parallax , 2002, vol. 8, no.

4, 108112

The Fall: Fictocritical Writing

Stephen Muecke

You have invited me to lunch because you want to pick my brains. So we meet at Central, then walk down the road to the Malaya. This is our rst meeting and I immediately nd you attractive. Over curry, which you nd too spicy, you are curious about my name. I say it is of German origin, and means little y. Because you speak French I can point out that it is a cognate of mouche: My name is Monsieur Mouche. And you laugh. **** Once Jacques Derrida asked us for a name: We must invent (a name) for those critical inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits.1 The name we would have given him was ctocriticism, but he went on anyway to write, and perform, critically, and sometimes ctionally, for instance by telling stories while making his philosophical arguments. One common eVect of this was the collapsing of the detached and all-knowing subject into the text, so that his (or your) performance as writer includes dealing with a problem all contemporary writers must face: how the hell did I get here? Faced with masses of ways of knowing things coming from all points of the compass, the contemporary writer asks what now can legitimate his or her point of view, and then tends not to just add to existing views of the world, but traces a path (which the reader will follow, avidly of course) showing how we got to this position, and what is at stake. What is at stake for ctocritical writing is the task of deforming literature in a world whose politics is more de ned by global transcultural relationships than by pride in ones national literature; by pragmatism more than idealism; by new ways of feeling emerging out of decades of reading in a multimedia fashion; and by the signi cant in uence of new post-structuralist philosophies and post-modern literary experiments. When criticism is well-written, and ction has more ideas than usual, the distinction between the two starts to break down. It is a little crisis because criticism cant be relied upon to keep its distance, and ction cant be relied upon to stay in its imaginary and sometimes politically irrelevant worlds.2 The whole arti ce of literary criticism was built up in order to do one thing really; to unmask the secrets of art. And the ction was always there re-enchanting the world by putting on the beautiful masks again and again.
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parallax ISSN 1353-4645 print/ISSN 1460-700X online 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk /journals DOI: 10.1080/1353464022000028000

Gilles Deleuze thought of a contrast which will serve me well in this essay, the distinction between concepts and percepts.3 Criticism uses concepts and ction percepts. Philosophy, according to Deleuze, is about the invention of new concepts which have the abstraction and exibility to be taken up by others and used. Art, on the other hand, invents percepts, monumental perceptions if you like, which are just there, either they work or they dont. They can stand alone. You can use someone elses percept, but it will be an imitation. And percepts and concepts chase each other around successively masking and unmasking. **** You smile at me, like a ower opening brightly. The sun must be your reference, but it does not matter to us if the sun is there or not, adjudicating. The smile is a percept, it is not in you or at me. Nobody invented the smile, we are the bodies in whose relationship the smile, as an idea and aVect, can manifest itself. Can I leave it at that? No, things move on and change, the smile now is gone and you are talking about a symbol in Les Fleurs du Mal, or something, and I want to know what your smile meant, by which I mean, what concept can I attach to it? The space between us dilates, it opens and closes with aVect, feelings which are warm or cool, fast or slow, sad or joyous. As fast as I think I know what you really mean, which has got nothing to do with your interior, there are more words, half nished sentences, and the unbearable beauty of the curve of a lip. You refer me to a website: Deleuze on Spinoza, his 1978 lecture: Sadness will be any passion whatsoever which involves a diminution of my power of acting, and joy will be any passion involving an increase in my power of acting. Carry that idea over into writing, you say, and we will always nd a way to unblock creative ows. Your succession of masks outstrips my unmasking, so that by the next day I have understood nothing and you have become a fantasy, so overpoweringly present that all I want to do is love you, to bring something else into existence: more trouble, no doubt. Fantasies thrive on very little, on the glimpse, the hint, the allusion. If you know too much (all the secrets) there is nothing left for the imagination to play with, and the idea withers. And of course there is another who is always there, critical of everything, commenting . This too is nourishment. Deleuze is impatient with people who believe they can make a novel out of everyday perceptions, memories, notes or observations. The task is to extract a percept, a bloc of sensations which can stand alone, disconnected from the material (language), the author or the reader. A sun- ower a ` la van Gogh is his head haunted by terror.4 The shabby detective invented by Chandler or maybe Poe (the aYrmation of the idea of this character lifting out of those mean streets) has become a giant, a god. He is everywhere and persists in time, and cannot be destroyed, such is the nature of the percept. You can invalidate a concept, but not a percept. Perceptions are so imsy, and memory so unreliable. Can I piece together your face, in my mind? It is just a ash, then gone. As the rest of you builds up its fantastical proportions. I have rung and said this cannot go on, we will meet, one last time, but
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I have only seen you twice, for two hours, then three quarters of an hour. We will have a picnic in the Botanic Gardens. I will greet you, and as you oVer your face for the cheek-kisses my gaze will insist, and then our kiss will bury itself in the storm of sensations I was talking about. Concept/percept, who cares? **** I invite you to the cinema, but you say you cannot come. You are stuck where you are, you say, writing your thesis about symbols and meanings, and I imagine a paradise full of owers. In Vertigo, Sam Rohdie tells us, Scottie (the detective, played by James Stewart) falls in love with an image [...] from the beginning and so do we.5 I watch it on video. It is about the cinema as deception: Kim Novak in Vertigo has multiple identities. She is Judy Barton making believe she is Madeleine Elster to mislead the detective ... Scottie is doubly mislead. He follows a false trail and a false person and falls in love with a false identity, with Madeleine Elster who is not Madeleine Elster. The actors masquerade as characters who in turn masquerade as other characters in a mis-en-abyme structure which is a vertiginous fall into the loss of representation. Scottie was never fully himself ; having been traumatized by an accident, he suVers from vertigo. As he encounters Kim Novak and her false identities (one of which is Elsters dead grandmother Carlotta Valde z bequeathing suicide as a tragic fate) he falls for illusion again and again. Remarkably, his passion is the only thing which is real, it is vertiginous, a state of unbalance. Movement, not identity, is the essence of passion. And cinema, where it becomes the ricochet of light into the unknown. At the end, says Rohdie, the lm restores Scottie to himself and the truth. The price of truth is dreadful: he loses Madeleine, and twice over, as Madeleine who ctively died, then as Judy who really does die, taking with her his illusions and his happiness. 6 The detective is never happier, it seems, than when he is walking into the trap made specially for him, and in the context of the lm, the art, there is no exit. Only as directors, spectators and actors can we walk away, but to other illusions? For as Rohdie wisely observes: To sustain a love, perhaps to sustain all love, one can never be wholly genuine or completely oneself .7 **** I will go back to the University to teach about texts and pitcher plants. Ce zannes paintings, I reckon, are not representations of Mont Saint Victoire, they are snares for the eye: the viewers gaze must be captured in something like an organic way.8 So what kind of capture does the literary text perform, when it is nothing much more than black tracks? What is important in a text is not what it means, but what it does and incites to do. What it does: the charge of aVect it contains and transmits. What it incites to do: the metamorphoses of this potential
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energy into other things other texts, but also paintings, photographs, lm sequences, political actions, decisions, erotic inspirations, acts of insubordination, economic initiatives, etc. 9 Its mode of capture is multiple, sensational. The writing teacher says: Make sure you cover sight, smell, touch and so on in your story. Ask yourself at the end of each section: what has the reader felt, and then also, what has the reader learned? Percept and concept. **** Pitchers can be up to 7 inches long, curved and decumbent, widening prominently toward the mouth. You fall into them. They are not owers, they are evergreen leaves, modi ed into pitchers and arranged in a rosette, the pitcher usually being full or partly full of rainwater. Leaf colour varies from bright yellow-green to dark purple and most commonly a middle variation with strong red venation. The leaves, or pitchers, are produced each year from stems arising from the rhizomes which can live 20 to 30 years under the ground. The leaf edges are curled around and fused to form a liquid-holding vessel, similar in shape to a cornucopia. How are the insects snared by this carnivorous plant? They are attracted, visually no doubt, to the colorful leaf rosettes that only resemble owers (ah, yes; they are all masks), and the red lip of the pitcher is particularly attractive as a landing zone. The red veins that lead downward are baited with nectar. And as we follow this lure, we reach the curve of the tube, which is lined with ne hairs, all pointing downward, so that we cannot work our way back. The pitcher, like the text, is a one-way zone. We, the victims destined to donate nitrogen, phosphorous and vitamins to the plant, fall deep into the pitcher, struggling for a while in the rainwater and the dew. A digestive enzyme soon dissolves us. The English call them Frogs Britches, in Madagascar they are known as apongandrano (water drum). You, my critical friends, have now learned the diVerence between the true ower and the deceptive carnivorous trap. This is something the insects which assure the survival of the nepenthes madagascariensis are destined never to learn. Attracted by beauty, they are suddenly transformed from free ight into a tumbling cadence. For each insect-victim it happens only once. But in writing, as Kim Mahood reminds us, we can do it over and over. Why? Because we can attach a concept to a percept. I fall from a horse, over and over. In the moment of falling my body is charged electrifyingly with the surge and sweat of the horse, to which I am linked in a ying arc. For this moment I am raw energy, foam and sweat, volitionless, a momentum in the extremities of horsepower. This is less a memory than an experience I have again and again. When the link breaks and my body ies away from the horse, hits the ground, hurt, collects itself, it turns into memory. The story to which I need to give a form is punctuated with charged moments of this nature, which do not lose their intensity with the passage of time.10
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We fall for the one who resembles a ower; this is the operation of a romantic percept as old and as complicated as the bouquet. But to know the structure of the plant (or the text) as a concept, is to be able, incredibly, to climb out again, wet, dripping, exhausted, on the lip of the world again. Now you know: that was some kind of trick. You look at the horizon, now, a little more shrewdly, more critically. But the fall! And you glance back with a delicious shudder.
Notes
1

Derek Attridge, This Strange Institution Called Literature: An Interview with Jacques Derrida, in Derek Attridge (ed.), Derrida: Acts of Literature (London: Routledge 1992), p.52. See also, on ctocriticism, Heather Kerr, Sympathetic Topographies, parallax , no. 19 (2001), pp.107126. 2 See Noel King, Reading White Noise: Floating Remarks, The Critical Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 3 (1991). 3 See also Ian Buchanan, Deleuze and American (Mythopoeic) Literature, Southern Review , vol. 34, no. 2 (1998), pp.7285. 4 Gilles Deleuze and Fe lix Guattari, Quest-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit, 1991), p.160.

Sam Rohdie, Promised Lands: Cinema, Geography, Modernism (London: BFI, 2001), p.107. 6 Rohdie, Promised Lands , p.107. 7 Rohdie, Promised Lands , p.108. 8 Alphonso Lingis, Excesses, Eros & Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), p.13. 9 Jean-Franc ois Lyotard, Driftworks (New York: Semiotext(e), 1984), pp.910. 10 Kim Mahood, Craft for a Dry Lake: A Memoir (Sydney: Transworld, 2000), p.28.

Stephen Muecke is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. He is co-editor of The Cultural Studies Review , which regularly publishes ctocritical writing; or see his No Road (bitumen all the way) (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1997). stephen.muecke@uts.edu.au

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