On the Verge of the Here and Now

Abstract

William Campbell, the major character of Hemingway's ‘A Pursuit Race’, fails to hold the lead, gets off his symbolic bike and barricades himself under a sheet in a hotel room, from beneath which he oozes his paranoid discourse of madness. This unexpected stoppage of an advance man for a burlesque show entails a profound distortion of the harmonious pattern of motion and immobility. Immersed in the paranoid, manoeuvring between the reasonable and the schizophrenic, Campbell resembles the Nietzschean rope-dancer, who improvises the present in his dramatic performance that starts anew with every fall. The major aim of this article is to analyse the paranoid condition of Hemingway's subject-in-madness through the prism of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of a desiring-machine as well as the Foucauldian perspective on insanity. The analysis will be carried out with reference to Hemingway's notion of ‘balance under pressure’, and the improvisational aspect of paranoid and non-reasonable.