carries out a stammering of language—that is, a making strange of uniform communicative and transmissible system.
Ferdinand de Saussure's reductionism describes a phenomenon of language that is incompatible with the material world, as it cannot straddle the distance between the word (the signifier) and the object (the signified). By contrast, Faulkner explores the idea of language as matter, bursting asunder the bar that Saussure has installed between content and expression.
The auditory similarity between ‘Fore Caddie’ and “for Caddy” is especially propitious for this material experience. [17] Whereas the former evocation conforms to a figurative signification of golfing jargon, the latter crosses
‘a threshold of intensity contained within the name itself’
and on this occasion, the reminder of Caddy through sound. [18] It neither denotes by means of a name nor is it a metaphorical appropriation with an expressive intent. Rather, it is a circuit of qualitative multiplicities that rekindle memories of Caddy–Benjy’s most cherished sound cue. Consequently, Benjy deterritorialises language through a different
‘accenting of the word, an inflection’
that succeeds in the opening of words onto unforeseen singular intensities. [19] Faulkner’s multi-dimensional and repetitive glimpses of characters contrast with the well-rounded portraitures of realism. These glimpses provide
‘possibilities for recomposing their existential corporeality’ only if they escape tautological impasses of ready-made materials so as ‘to resingularise themselves.’ [20]
By radicalising style, Faulkner revises the realist principles of temporality as a chronological unification. Benjy’s temporal trips, where memories impinge upon the present, suspend the Aristotelian seriality in the ordering of events. He cannot grasp the A-B-C locomotive format of time as a set of connected dots, thereby failing to provide it. Rather, he showcases time as a “crystalline event” that invites past, present and future from various apertures. [21]
Suggestively, Faulkner’s time is spatialised, placing the before-after as symbiotic with the now-after. This becomes explicit in two literary instances, where distinct happenings formatted in italics fuse with a non-italicised moment and form a cohesive chaos:
Jason came in.
I kept telling you to hush, Luster said.
What’s the matter now, Jason said.
‘He just trying hisself.’ Luster said (Faulkner, 1995: 54)
In the same vein, on the following page:
I could hear the roof. Father forward and looked at Quentin
Hello, he said. Who won.
‘Nobody.’ Quentin said. ‘They stopped us. Teachers’ (Faulkner, 1995: 55)
It could be said that Benjy narrates a nonverbal linguistic event where affective devices interrelate with those of the semantic. Fittingly, Benjy himself could be thought as a virtuality actualised through affects rather than as a subject with a causal bearing. Evidently, there is no sustainable link between the foregoing events, while this formal non-conformity of italicised and non-italicised lines makes it impossible to envision a continual temporal subject.
Therefore, Benjy’s means of expression do not abide by the decrees of Louis Althusser’s structural causality laid out by horizontal assortments and vertical interpretations of phenomena. [22] Instead, it corresponds to D&G’s transversal or diagonical junctures that leap across mutual scales of
‘the social and the subjective, the material and the semiotic.’ [23]
Given that, the intersection of cohesive and chaotic flows in Benjy undoes the “either/or” divisional stand-off, and bases expression in the more intensive nodes of a boundless “either…or…or.” [24] Faulkner’s minor tendency estranges regional language to the point where he experiences a sort of becoming-stranger of his own tongue. Here literature,
‘stops being representative in order to […] move towards its extremities or its limits.’ [25]
Singular narrative zones bring forth words in their unnatural and a-typical state. Benjy’s ‘employment of malleable’ and mobile nouns indicates how the figural language, as distinct from a figurative codification, endows words with a non-fixed dimension. A prime example is the word “sassprilluh”, which appears as an intra-lingual referent tied to a closed-off system in which syntax disintegrates. [26]
As the scene unfolds, however, the interaction with and inseparability of the word from its designation of an alcoholic beverage becomes palpable. This illustrates that, far from coincidental or accidental, word and designation are reciprocal aspects in an ongoing negotiation.
This also rehabilitates the ill-defined philosophy of D&G as an uncritical exponent of non-strategic openness in thought. As they clarify in ATP,
‘[y]ou may make a rupture, […] yet there is still a danger that you will reencounter organi[s]ations that restratify everything.’ [27]
Minor formulations are threatened as much from a relapse to centres of interpretation as from fluid micro-dispersions towards abolition.
Therefore, D&G’s philosophical project is cautionary: in place of reckless de-stratifying processes, it advocates lines of flight. In Faulkner’s case, the latter refers to linguistic distortions that lead somewhere inasmuch as they are able to return, i.e., to deterritorialisations that must end in a reterritorialisation. If anything, the former requires a territory from which to function in order to prevent annihilation. This implies that singularity is somewhat historically presupposed, and nowhere near a tabula rasa that occupies the postmodernist disembodied vacuum of “anything goes”. [28]
In this respect, even at Benjy’s quasi-obliterating narratorial sections when he senses that Caddy’s purity is jeopardised, his “language” manages to reclaim ‘the slipper’ – namely, its orientation:
'I squatted there, holding the slipper. I couldn’t see it, but my hands saw it, and I could hear it getting night, and my hands saw the slipper […] hearing it getting dark […] she smelled like trees' (Faulkner, 1995: 59)
The phrase ‘she smelled like trees’ is reiterated several times in that the natural smell of trees is correlated with Caddy’s chastity, and Benjy gets upset when that scent gets momentarily lost. [29] This example embodies, to quote Claire Colebrook,
‘the very essence of difference [as] its imperceptibility; a perceived difference [that] has already been identified, reduced or ‘contracted.’ [30]
The challenge for Benjy’s becoming-imperceptible in the end through the repeated phrase that points to his impurified sister, as part of his linguistic discordance, is to prolong the affective stage preceding the predictability of interpretation that forces him to be expressive.
IV. The Mobility of Stasis and The Processual Structure of Kafka
Much of the academic engagement with Kafka fails to do justice to his literary ingenuity. It is a commonplace in Kafka scholarship to define his oeuvre as a literature of besetting sins and irrevocable guilt. For example, Zahra Barfi reproduces a classic critical motif in appraising Kafka: the tendency to assimilate and tabulate certain narrative happenings to the “Kafkian” epithet. For Barfi, The Metamorphosis is not only a dramatisation of Gregor’s
‘unconscious world,’ but also a symbolical portrait of Kafka’s ‘inner world.’ [31]
The lexical and acoustic approximation of the protagonist’s surname, Samsa, with Franz Kafka himself has justifiably spawned semi-autobiographical readings through the lens of Freud's psychology.
But to apply a pre-establshed theory to a text, as Barfi does, is to invoke an instrumental logic of language. Not infrequently, the figure of the father is construed as the sovereign authority of command. Moments of hostility and violence are filtered through Freud’s tripartite model of human psyche including the id, the ego, and the superego. Above all, Gregor’s transformation is said to be representative of
‘his angst and […] repressed desire’ to flee from ‘the oppressive tyranny’ of his father.’ [32]
What is problematic about Barfi’s analysis is the fact that he monopolises and contains the text in a unilateral, one-way channel of signification. It assents to the Freudian rhetoric of the Oedipus complex, which reduces the multiple cathexes of the unconscious into the One–that is, the analogue of Oedipus.
Similarly, Barfi composes his own aggregate informed by a whole–namely, the psyche–which relegates the complexity of Kafka to an interiorised hierarchy. Barfi anchors experience in the empirical economy of a subliminal investment in the infantile, psychologically-guided narrative of conjugation–in this case, the conflictual relationship between father and son.
Theodor Adorno’s hermeneutical take on Kafka echoes Barfi’s sentiments. In his essay, Notes on Kafka, Adorno compiles a list of general rules on how to read Kafka, the first of which appears as follows:
‘take everything literally, cover up nothing with concepts invoked from above.’ [33]
However, in such a multi-layered text as The Metamorphosis in which sentences often tend to contradict and undercut one another, how can one read Kafka literally? Clearly, a non-conceptual approach is unable to account for Gregor’s ‘irrepressible squeaking’ that disrupts a hyper-human expressivity. [34] Kafka’s deterritorialising effect is best instantiated in the family’s lack of questioning over Gregor’s transformation. This suggests that a composite product of Platonic mimesis, where form originates from the idea it represents, is no longer tenable.
Therefore, Kafka shatters individuation and reassembles the shards to produce something solid that at first may seem inaccessible. Gregor is not mimetic of a ‘dung-beetle’ but poietic in an experimental manner. [35] Like Faulkner, he disfigures and undermines the plenitude of characterisation ascribable to realism.
D&G claim that
‘minor literature […] forces each individual to connect immediately to politics […] because a whole other story is vibrating within it.’ [36]
Gregor’s becoming-animal carries a political import which does not just dissolve the animal analogy. Most significantly, it begets networks for a ‘multiplicity of movements’ and a textual metamorphosis that goes unnoticed in Barfi and Adorno. [37] By veering away from a nuclear familial unit and Freud’s Oedipal subject, Kafka’s minor operation confounds the reader with the unknown. He manages
‘imperceptible openings of discontinuity in the stifling logic of the already-made,’
which defers what is immediately identifiable. [38]
Gregor is an eviscerated body stripped bare to expose the pre-figurative forces of affects. Kafka lays the groundwork for a notion of the de-subjectified body as a map of intensive routes and variations in speed. His model of a “torn-out” time is oxymoronic in that it implies activity
‘without anything decisive taking place.’ [39]
The altered physical state of Gregor freezes his momentum and hectic itinerary. His near five-page long recounted effort to get out of bed as well as the missed morning trains are both suggestive of the ‘slow tempo’ he adopts to appreciate the irrational. [40] Interestingly, this stasis, at least in the beginning, rewards him with a ‘physical well-being’ and ‘stirrings of a healthy appetite’ that he lacked as a human. [41]
As he aimlessly crawls over the walls and the ceiling, Gregor cracks opens tiny spaces in his ‘normal human room’ – enough for the ruptures to gush out and mobilise contradictions. [42] This is how he reifies his becoming-amnesic. The aspect of forgetfulness is key in Kafka. As Sara Ahmed notes,
‘cleansed of the self-justifying past and its promise of [future] happiness, the present unfurls its immanent potentiality in the gaps [that Gregor pries] open by forgetting.’ [43]
Gregor is ‘near enough of forgetting’ his human past as he reconciles to having his ‘old heirlooms’ of a historical sedimentation taken away when Grete and his mother undertake his room de-cluttering. [44]
The absence of topographic anchorage is equally important. The apartment that the family inhabits remains an unspecified, non-localisable, and thus provisional place. If Gregor
‘hadn’t known for a fact that he lived in […] Charlottenstrasse, he might have thought that [it] was a wasteland where grey sky merged indistinguishably with grey earth.’ [45]
This reflects an unstable spatiality that refuses to solidify a spatio-temporal continuity. Akin to Benjy’s observation that the ‘ground wasn't still [and kept] sloping up’ is Kafka’s repudiation of an underlining principle of space–that is, a temporally determined spatial arrangement. [46]
Arguably, an experiential event is at work here that, while ‘overwhelmed with uncertainty,’ it lends itself to random occurrences and strokes of change. [47] This counters Adorno's stance over Gregor’s death, inasmuch as he believes that
‘what perished there was that which had provided the criterion of experience–life lived out to its end.’ [48]
Evidently, Adorno embraces the same universalised fixation for transcendent certitude as realism. But the cleaning lady, this ‘vast charwoman with a mane of white hair’ arrives to refute Adorno. [49] With her use of the future tense as she reassures her employers amidst fits of ‘her happy laughter’ that ‘[she]’ll take care of’ Gregor’s corpse, she does not only accord an affirmative, not least celebratory tenor to the novella. [50] She also infuses it with a sense of ambiguity that leaves narrativity an open-ended task. Even after Gregor’s passing, writing does not cease or culminates; it has no telos. To the contrary: the collapse of character, or the subject and its apodictic nature of self-consciousness, ushers a non-negational, emancipatory potentiality.
Kafka’s universe is incapable of ending; it is an unending process. In this way, form is coextensive with the processual mode of writing. A processual singularisation is what helps the text to tread through the world in ways that provoke new variations on itself, ever reintegrating itself in the world afresh.
One cannot build a literary machine under the normative auspices of a totalising, abiding apparatus. Rather, the machine emerges alongside the writing and awaits the reader to put it in motion. Readers become legitimate interlocutors in the literary exchange insofar as they are willing to plunge into the hypothetical,
‘to read anew, to suspend judgement, to receive impression, to encounter.’ [51]
The speculative engagement with
‘unexpected virtual universes of references’ adjoined to ‘actual territories of existence’ subjects readers to a thought experiment.[52]
This is what grants them an active, participatory role and effectuates a
‘movement from the individuated animal to […] a collective multiplicity’ and minority. [53]
This minority collectivity, however,
‘is no longer or not yet given.’ [54]
Rather, it constitutes ‘the people-yet-to-come’ as Deleuze has it in Cinema Two–namely, a collectivity in the making. [55] Rather than mere passivity, this collective enunciation fosters the consistency of an intervention, contribution, and efficacy on the part of the reader.
V. In conclusion: Idioticise Language! Animalise the Major!
Kafka and Faulkner are testaments to D&G’s belief that representational and transcendent ontologies flatten out singular durations. In espousing the vigorous lexicon of the modernist anxiety upon language, Faulkner’s a-signification and Kafka’s formulation of subjects as assemblages–encompassing human and non-human sensibilities–dissent any academic effort to recruit them in the ranks of the realist estate.
Their minor literatures neither speak the idiom nor repeat the tropes of a major language for an already-known imitation. Rather, they supply the possibilities of thinking and living otherwise that upend the a priori knowledge of the actual. Their utilisation of clichés is conducted in such a way that does not subdue the virtual potentiality of the non-cliché; while, simultaneously, they rework themselves allowing something new to arise.
[1] This is an excerpt from Kafka’s short story, 'The Cares of a Family Man' (1919).
[2] Donald Kartiganer, ‘The Sound and the Fury and Faulkner’s Quest for Form,’ ELH, Vol. 37, No. 4 (1970), 613-639 (p. 614).
[3] Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 132.
[4] For a detailed critique of Hegel’s dialectic theory, see Tony McKenna, ‘Hegelian Dialectics,’ Critique, Vol. 39, No. 1 (2011), 155-172.
[5] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 7.
[6] Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 17.
[7] Simon O’Sullivan, ‘Notes Towards a Minor Art Practice,’ Drain, Vol. 2, No.2 (2005), p. 1.
[8] Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 17.
[9] James G. Hepburn, Arnold Bennett: The Critical Heritage (Cornwall: Routledge, 1997), p. 444.
[10] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: The Continuum, 2003), p. 40.
[11] Brian Massumi, ‘Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible,’ Architectural Design, Vol. 68, No. 133 5/6 (1998), 16-24 (p. 16).
[12] Raymond Tallis, In Defense of Realism (Cambridge: The Cambridge Quarterly, 1988), p. 50.
[13] Massumi, ‘Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible,’ p. 16.
[14] Richard Perrill Adams, Faulkner: Myth and Motion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 219.
[15] Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 23.
[16] Ibid., pp. 22, 25.
[17] Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (London: Vintage, 1995), p. 48.
[18] Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 20.
[19] Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 21.
[20] Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 7.
[21] For a comprehensive analysis on “crystal time”, see Walter Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel, trans. by Howard Eiland (Harvard University Press: Massachusetts, 2019).
[22] For Althusser’s structural causality, see Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1979), 182-93.
[23] Bruno Bosteels, ‘From Text to Territory: Félix Guattari’s Cartographies of the Unconscious’ in Deleuze & Guattari New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture (London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 152.
[24] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: The Continuum, 2003), p. 69.
[25] Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 23.
[26] Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, pp. 30-1.
[27] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 9-10.
[28] It is my contention that a total linguistic breakdown championed by postmodernists points to a yet another individualistic compartmentalisation of reality and identity as self-consistent.
[29] Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, p. 59.
[30] Claire Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze (Australia: Allen & Unwin, 2002), p. 71.
[31] Zahra Barfi et al., ‘A Study of Kafka’s the Metamorphosis in the Light of Freudian Psychological Theory,’ Research Journal of Recent Sciences, Vol. 2, No. 10 (2013), p. 107.
[32] Barfi, ‘A Study of Kafka’s the Metamorphosis in the Light of Freudian Psychological Theory,’ pp. 107- 9.
[33] Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1981), p. 247.
[34] Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis and Other Stories (London: Penguin Books, 2007), p. 90.
[35] Kafka, Metamorphosis, p. 131.
[36] Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 17.
[37] Kafka, Metamorphosis, p. 125.
[38] Anna Secor and Jess Linz, ‘Becoming Minor,’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 35, No. 4 (2017) 568-573 (p. 571).
[39] Kafka, Metamorphosis, p. 125
[40] Ibid., p. 125.
[41] Ibid., pp. 103, 90.
[42] Ibid., p.87
[43] Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 78.
[44] Kafka, Metamorphosis, p. 119.
[45] Ibid., p. 115.
[46] Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, p. 16.
[47] Kafka, Metamorphosis, p. 120.
[48] Adorno, Prisms, p. 260.
[49] Kafka, Metamorphosis, p.128.
[50] Ibid., pp. 144-5.
[51] Secor and Linz, ‘Becoming Minor,’ p. 572
[52] Bruno Bosteels, ‘From Text to Territory: Félix Guattari’s Cartographies of the Unconscious,’ p. 165.
[53] Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 19.
[54] Ibid., p. 19.
[55] O’Sullivan, ‘Notes Towards a Minor Art Practice,’ p. 4.
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The Singular Continuity in Faulkner and Kafka last modified: 16 December 2020
