SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY THINK BY MEANS OF CONCEPTS. Art, music, and painting think by means of percepts. That is what we are told: logos and tekhnd, in the original Greek sense, are opposed as are the two hemi-spheres of our brain, the rational and the intuitive, one calculating, the other feeling. But how does literature, which is neither logos nor tekhnd, which is both art and knowledge, think, and by what means? Being neither pure sound nor pure image, literature does not address itself strictly to the senses, nor does it address itself solely to the intellect. The literary text cannot be reduced to the mere intelligibility of its meaning nor to the rational apprehension of its cognitive content. Deleuze and Guattari, in What is Philosophy?, argue that writers have no reason to envy painters or musicians: the material used by writers is" words and syntax, a syntax created which rises irresistibly in the author's work and which is trans-formed into sensation"(158). As with all art, the authors conclude, litera-ture has as its goal" the tearing of the percept from the perception of objects and from the different states of the perceiving subject,[.. to] extract a pure sensory being"(Ibid.). More so than is the case in other arts, literature may" rise (to the level of) the percept," by detaching the percept from the concrete conditions of perception-these conditions being constituted by the immediate relation between subject and object. According to Deleuze and Guattari, Thomas Hardy does not represent" the perception of the landscape" through the eyes of a given character, but the" landscape [itself] as percept," in the same way that we can speak of Melville's" oceanic percepts" in Moby Dick and" urban percepts" in Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer (159).

Is there not an apparent contradiction here? If the building blocks of literature are words and syntax, as Deleuze and Guattari contend, then the object of our sensations-in reading or in writing-will necessarily be composed of sounds and letters, of phonemes and graphemes, as these entities are concatenated in the linear sequence of a sentence, rather than in a particular entity of the natural world, be it a landscape, the sea, or a city,