Wound-And-Quest Story

“The woman I love rode this way, carried off by horsemen. If I do not find her,
I will never find myself. If I do not find her, I will die in this forest, water within water.”

Jeanette Winterson, The Powerbook

“The novel has always been defined by the adventure of lost characters who no longer know their name, what they are looking for, or what they are doing, amnesiacs, ataxics, catatonics…La Princesse de Clèves is a novel precisely by virtue of what seemed paradoxical to the people of the time: the states of absence or ‘rest,’ the sleep that overtakes the characters…When the novel began, with Chrétien de Troyes, for example, the essential character that would accompany it over the entire course of its history was already there: The knight of the novel of courtly love spends his time forgetting his name, what he is doing, what people say to him, he doesn’t know where he is going or to whom he is speaking, he is continually drawing a line of absolute deterritorialization but also losing his way, stopping, and falling into black holes. ‘He awaits chivalry and adventure.’ Open Chrétien de Troyes to any page and you will find a catatonic knight seated on his steed, leaning on his lance, waiting, seeing the face of his loved one in the landscape; you have to hit him to make him respond.’”

-Deleuze & Guattari, “Year Zero: Faciality,” from A Thousand Plateaus