Introduction: Differential Narratology

The introduction establishes what Askin calls differential narratology, that is, both a new theory of narrative and its concomitant method of inquiry into (forms of) narrative. Highlighting narratology’s thoroughgoing anthropocentric, epistemological and experiential bias, the introduction shows how these fundamentals of narrative theory, which ultimately can be traced back to Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy and are acutely on display in today’s paradigm of cognitive narratology, are inadequate for properly capturing narratology’s object of study. In order to mend narratology’s Kantian shortcomings, the introduction proposes an explicitly speculative and metaphysical conception of narrativity. To achieve this end, the introduction turns to Deleuze’s philosophy of difference, which has the triple advantage of formulating 1) a systematic and consistent metaphysics that 2) is contemporary enough and 3) is based on an explicit critique of the Kantian system. Elaborating on this Deleuzian fundament the introduction formulates a concept of narrative as differential, immanent and univocal with actual narratives being constituted by singular sensations—affects and percepts—, the populace of Deleuze’s realm of the virtual. The introduction closes by showcasing the adequacy of its newly established metaphysical concept of narrative in two short readings of contemporary narratives.

Sensational Realism: Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist

The third chapter moves away from the more experimental aesthetics of Castillo’s and Ondaatje’s narratives to incorporate an analysis of a formally non-experimental and realist text in order to show that Deleuzian sensations likewise underpin and constitute explicitly representational and verisimilar narration. Tracing the novel’s African American protagonist’s progressive immersion in becoming the chapter draws out how she engages in what Isabelle Stengers has termed speculative constructivism—the facilitation of events—in order to create the future to come. Since the protagonist’s speculative trajectory is created by poetic means it is tantamount to the figuration of the narrative’s very own speculative-creative activity and thus emblematic of narration’s own construction work.

Narrating Sensation: Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

The second chapter traces in detail how Ondaatje’s text engages in what Askin terms disfiguration—the very process of disfiguring its representational surface both in terms of content and form—in order to unearth its constitutive sensations. Disfiguration makes tangible what otherwise remains intangible, the very constitution and genesis of actual narratives from virtual sensations. In The Collected Works of Billy the Kid disfiguration is most prominently on display in a series of becomings the protagonist undergoes culminating in his metaleptic account of his own death where his brain breaks apart and thus literally kills off representation. It is in staging such acute moments of representational crisis that the narrative reaches the impersonal and nonhuman beyond of personal and human experience. By the same token the beyond of actual narratives is attained: the sensations and forces that make up the death of Billy are those that make up the narrative at hand in so far as it is the narrative that assembles and composes the figure of Billy. It is thus that The Collected Works of Billy the Kid can be said to be a Deleuzian monument of sensation.

Conclusion: From the Becoming of Narrative to the Narrativity of Becoming

The conclusion briefly brings together the results of the previous chapters recapitulating how they all work to reveal becoming as the primary ontological virtual realm of any given actual narrative and that this has only been possible by following the reverse movement of the speculative becoming-virtual of actual narratives as they crack open their representational surface and burrow ever deeper towards their conditioning differentials. In addition, and taking its cue from chapter 4, the conclusion makes clear that the becoming of narrative also entails the narrativity of becoming. While the former has been the focus of the present work, elaborating the latter remains a task for the future. The conclusion ends by briefly delineating—with recourse to the recent speculative turn in continental philosophy—the first tentative steps of such a task thus, in true Deleuzian spirit, ending the book with the detection and formulation of a new problem to be tackled.

Real Folds: Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves

This chapter is dedicated to the most explicitly self-referential narrative exploration of difference scrutinized in this book. It shows how Danielewski’s narrative meticulously works towards unearthing its very own building blocks, the very stuff it is made of. In short, House of Leaves is explicitly engaged with unearthing the virtual Idea of narrative. For this end, the novel unfolds a spectacle of disintegration on all levels, from the disintegration of characters’ minds to that of its own plot and narrative discourse. At the same time, the novel presents a veritable cosmogony suggesting an inherently fractured, fractalized and differential world. Difference thus becomes the guiding principle of both the created world and its creation. What Danielewski’s novel ultimately proposes, then, is not only the becoming of narrative but also the narrativity of becoming.

Intensive Narration: Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters

The first chapter provides a close reading of Ana Castillo’s 1986 debut novel. Against the well-established view of the novel as staging a search for Chicana identity the chapter shows that The Mixquiahuala Letters constitutes nothing less than a voyage into difference itself. This diagnosis is based on the analysis of the novel’s three most salient aesthetic and poetic features, namely its epistolarity, its hypertextual form and its emphasis on dreaming and sleeping—all aspects that have garnered relatively little attention in Castillo scholarship, which tends to be thematic. The chapter shows how the thematic focus on identity politics that avails itself of ready-made concepts of cultural difference and hybridity not only misses the novel’s constitutive differential poetics but also its political thrust. This is the case because the novel’s politics precisely rests on its poetics, a poetics that advocates and enacts incessant differentiation and dynamic becoming rather than essential identification and static being. Casting “Mixquiahuala” against “Aztlán,” the novel proposes originary difference and repetition as its feminist antidote to Chicano male repetitions of identitarian origins. The novel achieves this by intensifying narration—by disrupting and breaking apart its own representational coherence—, laying bare its fabulatory dream poetics.