“Deleuze And Literature: Metaphor And Indirect Discourse” by John Marks: Summary and Critique

🔄 Rejection of Metaphor in Literature

• 🔹 Deleuze rejects metaphor as central to literary expression:

“The general rejection of metaphor that informs Deleuze’s work on literature can be more precisely defined as a theory of free indirect discourse” (Marks, 1997, p. 234).

• 🔹 Metaphor is seen as “disastrous for the study of language”, only a secondary effect of indirect discourse:

“Metaphors and metonymies are merely effects… they presuppose indirect discourse” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 76; quoted in Marks, 1997, p. 238).
🌈 (Theme: Against Representation)

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🗣️ Free Indirect Discourse as a Literary Principle

• 🟣 Free indirect discourse is key to Deleuze’s literary philosophy:

“It is no longer metaphor… it is free indirect discourse” (Deleuze, 1986, p. 73; in Marks, 1997, p. 239).

• 🟣 It reflects the multiplicity of voices in literature, enabling a zone of indiscernibility between narrator and character:

“Literature is a matter of becomings… a zone of indiscernibility” (Marks, 1997, p. 234).
🌈 (Theme: Multiplicity & Enunciation)

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🌍 American Literature as a Model

• 🟢 Deleuze privileges American literature for its experimental and deterritorialized character:

“Anglo-American literature is somehow ‘superior’… a literature of flight, rupture, deterritorialisation” (Marks, 1997, p. 235).

• 🟢 Writers like Whitman, Melville, and Kerouac illustrate the “line of flight” and “open road” ideology, resisting interpretation:

“Whitman’s essential message was the Open Road… the bravest doctrine man has ever proposed to himself” (Lawrence, 1964, quoted in Marks, 1997, p. 233).
🌈 (Theme: Deterritorialization & Experimentation)

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🧠 The Impersonal Force of Literature

• 🔴 Writing becomes impersonal; the self is dissolved:

“Literature is characterised by ‘the force of the impersonal’” (Deleuze, 1993, p. 13; cited in Marks, 1997, p. 234).

• 🔴 Great writers are “symptomatologists,” revealing signs and flows rather than telling personal stories:

“They may themselves be physically frail… overwhelmed by the life that traverses them” (Marks, 1997, p. 234).
🌈 (Theme: Impersonality & Affects)

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🌀 Characters without Identity

• 🟡 Characters like Bartleby and Nashe resist psychological or moral interpretation:

“Bartleby’s ‘I prefer not to’… hollows out a zone of indiscernibility” (Marks, 1997, p. 237).
“Nashe… remains obscure… describing Nashe’s enigmatic inner world” (Marks, 1997, p. 237).
🌈 (Theme: Subject Dissolution)

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🎥 Application in Cinema

• 🔵 Deleuze extends free indirect discourse to cinema (e.g., Cinema 1 & 2):

“Cinema’s perpetual destiny… from objective perception to subjective perception” (Deleuze, 1986, p. 72; in Marks, 1997, p. 239).

• 🔵 Directors like Godard and Antonioni use free indirect discourse to displace the viewer’s position and create polyphonic narratives.
  🌈 (Theme: Media Crossovers)

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🌿 Landscape, Percepts, and the Earth

• 🟢 Deleuze argues that art is geophilosophical, rooted in the earth, not metaphor:

“We are not in the world, we become with the world… everything is vision, becoming” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 169; in Marks, 1997, p. 243).

• 🟢 Lawrence and Melville show how landscapes “see” and affect the subject, dissolving individual consciousness:

“The landscape sees as much as the subject… the mind is a membrane” (Zourabichvili, 1996, cited in Marks, 1997, p. 243).
🌈 (Theme: Percepts & Territory)

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📚 Polyphony and Democratic Expression

• 🟣 Literature allows the coexistence of voices, especially in American literature:

“Whitman is… a poet of polyphony” (Marks, 1997, p. 236).
“The novel contains… polyphonic, and plurivocal compounds” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 188; in Marks, 1997, p. 239).
🌈 (Theme: Plurality & Minor Literature)

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🌌 Affects and Percepts in Literary Creation

• 🔴 Literature creates percepts and affects, not metaphors:

“Percepts aren’t perceptions… affects aren’t feelings, they’re becomings” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1995, p. 137; in Marks, 1997, p. 241).

• 🔴 Melville and Kafka are cited as creators of perceptual intensities, not interpreters of meaning.
  🌈 (Theme: Becoming & Intensity)

🌀 Poststructuralism & Anti-Hermeneutics

• 🔸 Challenge to traditional interpretation and hermeneutics: Marks emphasizes Deleuze’s resistance to interpretation in favor of flows, becomings, and intensities, destabilizing meaning as fixed or representational.

“Abandon interpretation in favour of ‘fluxes’ or flows” (Marks, 1997, p. 234).

• 🔸 Marks positions Deleuze as part of a poststructuralist rejection of metaphor and symbol in favor of immanence and literal becoming.

“Metaphor… has no real significance… all language is indirect, or ‘oblique’” (Marks, 1997, p. 238).
🌈 (Contribution: Critiques metaphoric language and interpretive models)

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🎭 Narratology / Voice Theory

• 🗣️ The paper significantly contributes to narrative theory through its analysis of free indirect discourse as central to literary enunciation.

“Free indirect discourse… blurs the distinction between narrator, character and author” (Marks, 1997, p. 239).

• 🗣️ This challenges classic narratology’s rigid distinctions between first-person/third-person or author/narrator/character, suggesting instead a polyvocal or plural mode of storytelling.

“All discourse is indirect… many voices in a voice, murmurings, speaking in tongues” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, quoted in Marks, 1997, p. 238).
🌈 (Contribution: Advances polyphonic and hybrid narrative theory)

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🌍 Minor Literature / World Literature

• 🌐 The article develops Deleuze & Guattari’s concept of “minor literature”, showing how American literature functions as a destabilizing, experimental space.

“American literature is a minor literature ‘par excellence’… its fragmentary nature lends itself to collective statements” (Marks, 1997, p. 236).

• 🌐 By doing so, Marks contributes to the growing theoretical interest in non-canonical, transnational, and politically minor writing.

“American literature creates something schizophrenic from the neurosis of the Old World” (Marks, 1997, p. 236).
🌈 (Contribution: Reinforces minoritarian aesthetics and postcolonial resonance)

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🧩 Affect Theory

• ❤️ Marks connects Deleuze’s theory of affects—intensities beyond emotion or cognition—with literary practices.

“Affects aren’t feelings… they’re becomings that spill over beyond whoever lives through them” (Marks, 1997, p. 241).

• ❤️ This influences the affective turn in literary theory, where emotion, sensation, and intensity replace interpretation and psychological realism.

“Literature creates percepts and affects, not metaphors” (Marks, 1997, p. 241).
🌈 (Contribution: Deepens affect theory’s engagement with literary form)

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🌄 Ecocriticism / Geophilosophy

• 🌿 Marks shows how Deleuze’s geophilosophy proposes a new relationship between literature, subjectivity, and environment: the landscape sees.

“The landscape sees as much as the subject… the mind is a membrane rather than a searchlight” (Marks, 1997, p. 243).

• 🌿 This moves beyond anthropocentric readings to consider how geography, materiality, and affect form literature.

“Art is the Earth’s song… becoming is geographical” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, cited in Marks, 1997, pp. 241–243).
🌈 (Contribution: Contributes to ecocritical, materialist approaches in literary theory)

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🧠 Experimental Literary Form & Modernism/Postmodernism

• 📚 By exploring authors like Whitman, Melville, Kafka, Beckett, and Lawrence, Marks aligns Deleuze with the tradition of modernist and postmodern experimentation.

“Great writers… invent ways of living, of surviving, resisting, and freeing life” (Marks, 1997, p. 234).

• 📚 This supports a non-linear, fragmented understanding of literature where logic and character dissolve into flows and becomings.

“The American writer must write spontaneously in fragments, or ‘specimens’” (Marks, 1997, p. 236).
🌈 (Contribution: Links modernist experimentation with Deleuzian ontology)

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🎬 Intermedial Theory / Cinema Studies

• 🎞️ Marks shows how Deleuze’s literary theory overlaps with cinematic theory, especially through Cinema 1 and Cinema 2.

“Cinema’s perpetual destiny is to make us move from an objective perception to a subjective perception” (Marks, 1997, p. 239).

• 🎞️ This contributes to intermedial studies, where literature, cinema, and art share aesthetic functions—e.g., the indirect discourse of the image.

“Free indirect discourse is an aesthetic cogito to which cinema is ideally suited” (Marks, 1997, p. 234).
🌈 (Contribution: Connects narrative techniques across media)

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🧬 Materialism / Assemblage Theory

• 🧩 Marks presents literature not as symbolic but as a material assemblage of affects, language, subjectivity, and sensation.

“Speaking in tongues… the molecular assemblage of enunciation” (Marks, 1997, p. 238).

• 🧩 This reinforces non-representational theories of literature that align with new materialism and assemblage thought.
  🌈 (Contribution: Develops a non-human-centered, assemblage-based literary materialism)

⚖️ Philosophical Overreach

• 🧠 Too abstract for literary analysis: Critics may argue that Marks, by channeling Deleuze’s philosophy, often departs from grounded textual analysis, making the paper more philosophical than literary.

📍 Focuses more on Deleuze’s ontology than the works themselves.

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📉 Marginalization of Metaphor

• 🔍 Neglects metaphor’s productive role: The paper follows Deleuze in rejecting metaphor wholesale, but this can be seen as reductive, especially when metaphor is a cornerstone of literary aesthetics.

📍 “Against metaphor” stance may ignore how metaphor generates complexity and ambiguity in literature.

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📚 Selective Canon

• 📘 Overemphasis on Anglo-American and male writers: While celebrating “minor literature,” the essay paradoxically centers canonical white male authors (Melville, Whitman, Lawrence, etc.), overlooking more diverse minoritarian voices.

📍 Limited representation of gendered, racialized, or non-Western ‘minor’ literatures.

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🌀 Ambiguity in Methodology

• 🧩 Conceptual slippage: Terms like becoming, assemblage, and percept are used evocatively but can feel vague or underdefined in a literary context, making application difficult for close reading.

📍 Lacks methodological clarity for literary critics unfamiliar with Deleuzian vocabulary.

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📽️ Overextension into Cinema

• 🎬 Cinema analysis diverts from literary focus: The integration of Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 insights, while illuminating, might distract from the core argument about literature, creating a diffuse theoretical field.

📍 Blurs the boundary between literary and cinematic analysis, potentially weakening focus.

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🧭 Directionless in Application

• 🔄 Non-linear, deterritorialized structure: Although this mirrors Deleuzian logic, the article’s structure can appear unanchored, making it challenging for readers seeking cohesive literary theory.

📍 May feel like a “rhizome” of ideas without clear critical payoff.

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🧓 Lack of Contemporary Examples

• ⌛ Few modern or experimental texts beyond 20th-century canon: Despite theoretical openness, the essay focuses on earlier works (Melville, Beckett, etc.) and lacks strong engagement with contemporary or avant-garde literature post-1990s.

📍 Missed opportunity to apply Deleuze to newer postmodern or digital literature.

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🤖 Inaccessibility

• 🧬 Heavy jargon and reliance on Deleuzian idiom: The density of Deleuzean terminology may alienate readers not already versed in poststructuralism or continental philosophy.

📍 Difficult for entry-level students or general literary scholars to engage with.