Gilles Deleuze: Travels in Literature (review)

This book is, as Mary Bryden says in her Acknowledgements section, a journey into journeying. The bipartite title is an indication of its double focus: it is simultaneously a study of Deleuze as he explores certain literary texts and a study of the authors thereby explored. Rather than writers such as Proust, Kafka or Sacher-Masoch about whom Deleuze wrote full books and who have thus understandably generated the most commentary by Deleuzian critics, the authors chosen are those about whom the philosopher wrote significant pieces but whose importance can be said to mark his work in a more diffuse—or rhizomatic, to borrow a more Deleuzian term—way. They are varied in terms of era, language and culture: the five chapters deal with, in turn, T.E. Lawrence, Herman Melville, D.H. Lawrence, Michel Tournier and Samuel Beckett. In line with the majority of Deleuze’s investigations into literature, they are not, however, varied in terms of gender, as Bryden drily points out. The Afterword seeks to redress this imbalance, focussing on (Deleuze’s commentary on) the work of Hélène Cixous. What all these authors do have in common, on the other hand, and what provides the focus of the book, is their ‘polyvalent relationship with the notion of travel’ (p. 8). The Introduction deftly outlines the book’s overall problematic, glossing Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome and explaining why, as a figure of flux and becomings, it provides a useful tool to consider not only literature and travel but also literature as travel. The different chapters then take their cue from the works they respectively study to bring out how these very diverse writers are each in their own way more preoccupied with the journey than with the point of arrival, with the processual rather than the teleological. All are rich, the chapters on T.E. Lawrence (‘Travelling by Camel’) and Beckett (‘Travelling by Foot and Bicycle’) to my mind being particularly insightful. The book is very well written, and combines an impressive erudition with a high degree of textual sensitivity. My one slight criticism is that it presumes a degree of familiarity with Deleuze’s work that may lessen the impact of Bryden’s insights for readers less thoroughly immersed in his thinking. This is instanced, for example, in the fact that rather than glossing words such as ‘territorialization’ and ‘deterritorialization’ when first used, they are sometimes deployed as though their meaning was transparent. On occasion the reader has the impression of being ‘inside’ Deleuze so much that it can be a little difficult to ascertain where Deleuze stops and the writer in question begins, or whether the analysis in question is that of Deleuze or that of the author. But this is a tiny quibble which is due in part to the generosity and carefulness of Bryden’s approach: this is a highly thoughtful book in every sense of the word. It is a pleasure to read and constitutes a very valuable addition to the discussion of Deleuze and literature.