Literary Systems

Since I haven't read Roussel or much Joyce, and only finished the first volume of Proust's opus, illustrating the dark precursor with examples drawn from these authors wasn't especially helpful for me.  As a result, this is going to be a short post.  I know, promises, promises.  I think I at least vaguely grasp how the Roussel and Proust materials illustrate the way the dark precursor links series by their difference, rather than their identity. 

Everything I know about Roussel I learned from wikipedia.  Luckily, this turns out to be enough to make some sense of Deleuze's example, which refers to Roussel self-described compositional method.

Roussel kept this compositional method a secret until the publication of his posthumous text, How I Wrote Certain of My Books, where he describes it as follows: "I chose two similar words. For example billard (billiard) and pillard (looter). Then I added to it words similar but taken in two different directions, and I obtained two almost identical sentences thus. The two sentences found, it was a question of writing a tale which can start with the first and finish by the second. Amplifying the process then, I sought new words reporting itself to the word billiards, always to take them in a different direction than that which was presented first of all, and that provided me each time a creation moreover. The process evolved/moved and I was led to take an unspecified sentence, of which I drew from the images by dislocating it, a little as if it had been a question of extracting some from the drawings of rebus. For example, Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard = The white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table… must somehow reach the phrase, …les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard = letters [written by] a white man about the hordes of the old plunderer."

I imagine that this method is anything but obvious from reading the original text, which certainly makes the role of the precursor, difference between b and p, dark enough.  Deleuze's point with this examples is that the story, which consists of two series that culminate in those phrases, is held together not by some similarity in what the two phrases refer to (resemblance of the signified), nor even to a likeness between the sounds of key word that appears in them (nominal identity of the signifier), but are joined by the difference between words (differential character).

The precursor, however, by no means acts by virtue of its identity, whether this be a nominal or a homonymic identity: we see this clearly in the case of the quasi-homonym which functions only by becoming indistinguishable from the differential character which separates two words (b and p). Similarly, the homonym appears here not as the nominal identity of a signifier but as the differenciator of distinct signifieds which then produces secondarily an effect of resemblance between the signifieds along with an effect of identity in the signifier.

Perhaps the overarching point here is that homonyms are a good illustration of the structuralist idea that meaning in language is dependent on differences in context.  The same sound (spoken signifier) can point to several different ideas or things in the world. (signifieds).  Which witch is which is only differentiated by context or (sometimes) by the orthographic differentiation of writing.  

This would contradict the idea that the power of language to point to or represent things stems from it's ability to equate different things through generalization.  I use the word "bug" to refer to every actual bug, even though each one is obviously distinct phenomena.  Does our language identify all those bugs with one another, lump them all into a single concept, simply because of the empirical fact that we don't have sounds for each individual bug?  In essence, the sound of the word "bug" functions as a homonym for all the bugs, and even for the same bug on different days.  We actually saw this idea treated back in the introduction as a type of natural blockage that prevents every individual thing from having its own concept of word.  

We have here a reason why the comprehension of the concept cannot extend to infinity: we define a word by only a finite number of words. Nevertheless, speech and writing, from which words are inseparable, give them an existence hic et nunc; a genus thereby passes into existence as such

But if that's how language works, then why doesn't a homonym also create a new concept or reference, instead of just potential confusion?  

Instead, the power of language to refer to particular bugs, or even the general concept of bug, comes from the overall structure of the language and the various possible contexts in which "bug" is said instead of "pug".  The power of "bug" to function as a homonym, so to speak, comes not from identifying individual bugs with the pre-existing category, and corresponding single sound, "bug", but from the way that sound makes all the different bugs in all the different possible contexts resonate.  That bug over there, and this bug over here, the hairy one with the six eyes, and the one from yesterday that fell into your soup.  If the secret of language is its structure, and the structure of the way it relates to our lived experienced, then the resonance between these bugs doesn't come from the fact that they all sound the same, but from the fact that in each context they are different from pugs.  This at least, is my rough translation of what Deleuze concludes from Roussel's example.

In fact, it is not by the poverty of its vocabulary that language invents the form in which it plays the role of dark precursor, but by its excess, by its most positive syntactic and semantic power. In playing this role it differenciates the differences between the different things spoken of, relating these immediately to one another in series which it causes to resonate.

Proust is meant to provide another example of how two series get connected by something which doesn't exist, or at least has no identity in itself.  We saw before how reminiscence in Proust puts us in touch with an in-itself that never really was a present, as if all our experiences were merely dreams that we were awake.  Deleuze characterizes all of Proust's approach to memory as asking the implicit question of how certain qualities come to get associated with certain memories, the exact qualities that enable us to draw together a present and a past as related by a moment of memory.

No doubt, to remain at a first dimension of the experience, there is a resemblance between the two series (the madeleine, breakfast), and even an identity (the taste as a quality which is not only similar but self-identical across the two moments). Nevertheless, the secret does not lie there. The taste possesses a power only be- cause it envelops something =x, something which can no longer be defined by an identity: it envelops Combray as it is in itself, as a fragment of the pure past, in its double irreducibility to the present that it has been (perception) and to the present present in which it might reappear or be reconstituted (voluntary memory). This Combray in itself is defined by its own essential difference, that 'qualitative difference' which, according to Proust, does not exist 'on the surface of the earth', but only at a particular depth. 

The cookie I'm eating now tastes the same as grandma cookies.  I used the same recipe.  Must be some similarity in the chemical structure of the cookie, right?  Sure, but that empirical similarity is not what really explains why they get related by memory.  Many things went on at grandma's house.  My experience eating this cookie right now is likewise enormously complicated.  How does the particular element of the taste of the cookie come to be a salient variable that attaches to both of these experiences and characterizes them as related?  Why does the taste remind me of grandma's house, and not the red color of my hoodie or the way my dog's smell is similar to the wolf's?  Any two moments of experience can have an infinite number of similarities that might link them.  But it's actually the differences -- the points within each experience that stood out as different or important -- that link the experiences as the same, but different.  "Only differences are alike".  But their likeness comes to us only through their differences, through some process that produces them as different, as now but not now, as memories.