The Philosophy of Horror

Shock Value: A Deleuzean Encounter with James Purdy’s Narrow Rooms

Shock Value Robert F. Gross There is no more a method for learning than a method for finding treasures. —Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition The prospect of writing an essay on Narrow Rooms and the works of Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze is both inviting and challenging. Inviting, because this dynamic duo of French philosophy often investigated artworks as an important part of their philosophizing—the fictions of Franz Kafka, the music of Robert Schumann, the paintings of J. M. W. Turner, and the horror film Willard, to name only a few. Works of art, they asserted, had the power to challenge and break up deadening assumptions and habits not only of daily living but of philosophy as well. Great writers create “new forms of expression, new ways of thinking, and an entirely original language.”1 Challenging, because Deleuze and Guattari were quite explicit about how art should not be used in philosophy. Art, they argued, should not simply be used to furnish examples that illustrated preexisting philosophical concepts. If I wrote an essay that used Narrow Rooms to explain Deleuze and Guattrai’s concept of “de-territorialization,” I would be paying them the compliment of showing admiration for the concepts they developed, but I would be completely betraying their idea of what philosophy is all about. For them, philosophy is meant to venture into the realm of the unthought, to force us out of comfortable and lazy reassertions and into the construction of new connections and concepts. Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari rejected the widespread intellectual habit of “interpreting” works of art, which they dubbed “interpretosis.” 199 A Deleuzean Encounter with James Purdy’s Narrow Rooms 200 Robert F. Gross The interpreter forces the artifact into the Procrustean bed of a preexisting system, whether Marxist (“It about class conflict”), Freudian (“It’s about Mommy, Daddy, and me”), or any number of other critical schools. Interpretosis reduces the teeming, varied, “molecular” movements found in the work to simple “molar” oppositions—proletariat vs. bourgeois, mother vs. father, male vs. female, human vs. nonhuman, good vs. evil, and so forth. The goal of philosophy, science, and art is not to reduce experiences to mere oppositions but to render experience more complex, opening up new and vital possibilities for us. “Experiment, never interpret,” urges Deleuze.2 So to approach James Purdy’s novel à la Deleuze and Guattari is to avail ourselves of the tools that they devised but also to accept the joyous challenge of realizing that we are not working within a closed system of thought but are using tools that open up on the world and lead to innovation and construction. Deleuze once said that he would like to teach a course the way Bob Dylan sang a song, with room for playfulness, clowning, and improvisation. For him and Guattari, learning was not learning to mimic but learning how to generate something new: “We learn nothing from those who say: ‘Do as I do.’ Our only teachers are those who tell us to ‘do with me,’ and are able to emit signs to be developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce.” Thought begins not with a preestablished method but with an encounter: “Something in the world forces us to think.”3 In this case the encounters are multiple: I encounter the writings of Deleuze and Guattari , and I encounter Narrow Rooms, with each forcing me to think. You, in turn, encounter my essay here as well as, I hope, encountering the writings of Deleuze, Guattari, and Purdy for yourself. No encounter should close in on itself—it should proliferate, leading to ever-new connections. But when I say “I” encounter the work, I misrepresent the encounter, because Deleuze and Guattari see each of us as a multiplicity. I am not only an assemblage of fairly obvious roles and identifications (male, gay, U.S. citizen, Euro-American, son, teacher, scholar . . . ) but a myriad of fugitive impulses, many of which may go unnamed or unidentified by me. The attractions and aversions that arise one moment, only to vanish the next, as I walk down the street reacting to weather, facades, passersby, and ads, are evidence that I am a creature far more various than the self-descriptors I just listed in parentheses. Not only do art and philosophy help me be aware of these molecular movements of multiplicity, they foster new ones as well, and that—for Deleuze and Guattari—is all for the best. Each one of us...