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Abstract
This essay begins with an examination of Balzac’s “Louis Lambert,” an angelic figure who ends his life in a catatonic state, a condition as inert as a stone. It goes on to examine the intersection of the theological and geological in Balzac’s writings, and thinks about how this might relate to the work of similar figures in stories by authors such as Melville and Nescio, as well as a drawing by Paul Klee. The essay also considers Deleuze’s writings on Melville’s Bartleby, desire, hypochondria and the body without organs. It offers a psychoanalytic interpretation of the latter’s writings, and argues that the process of mineralisation undergone by the figures under examination, which might be described as a form of material immanence, is one that is enthralled by the drive to return to an inorganic state.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Henry Miller, “Reading the Face of the World” in Henry Miller: On Writing, ed. T.H. Moore (New York: New Directions, 1964) 42.
2 Henry Miller, “My Two Beginnings” in Henry Miller: On Writing 117.
3 Ibid.
4 Honoré de Balzac, Louis Lambert, trans. Clara Bell and James Wearing (Project Gutenberg e-Book, 2010), <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1943/1943-h/1943-h.htm> (accessed 17 June 2017).
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 My discussion of angels is indebted to two collections of essays on the subject: Angels in the Early Modern World, eds. Peter Marshall and Alexandra Walsham (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006); A Companion to Angels in Medieval Philosophy, ed. Tobias Hoffman (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
14 Honoré de Balzac, Preface to The Wild Ass’s Skin (Project Gutenberg eBook, 2010), <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1307/1307-h/1307-h.htm> (accessed 17 June 2017).
15 Ibid.
16 Balzac, Louis Lambert.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 Gilles Deleuze, “Bartleby; or, the Formula” in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. D.W. Smith (London: Verso, 1998) 79.
22 Ibid.
23 Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” in Billy Budd, Sailor and Selected Tales, ed. Robert Milder (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998) 11.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid. passim.
26 Deleuze, “Bartleby; or, the Formula” 79.
27 Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” 12.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid. 21.
31 Ibid. 39.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid. 14.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid. 22.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid. 31.
38 Ibid. 29.
39 Ibid. 37.
40 On this view, it may be no coincidence that, like Balzac, Melville knew of Cuvier’s Catastrophist theories, even as he was prone to parodying the latter’s drive to classify. In the satirical chapters of Moby Dick, for example, the writer displays a detailed knowledge of cetology, the science of marine mammals, differentiating between “pre-adamite whales” and other “antichronical creatures” whose fossilised fragments were found across Europe and America, and those that are said “to have entered the Ark.” Herman Melville, Moby Dick (Project Gutenberg e-Book, 2008), <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/2701-h/2701-h.htm> (accessed 17 June 2017).
41 See Brian Massumi, “Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgments” to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987) xvi.
42 Roger Caillois, The Writing of Stones, trans. Barbara Bray (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1985) 1.
43 Ibid. 2.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid. 3.
46 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone, 1992) 60.
47 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone, 2004) 166.
48 Thomas Aquinas in Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003) 62–63. Stephens makes a similar case for the virtual body of the angel, but does not relate this condition explicitly to an absence of internal organs.
49 Balzac, Louis Lambert.
50 Deleuze, “Bartleby; or, the Formula” 80.
51 Nescio, “The Freeloader” in Amsterdam Stories [1933], trans. Damion Searls (New York: New York Review Books, 2012) 5.
52 Ibid. 10.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid. 29.
55 Ibid. 33.
56 Deleuze, “Bartleby; or, the Formula” 72.
57 Balzac, Louis Lambert.
58 Ibid.
59 Robert Walser, Looking at Pictures, trans Susan Bernofsky and Lydia Davis (New York: New Directions, 2015) 20.
60 Deleuze, “Bartleby; or, the Formula” 72.
61 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961) 11.
62 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays [1905], “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic, 2000) 7: 222.
63 Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (London: Routledge, 1996) 264.
64 Walter Benjamin, “Robert Walser” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–34, trans. Rodney Livingston et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999) 257.
65 Paul Klee in Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London: Continuum, 1993) 16.
66 Paul Klee in John Sallis, Transfigurements: On the True Sense of Art (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008) 19.
67 Paul Klee, The Diaries of Paul Klee: 1898–1918 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1964) 244.