Becoming Mole(cular), Becoming Noise: Serres and Deleuze in Kafka’s ＂Burrow＂

Both Serres and Deleuze in effect ”deterritorialize” sound as noise, thereby achieving a sort of regeneration of sound (sense). Serres's A-B communication, once it has become too efficient (too rational) and thus (as A-A monologue) entered a state of terminal equilibrium or ”information death,” must be interrupted by parasitical noise in order for the communication of meaning to be renewed. In Deleuze's ”becoming-animal” (or ”becoming-molecular,” ”becoming-multiplicity”), A also becomes B through a sort of ”communication.” This man-animal interchange is possible due to a ”common voice”; one passes into the other through a continuum of intensive states in which both words and things are part of the ”sonic block” itself, sound as pure force. In a certain way we have again the regeneration (from noise) of sound (sense). Here I bring into play both views to interpret the latter part of Kafka's ”The Burrow,” written as the author was (consciously) dying of lung disease. The story's narrator, a mole-like animal building underground tunnels, is disturbed by the sounds of many small creatures in or behind the walls; by the end these coalesce into the single sound (noise) of an unseen ”beast” which steadily approaches him. Taking this as an inner-body scene in which the beast is the narrator-author's other-the multiplicity of invading micro-organisms now become(s) death itself against his own life-I read the final (”communicative,” noise/silence) interplay or war-game between narrator and other, via Serres and Deleuze, in terms of the disjunctive functions of a now deterritorialized ”mouth”: breathing, eating, speaking and (by extension) thinking. Such an approach lets us reduce the ”transcendental” problems in Kafka to ”radically empirical” ones; by giving an equal priority to the narrator's own ”interruption” of the (approaching) silence/noise of death, it also suggests that death is merely a neutral form of transformation.