Riffing on G.H.

I'm sitting here bored out of my mind, poor, recovering from a hangover, drinking a beer, and listening to High On Fire (which has to be one of the worst band names ever), so, to fill the time, I've decided to post something on G.H. Hopefully it's interesting. Hopefully I can remember the text (Dave took my copy camping). Hopefully it makes sense. Hopefully it's not too long. Hopefully I post it correctly (never done this blogging thing before).

I have to say that I love narratives like THE PASSION ACCORDING TO G.H.: narratives which not only recount how a specific event undoes a subject, but recount how the recounting of that event is difficult or even impossible. And I don't just mean self-reflexive narratives that reflective on the general problem that inheres between a representation and what it's supposed to represent. I mean particular events that are in some way ineffable, that resist being captured by representation, or that have at least an asymptotic relationship to attempts at representation--events that function as black holes that suck up the light that representations try to shine on them, and, in so doing, undo the subject that is doing the representing. Self & world are destroyed at the same time.

The narrative's Scylla & Charybdis is nonsense and sense. In order to stay true to the event, G.H. must, in her retelling, avoid having the narrative fall into complete indeterminacy and avoid forcing it to mean something, meaning being necessarily conventional. These are the problems, to my understanding, that mysticism and negative theology encounter. And, I believe, G.H. follows the same route: using paradox and negation. I would really love to do a sustained reading of the use of paradox in the book. Unfortunately, I don't have the book in front of my so I can't even look at a couple of examples. My worry is that she sometimes uses paradox as a convention: that is, in the end, the book comes to "mean" in the sense used above, it comes to signify the ineffable through a conventional, rather than productive, use of paradox. In other words, the whole book is a whole lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. Although I don't think this is necessarily true. And, to be honest, I don't even feel equipped to make such a judgment because I couldn't even start to explain what a "productive use of paradox" might look like (although my starting point would be Deleuze's use of paradox in his LOGIC OF SENSE). (Another problem is the translation: in his preface, the translator says that the difficulty of the language often forced him to summarize.)

Given my skepticism, I would still love to assign this book in a class on Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze's starting point is that "thought comes from the outside." Thought, for Deleuze, is certainly possible in human beings, but it is not something that springs up naturally in us: something, an event, a person, a perception, forces us to think; we are constrained to think. And, typically, under the pressure of the shock, we force what makes us think to conform to conventional models of representation, we make it "mean." Instead, Deleuze calls on us to follow the shock, which appears as a sign (for the Deleuze of DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION, as I understand it, signs are cracks in the phenomenal, representation field), to unfold the sign, to become with it, which involves the forgetting of ourselves and our word (Deleuze says that thinking must first forget). I don't know any other way of describing G.H.'s situation. She walks in the room a bourgeois woman, but, under the shock of what she sees in the room, she unfolds the signs that do not conform to her representational models, and, in the process, she becomes with them. She goes on a schizophrenic voyage through time and space--and matter. (The text also provides a wonderful example of Deleuze's becoming-animal).

Now, this journey, to my mind, is not fully schizophrenic: it follows a definite master narrative. Destruction is followed by construction. Process and becoming are forced to serve some end. This is why I much prefer the destructive part of the narrative in which G.H. unfolds the signs and becomes with the room and the bug (I also think that the problem of telling the story is more prevalent during this part than near the end). But the existentialist (maybe the Joycean?) in her feels the need to build back up, to come to some point, to some kind of transformation of her subjectivity such that she is more whole, more true, more authentic. In the end, I feel that the material of the narrative is forced to conform to a narrative arc that is artificial. I feel that Maurice Blanchot's evaluation of Sartre's NAUSEA could apply here: yes, but you could go further. Blanchot felt that, though Sartre's book went far in undermining teleological narratives, because it relied to heavily on ideas that are exterior to the book, it was in the end too much of a roman a these. While Lispector's book is far from a roman a these, in the end it forces its material to conform to a pre-established narrative arc.

Some other things that interest me in the book, but I can't talk about for whatever reason, are: its relation to theology; the relation between the senses (specifically sight, touch, and ultimately taste).

Anyway, hopefully this wasn't too boring. Or too removed from the book!