"Turning the Screws on a Life: A Literary Experiment with Fitzgerald, Wilson, and James"

Hakan Atay | Hivren Demir Atay

French philosopher Gilles Deleuze often expresses his belief in the power of experimentation in writing and praises Anglo-American literature for its venture into experimenting with lives. According to him, reading a long list of Anglo-American writers, including Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, shows us that the sense of a life cannot be grasped, as it is full of unknown materials and their obscure, immaterial effects. Deleuze argues that healthy writers, having faced the impossibility of encompassing the entirety of a life, create lines of flight, move along with them, and discover worlds that enable themselves to transform. Then writing, as a process of becoming, turns out to be impersonal, while cracks and ruptures, often considered failures in life, appear as opportunities for lit...