Making Your Writing Stick

In Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's essay A Thousand Plateaus, the authors describe a root system that weaves together a seemingly unitary structure that can unfold into multiplicity. The normal thesis is replaced with references and regimes of signs.  The entire framework is compared to a botany framework.  The "root" represents symbols found in various settings that imitate the world. A "radicle" represents the seedling or meaning from a root.  Finally, the radicles and roots conglomerate into a system known as a "rhizome".  An example of hidden multiplicity can be seen in the Harry Potter series. One of the secondary characters is named "Dobbie", an elf that plays the trickster archetype to the main character, Harry Potter.  What many American readers fail to notice is that "dobbie" is a British term for an imbecile. Suddenly a character is interpreted differently based on the audience's knowledge of British slang. The most straight-forward children's fantasy becomes a complex web of inside jokes, cryptic symbols, and befuddling conclusions. Rhizomes act as both barriers and rewards for the reader to extract from the text. This cat and mouse game between the reader and the author
serves as a larger analogy to real life settings.  True rhizomes exist without footnotes because in real life symbols that are not yet defined to people remain meaningless until that person researches that symbol more. In the case of the "dobbie" interpretations, the reader isn't given a footnote to its double- meaning. Instead the reader might not discover the meaning until a
few years later while reading a British anthology text. Each time a new discovery of a text meaning takes place, connections within the rhizome are unearthed, but new radicles can form to expand the rhizome. Hence, a well-designed rhizome should have roots that can form more than one radicle and radicles that make the rhizome bigger.  
  
               In terms of timeless literature, the author must essentially make up as much words and concepts possible in order to have a timeless rhizome. Samuel Colridge made his works stand out because he used words and phrases such as "desynonymize", "esemplastic", and "willful suspension of disbelief". Some of his terms have been understood and used in the 21st century while others are so obscure they remain out of the mainstream lexicon yet still studied with each new generation of English Majors. If an author like Coleridge can add new words to the reader's lexicon over multiple generations, than the rhizome that he created was a success. The root becomes the term "esemplastic", the radicle becomes the meaning that is given to a generation of students, and the rhizome becomes their interpretations and roots that they impose within their own rhizome. In that sense, an author's final contribution from their rhizome is that it becomes the root of a new rhizome to continue the cycle.