Deleuze's Child in Twenty-First Century American

Moving Rhizomatically: Deleuze’s Child in Twenty-First Century American Literature and Film Markus Peter Johannes Bohlmann Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D. degree in English Faculty of Arts Department of English University of Ottawa © Markus Peter Johannes Bohlmann, Ottawa, Canada, 2012 Bohlmann 2 THE GROWNUP All this stood upon her and was the world and stood upon her with all its fear and grace as trees stand, growing straight up, imageless yet wholly image, like the Ark of God, and solemn, as if imposed upon a race. And she endured it all: bore up under the swift-as-flight, the fleeting, the far-gone, the inconceivably vast, the still-to-learn, serenely as a woman carrying water moves with a full jug. Till in the midst of play, transfiguring and preparing for the future, the first white veil descended, gliding softly over her opened face, almost opaque there, never to be lifted off again, and somehow giving to all her questions just one answer: in you, who were a child once—in you. Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Stephen Mitchell Bohlmann 3 For Paul, In mysterium potentia est Bohlmann 4 Abstract My dissertation critiques Western culture’s vertical command of “growing up” to adult completion (rational, heterosexual, married, wealthy, professionally successful) as a reductionist itinerary of human movement leading to subjective sedimentations. Rather, my project proposes ways of “moving rhizomatically” by which it advances a notion of a machinic identity that moves continuously, contingently, and waywardly along less vertical, less excruciating and more horizontal, life-affirmative trails. To this end, my thesis proposes a “rhizomatic semiosis” as extrapolated from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to put forward a notion of language and, by implication, subjectivity, as dynamic and metamorphic. Rather than trying to figure out who the child is or what it experiences consciously, my project wishes to embrace an elusiveness at the heart of subjectivity to argue for continued identity creation beyond the apparently confining parameters of adulthood. This dissertation, then, is about the need to re-examine our ways of growing beyond the lines of teleological progression. By turning to Deleuze’s child, an intangible one that “makes desperate attempts to carry out a performance that the psychoanalyst totally misconstrues” (A Thousand Plateaus 13), I wish to shift focus away from the hierarchical, binary, and ideal model of “growing up” and toward a notion of movement that makes way for plural identities in their becoming. This endeavour reveals itself in particular in the work of John Wray, Todd Field, Peter Cameron, Sara Pritchard, Michael Cunningham, and Cormac McCarthy, whose work has received little or no attention at all—a lacuna in research that exists perhaps due to these artists’ innovative approach to a minor literature that promotes the notion of a machinic self and questions the dominant modes of Western culture’s literature for, around, and of children. Bohlmann 5 Acknowledgements A multiplicity of events have “rhizomatically”—that is continuously, heterogeneously, virtually, and affectively—contributed to the writing of this project, a few of which I would like to give credit to by name: The U.S. homeland security officer at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport, who, upon inquiring after my profession, asked me what I was going to do when I grew up (I refrained from telling him that I was on my way to a childhood-studies conference in the U.S.); David Jarraway, who introduced me to American literature and the prickly work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and who perfectly understands how to be a double in regard to thesis supervision, since, as Deleuze perhaps knows best, “[e]ven when you think you’re writing on your own, you’re always doing it with someone else you can’t always name” (Negotiations 141); Ingrid Hotz-Davies, who has kindled my interest in literature as a university student and whose ineffable talent and support I admire with utmost respect and gratitude; Summer Pervez, whose love and encouragement are as infinite as her editorial advice; and Lorrie Graham, whose astute pedagogy continues to remind me of the joys of teaching. I would further like to thank the Lambda Foundation Canada for awarding my thesis their Lambda Foundation for Excellence Award, the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies at the University of Ottawa (FGPS) for their Doctoral Research Scholarship, and the Association of Part-Time Professors at the University of Ottawa (APTPUO), which assured me of an interest in my research beyond the dyad of supervisor and thesis writer. A special thanks to Virginia Blum, Kathryn Stockton, and Susan Honeyman, whose research has been more than an inspiration to me. Furthermore, I wish to thank Rainer Maria Rilke for his Bohlmann 6 poetry, which I began to read throughout the writing of my dissertation, and which I admire more full heartedly every day. Above all, however, words fail to express my gratitude and thanks to my family and friends: my parents, Peter and Petra, and my sister, Marita, for their financial support, unconditional love, and encouragement to set sail across an ocean; my grandparents, Erika and Hans Restle, for their belief in me; my late grandmother, Aurora Bohlmann, for her support, though she never understood why I had to go to Canada. Thanks to my friends for their words and laughter: Christian Lassen, Maria Schwenk, Simone Bortoli, Kathrin and Ulrich Schermaul, Katrin Eckert, Sandra Beyer, Bryan Mattson, Carmela Coccimiglio, Steven Léger, Delroy Clarke, Jean Levasseur, and Paul Beaudry. Foremost, however, my eternal gratitude goes to Christopher Moss, whose continuous and unwavering love, patience, and encouragement are indeed worthy of an angel. Markus Bohlmann, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada 22 December 2011 Bohlmann 7 Table of Contents Introduction 1 Toward New Modes of Growing: Moving Rhizomatically Chapter One 23 Growing Up—Growing Low: Cartographies in John Wray’s Lowboy Chapter Two 57 Strange Encounters: Identity and Its Limits in Todd Field’s Little Children Chapter Three 93 “In any event!”: Rhizomes in Peter Cameron’s Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You Chapter Four 131 Fissures in Discourse: Language, Memory, and Imagination in Sara Pritchard’s Crackpots Chapter Five 163 Beautiful Beloved: Child-Rearing, Aesthetics, and Love in Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall Chapter Six 184 Apocalypse Americana: Family H(a)untings in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road Conclusion 215 Childhood Studies Revisited Works Cited 223 —Introduction— Toward Different Modes of Growing: Moving Rhizomatically I believe children are our future. —Whitney Houston, “Greatest Love of All” On the subject of children we are very deeply confused. —George Bernard Shaw, A Treatise on Parents and Children A rhizome has no beginning or end: it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo . —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus That “the child” is a blind spot, a mystery at once strangely familiar and yet elusively unrepresentable, constitutes a secret whispered amongst scholars in the fairly recent field of childhood studies.1 In 2000, Rutgers University at Camden founded its Centre for Children and Childhood Studies, followed by its introduction of the first American doctoral-degree program in the field of Childhood Studies in 2007. The Centre’s launch of its annual series of international graduate conferences in 2009 continues academic studies of “the child,” which, perhaps, began with the establishment of the Children’s Literature Association in 1973 and 1 See also Honeyman 2, 9. Bohlmann 2 the vast proliferation of academic journals and literary entries on children and their literature since the last quarter of the twentieth century.2 Indeed, “the child” was at the centre of twentieth-century discourse, as predicted by Ellen Kay in as early as 1909. That “the child,” as we in the twenty-first century pervasively know it, is a product of the Romantics has been largely theorized by childhood historians such as Philippe Ariès, whose Centuries of Childhood has become a seminal text for childhood studies. No longer conceived of as deficient little adults, children received philosophical attention by John Locke whose idea of “the child” as a tabula rasa predominantly confirms adult rationalism and enlightenment. His conception of the child contrasts with the one by Jean-Jacques Rousseau toward the later half of the eighteenth century, who, in his imaginary pupil Emile, sets off the child against the influences of an adult world in order to bring out the child’s own capabilities (119, 281).3 However, Rousseau’s perspective on the child and Rousseau’s educational endeavour rest on adult observations and prescriptions that come to chronicle childhood. Writes Frances Ferguson, “Rousseau’s attempts to see children and to see them clearly also involved segmenting the time of their lives into a series of stages and treating those stages as if they could be coherently described and predicted. The time of childhood, that is, became a space, and 2 See Center for Children and Childhood Studies. Children’s Literature Association is a pan- American organization on publications, conferences, scholarships, awards, and professional opportunities in the field of children’s literature. For more details, see their website Children’s Literature Association. Also, see, the list of journals and associations posted on the Rutgers website Center for Children and Childhood Studies. 3 See also Honeyman 96. In the context of child development, she points to two contradictory linear trajectories that refer back to the opposing views of Locke and Rousseau: developmental recapitulation, a biological development of the inferior, primitive, savage- child toward the ideal of adult rationality via education, and romantic neoteny, that is the already advanced child as being corrupted by progressing socialization.

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