Gregg Lambert
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816678020
- eISBN:
- 9781452948058
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816678020.003.0002
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
This chapter defines the concept of a machine and a narrator in Proustian terms. Simply put, the Proustian narrator is a“Body without Organs”—unlike the Cartesian definition—and it is a being of pure ...
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This chapter defines the concept of a machine and a narrator in Proustian terms. Simply put, the Proustian narrator is a“Body without Organs”—unlike the Cartesian definition—and it is a being of pure sensation (no eyes, no ears, no memory, and above all, no thought), while the machine of Deleuze and Guattari is anything that interrupts a flow. Therefore the literary machine is a spiderweb—a vast and complicated partly animal and partly herbal web that interrupts the flows of signs and impressions that get caught up in it; and the narrator is the spider that drags its heavy body to the place of the interruption and spins a cocoon around the impression it finds there (i.e., to develop the impression into a sign) in order to finally drink its blood (extract its essence, its spiritual idea).Less
This chapter defines the concept of a machine and a narrator in Proustian terms. Simply put, the Proustian narrator is a“Body without Organs”—unlike the Cartesian definition—and it is a being of pure sensation (no eyes, no ears, no memory, and above all, no thought), while the machine of Deleuze and Guattari is anything that interrupts a flow. Therefore the literary machine is a spiderweb—a vast and complicated partly animal and partly herbal web that interrupts the flows of signs and impressions that get caught up in it; and the narrator is the spider that drags its heavy body to the place of the interruption and spins a cocoon around the impression it finds there (i.e., to develop the impression into a sign) in order to finally drink its blood (extract its essence, its spiritual idea).
