| Chapter : | Introduction: An American Literature of the Outside |
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term “novel,” thereby marking the text as such. I propose, however, that one understands this text as a novella,7 a proposition that rests to some degree on the text’s length but more so on the definition Deleuze and Guattari offer in “1874: Three Novellas, or ‘What Happened?’” In this chapter from A Thousand Plateaus, they argue that the novella is organized around the question, “What happened?” Yet instead of saying that in response to this question the novella is essentially an exposition of memory of the past or the calculated problem solving, they claim the novella involves a different kind of memory and relation to time, a forgetting:
Not being in the past or future, “…the novella relates, in the present itself, to the formal dimension of something that has happened, even if that something is nothing or remains unknowable” (194). Occupying the presence of this question means having a relationship with outside forces—forces on thought, memory, forgetting. The defining question does not imply that something has conclusively occurred; to the contrary, it involves a double implication—something might have happened or not. In the case of The Body Artist, for example, Mr. Tuttle might have gone (back) to the hospital or not. Even if “nothing” has happened, this nothing is a force. For example, one might say, “All day I thought it was Friday,” when in fact today is Thursday. What made one think this? What made one’s thought go there and come back to here, Friday? Like Rey Robles in The Body Artist, Deleuze and Guattari ask, “Whatever could have happened to make me forget where I put my keys, or whether I mailed that letter, etc.?” (193). Another way of thinking this forgetting is through the secret, to which the novella has a “fundamental relation.” Deleuze and Guattari are not talking about any “content” of a secret but the “form” that is secrecy. A novella does not trade in discovery of facts