User:Andre Castro/2/annot/minor kafka

What is a Minor Literature?

from Kafka

In the work Kafka by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari the two author delve into a reading of Kafka's work. In the chapter What is a Minor Literature is dedicated to the this notion in relation to oeuvre of the Czech writer. Deleuze and Guattari describe minor literature not as a construction based on a minor language; 'it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language. But the first characteristic of minor literature in any case is that in it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization'

The reason why Deleuze and Guattari describe Kafka's work as a minor literature is a two-fold. His birth within a German-speaking Jewish family, and a German education, in the context of the mainly Czech-speaking Prague positions him both within both linguistic and ethnic minority. Although writing and speaking in a major language - German - Kafka is part of the 'deterritoralization of the German population'(p.16); Not unlike and emigrants in his new country of residence, Kafka's was a foreign in the Prague where he was born in. Beside that foreign condition Kafka, in his writings, decides to take distance from "correct" high German. Instead Kafka brings to his writing the peculiarities and deformations of the German spoken in Prague, 'a deterritorialized language appropriate for strange and minor uses'(p.17)

Deleuze and Guattari resource to the tetra-linguistic model proposed by Henri Gobard to explain Kafka's linguistic entanglement. The model encompasses four language typologies: vernacular, vehicular, referential, and mythical. Vernacular refers to a territorial language, spoke mainly by rural communities; vehicular to the language used in everyday practical and transnational exchanges; referential to the language of culture; and mythical to a religious or spiritual language. The authors ask what is the relation Prague Jews, and consequently Kafka, to those four languages. Czech and Yiddish were vernacular languages, disregarded in an urban scenario, yet Kafka, unlike most Jew, was able to understand and write in Czech, which became important in his relation with Milena Jesenská. German filled both the vehicular and referential language; it played the same role within the Austro-Hungarian Empire as English plays today world-wide. 'German is the vehicular language of the towns, a bureaucratic language of the state, a commercial language of exchange', but also referential and cultural language, as the authors remind us by mentioning twice 'Goethe always on the horizon'(p.25). And Hebrew, was the mythical language, associated with the foundation of Zionism and the state of Israel. Whereas 'vernacular language is here; vehicular language is everywhere; referential language is over there; mythic language is beyond' (p.23).

The dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire brought with World War I 'increases the crisis, accentuates everywhere the movements deterritorialization and invites all sorts of complex reterritorializations' (p.24). In this movement Kafka does not opt for a 'reterritorialization through the Czech. Nor towards a hypercultural usage of the German... Nor toward an oral popular Yiddish' (p. 25). Instead he chooses an intermediate route, bring Prague's German into his writing, and exploring it beyond the previous limits of this language. '[H]e will tear out of Prague German all the qualities of underdevelopment that it has tried to hide ... He will turn the syntax into a cry that will embrace the rigid syntax of the dried-up German. He will push towards a deterritorialization that will no longer be saved by culture or by myth'(p.26). In other words Kafka places the here of the vernacular language into everywhere of the vehicular language; he casts a language that has its roots, encompasses many places, but is not rooted anywhere.

Deleuze and Guattari situate the revolutionary intensity of Kafka's writing in the minor and undefined character of the language Kafka chose to write in. A language without masters, in within which even its creator is stranger; a language marked by its poverty, no single define identity. And it is this language that Kafka explores its, its in it that he 'find[s] points of nonculture or underdevelopment, linguistic Third World zones by which language can escape' (p.27). For Deleuze and Guattari This linguistic territory has no single center of power neither clear boundaries toward what can and cannot be said.(p.26)

'[A] Harlequin costume in which very different functions of language and distinct centers of power are player out, blurring what can be said; one function will be played off against the other, all the degrees of territoriality and relative deterritorialization will be played out'. (p.26)