Madhurai Gangopadhyay

M.Phil Internal Assessment

Roll 7

31 November 2018

The Voice of the Voiceless: A Discussion of the Characteristics of Minor

Literature with reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Towards a Minor

Literature

Abstract

This paper is an analysis of the chief characteristics of minor literature and the functions of

language in the construction of such a literature with reference to the work of Deleuze and

Guattari. A major language is taken off from its area of dominance and placed and practised in

an area where it has minority status. This language gets deterritorialized in another linguistic

domain. Deterritorialization is therefore the first and foremost characteristic of such literature,

the other two being that everything in it is political and that everything takes a collective sense.

In this paper I would also discuss how before the advent of colonialism, every text used to be

multilingual. Even regional languages, used to incorporate Sanskrit, Persian or Arabic. It is only

with the advent of colonization that English was systematically imposed on each and every

colony. I would also use certain linguistic theories to attempt to analyse the language of minor

literature.

Keywords

Deleuze, deterritorialization Guattari, vernacular, vehicular

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“Kafka- towards a Minor Literature” was published in 1975 and the book presents a new

approach to Kafka’s works and contrasts with the representations of Kafka in various literary

canons. In fact, both Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari derived the notion of minor literature

from the writings of Kafka himself. Kafka was born in a German Jewish family living in

Czechoslovakia. The Czechs formed the majority in Prague and the prominent language in use

there was Czech whereas Kafka’s family spoke German. Germany was definitely a super-power

and in the global scenario, German was definitely a major language, but the status of German in

Prague was that of a minor language. Although Kafka was fluent in and spoke both German and

Czech, he considered German as his mother tongue. Moreover, Kafka’s family was Jewish

whereas the Czech people were predominantly Catholic. So Kafka created his work in an

atmosphere of three kinds of omission--- culture (Christian/Jewish), territory (Czech territory/

German territory) and the politics of language.

In this paper I would attempt to analyse the concept and characteristics of minor

literature as formulated by Deleuze and Guattari in their book Kafka: Towards a Minor

Literature, with special reference to the third chapter of the said book---What Is a Minor

Literature? Deleuze and Guattari regard minor literature against the backdrop of culture, territory

and politics. Minor literature is not a formal method of criticism, rather it is an expression

machine.

The very reason why Kafka chose to write in German was because the German spoken in

Prague was a very dry, arid and impoverished language and it provided him an opportunity to

vibrate it with newer texts. He could add new life to it and experiment with the impoverished

language. This created an instance of what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “deterritorialization”

of language implying that the real territory of the German language was Germany and it had
 Gangopadhyay 3

been plucked out of its mother soil and replanted in an alien territory of Czechoslovakia. In this

context, the allusion in the essay to Samuel Beckett and James Joyce is also worth noting for its

poignancy, for the former experimented with English in France and the later with English in

Ireland.

The main aim of minor literature is to invite readers to a kind of subversion. And for that

subversion to take place it is not necessary to write in German as a Czech or in English as an

Irish. It simply depends on the choice of the kind of territorialized or deterritorialized language

that a writer chooses to write in. A writer of minor literature has to bend the language, deprive it

of its familiar ideological choices and experiment with the hidden potentials of the language. The

entire concept can be aptly summed up in the words of Deleuze and Guattari themselves---“A

minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language. It is rather that which a minority constructs

within a major language.” (16)

For example, the predominant language of the works the renowned Bengali Dalit writers

Anil Gharai, who writes about the tribal and Dalit communities of South Bengal, Odisha and

Jharkhand, is Bengali. Yet it contains definite expressions which are not understood by a person

whose mother-tongue is Bengali, because of the simple reason that this Bengali is not the

standard Bengali of the Gangetic plains, but that of the coastal areas of East Medinipur district,

which is heavily influenced by the neighbouring state language Odia.

Therefore, the first characteristic of minor literature is that “in it the language is affected

with a high coefficient of deterritorialization.” (p. 16) Since the language is impoverished and

arid, it is modified by a high degree of influence. In this way Kafka passed the great impediment

of writing for the Jews in Prague, who could not produce substantive literature because their

language was so underdeveloped. Not writing was also an impossibility because national
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consciousness necessarily expresses itself by means of literature. Literature is a means of re-

linking oneself to one’s nationality. Moreover, the entire German Jewish population in Prague

had been deterritorialized. They had been driven out of Germany by the Nazi people and had

taken shelter in Czechoslovakia. Their status in the Czech society was that of refugees and

infiltrators. The minority (of the German Jews in Czechoslovakia) spoke a language which is at

the same time cut off from mainstream German as well as the language of the Czech masses. So

they were living in a society in which they were included as well as excluded and hence, theirs is

a very problematic identity. It is interesting to note the way in which Deleuze and Guattari

describe this language—“ Prague German [not Munich German or Bohn German] is a

deterritorialized language, appropriate for strange and minor uses.” (17) In some Bangla cinema

meant for a specific elite audience, like Moner Manush, we often find expressions of a Jhumur or

Baul songs, as sensational insertions, but we never find sustained use of folk language in

mainstream films, because the standard audience would prefer the standard dialect of the

Gangetic plains.

The second characteristic of minor literature is that everything in them is political,

thereby implying here is based on power relations, or more specifically the major minor relation.

In a major literature, the author has the liberty, freedom and the sense of security to deal with

individual concerns even when he is living in very turbulent times. For example, East and West

by Sunil Gangopadhyay has definitely the social milieu of the political unrest, financial crisis,

refugees, property loss, job crisis and the tensions, between the two Banglas but here the

collective life is less important than the love affair, which in turn gets connected to other

individual concerns. So it is basically about the narrative of an individual set against the

backdrop of a social milieu.

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But the case of minor literature is entirely different. Here each individual’s attempt to

survive is immediately connected to politics, because otherwise the micro-level cannot survive

and minor literature is, after all, a literature of survival. In minor literature, the individual

concerns become all the more necessary, indispensible and magnified because of a whole lot of

stories vibrating within them. An excellent example of this is Dalit literature. SharanKumar

Limbale rightly term Dalits as “human beings who are not treated as humans” (32), for they are

treated, in a way, worse than animals, surviving on left-over rotten food and flesh of dead

animals. Dalit children learn to work as soon as they learn to walk. Bama, in Sangati and Baby

Kamble in The Prisons We Broke describes how the children, especially the girl children of the

Dalit families are treated as a source of unpaid labour. She has to act as a surrogate mother to her

younger siblings. Bama describes an eleven-year-old girl Maikkani who had to do all the

household chores like scrubbing pots, collecting water, washing clothes, gathering firewood and

cooking kanji (70). She even had to support her family financially during her mother’spregnancy

by working in a neighbouring match factory, which is an extremely dangerous occupation for a

child. The individual stories of Baby Kamble and Bama become a microcosmic reflections of the

entire Dalit community. The self there immediately connects to the community and ultimately

gives rise to the narrative of the community.

The third characteristic of minor literature is that even if it begins with an individual

narrative, it soon assumes the form of a collective narrative. Talent isn’t abundant in minor

literature. There is no possibility for an individual enunciation that would be exclusively the

writer’s and would be separated from a collective enunciation. Major literature has Rabindranath,

Manik Bandopadhyay, Bibhutibhushan or Tarashankar, but minor literature may have only one

Anil Gharai. So Deleuze and Guattari point out that in minor literature, there is no scope of
 Gangopadhyay 6

developing a style—like Rabindranath’s style or Bibhutibhushan’s style. But this paucity of

talent actually proves beneficial because it allows the creation of, if not the great literature of the

masters, at least something other than the literature of the masters. Here, what each author says

individually already constitutes a common action. Bama talks individually of her pain and

suffering, so does Baby Halder, Baby Kamble or even Om Prakash Valmiki. So pain, suffering

and humiliation have their own text and context. But in case of an individual writer, the pain or

suffering is not confined to any particular text or context, it rather has many texts and many

contexts. The essence of minor literature is representations of the collective conscious as well as

the collective unconscious. A good example of this is folk literature because in folk literature we

are not concerned with the expression of the individual genius, rather we are more concerned

with the expression of an individual culture.

So what each author of minor literature says or does is necessarily political, simply

because of the fact that it has an ideology. Minor literature is, after all, a literature of resistance.

There is no compulsion on the part of minor literature to develop a kind of universality. On the

other hand, in case of major literature, there is a compulsion on the part of the writer to come to a

universal agreement in terms of aesthetic balance. But minor literature doesn’t have to toe the

line, because, as Deleuze and Guattari point out---“The political domain has contaminated every

statement”

Deleuze and Guattari purposely use the word contaminated, meaning polluted and it is

interesting to conjecture why they chose a word which can be used in a pejorative sense. Minor

literature is born in a language that is a minor language, so it is ontologically pejorative by social

standards. So if a language has a pejorative social connotation, literature will definitely bear the

legacy of pejorativeness.
 Gangopadhyay 7

Colebrook’s opinion in this regard is worth noting for its poignancy:

“What makes a literature minor is not how many speakers it assembles, but the style of its
assemblage… [It] repeats the past as an unchanging whole, a whole in which the
speaker participates and from which he borrows his unique identity. …Great literature,
as minor literature, works with a more profound repetition. It does not repeat the
surface forms of literature; it does not reproduce already established forms and
rhythms. What is repeated in minor literature is literary becoming.” (119)
Another important feature of the essay is an exploration of the language in minor

literature. Ulysses, for example, is an experimentation with different languages and cultures,

different mythological and legendary ideas, symbols, motifs and ancient practices. And the text

is abundant with French and Roman expressions. In a way, what is happening in Ulysses is never

over-determination, rather it is a kind of worldwide reterritorialization. Reterritorialization is the

exact opposite of deterritorialization. When a language is deterritorialized in a different cultural

context, it is deterritorialized and once the author starts experimenting with it, it is used in a

separate context and the author explores how its weakness could be made into a strength. When

we experiment with this devitalised language, ultimately what happens is that we are sending it

back to another domain if existence which is a kind of reterritorialization but which is never

similar to its first territorialisation. As an example, we can cite Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale

where there is a departure from one version of reality and a movement to a world of imagination

but there is also a return to the reality but that is another version of reality. It is another

destination with enhanced mode of realization and also a new kind of experience and realization

which had never been present in the first kind of departure. Similarly, a language is

deterritorialized because of the migration by the language speakers. That migration may be

voluntary, forced or an exilic experience. But whatever be the socio-political compulsions, the

fact remains that deterritorialization takes place mostly due to large scale social migration. So

language is deterritorialized because that language is supplanted onto an alien culture where the
 Gangopadhyay 8

speakers are in the habit of using another dominant language and this language does not get any

nourishment from the neighbouring language. Rather, it is prevented and thwarted by the

dominant language and there is a kind of what we may call an anxiety of influence and a kind of

sibling rivalry which we notice between the so called dominant language and the so called

deterritorialized language. But when a writer like Kafka starts experimenting with the language,

it is enriched and it gathers many kinds of expressions and in a way it moves towards the parent

language with a new meaning and with a new set of signifiers and signifieds which ultimately

enriches the parent language. So it becomes a kind of reterritorialization. For example, when

Manbhoomia was used in the Purulia district of Bengal, it is deterritorialized, because it is

Bengali in a very devitalized form. But when a number of writers start using that language in

mainstream Bengali literature, like Saikat Rakshit and Sukanto Gangopadhyay, the situation

changes. For example, Rasika by Subrata Mukhopadhyay, on which the drama Nachni is based,

shows how the Manbhoomia dialect has been used in such a way and in such emotional contexts

that it enriches mainstream Bengali. Therefore, there is a continuous dialogue between the major

and the minor variant of the language. In this process, first there is a deterritorialization and then

a reterritorialization. Reterritorialization is a marker of the innate vitality and strength of the

language. It proves that a language has the capacity to renegotiate its relationship with the major

variant of the language.

The minor variation of the language has a very elastic identity, in the sense that that it is

discarded, but it has a kind of afterlife and it can come back with redoubled intensity. It is like

the swift, small currents in a river, which ultimately help the river to flow. A river has a great

volume of water, but that water will get movement only from the swift currents. Minor language

is like those swift currents, because they can give us certain wonderfully rich folk worldview,
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which one can never find in the main variant of the language. So from that point of view, even if

it is impoverished, it is not poor. In this context we can recollect the poem Coat by W.B.Yeats:

“There is more enterprise in walking naked.”

In this context we can also refer to the use of the expression “Shanti, Shanti, Shanti” by

T.S.Eliot, towards the end of “The Wasteland”. In the context of English and Sanskrit, in the

context of the relationship between the East and the West, the word “Shanti” belongs to the

domain of minor literature and there English is the major language. Yet Eliot doesn’t find an

adequate expression in his major language to express the sense of desperate search for peace.

Here, Sanskrit is deterritorialized but it has the maximum intensity.

Deleuze and Guattari aptly portray the typical plight of post-modern literature with the

words---“How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not

yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are forced to serve?”

(19) Even today, when we go to any remote corner of Bengal and speak to people who speak

tribal languages, we do find that they are forced to learn and speak in a language not their own.

And this is the experience of diasporic communities across the globe. The younger generation of

the tribal communities neither know Bengali nor their mother-tongue properly because they are

in the process of giving up their mother tongue completely.

Deleuze and Guattari categorically state that the use of language is in a hierarchic and

imperative system of transmission. And we find that three different situations are there:

1. Transmission of orders

2. Exercise of power

3. Resistance to the exercise of power

Depending on the three situations, the use of language can be bilingual or even
 Gangopadhyay 10

multilingual. To quote from the text:

“Using the research of Ferguson and Gumperz, Henri Gobard has proposed a tetralinguistic

model:

vernacular, maternal or territorial language, used in rural communications or rural in its

origins;

a vehicular, urban, governmental, or even worldwide language, a language of businesses,

commercial exchange, bureaucratic transmission, and so on, a language of the first sort of

deterritorialization; referential language, language of sense and culture, entailing a cultural

reterritorialization; mythic language, on the horizon of cultures, caught up a spiritual or

religious reterritorialization. The spatiotemporal categories of these languages fifer sharply:

vernacular language is here; vehicular language is everywhere; referential language is over

there; mythi language is beyond.” (p.23)

To exemplify the above passage, we can use the example of Bengal where Bengali is the

vernacular language and English which is the vehicular language. Examples of referential

language are Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian. They are not in everyday use, yet they have numerous

referential contexts. Mythic language, on the other hand, is a language of spiritual realization.

These languages, like Zionism, the tantric languages, the occult languages, entail

experimentation in an encoded form. It is codified, one has to decode it, and the process of

decoding the language is both a process of realization as well as a method of decoding the

culture. However, this culture is not the public culture, rather this culture includes a whole set of

practices and beliefs that would lead to a different state of awareness and enlightenment.
 Gangopadhyay 11

The status of a language in a common culture may also change in the course of time.

Earlier Latin was everywhere, gradually it moved to the domain of over there and then it became

beyond. Nowadays there has been a revival in Sanskrit learning, but Sanskrit has also moved to

the domain of the mythic. There is a continual flow of interlingual transfer of expressions,

meanings, significations. And at the same time, there is also a persistent attempt to block certain

communication signals. They are talking about an interlingual communication between the four

states--- the vernacular state, the vehicular state, the referential state, the referential state and

finally the mythic state. There are many osmotic and reverse osmotic movements that we find in

these domains of communication but there are also some intransigent points, which cannot be

penetrated. For example, when talking about an official vehicular form of communication, one

cannot borrow anything from the domain of the mythic. So there is a question of both porosity

and resistance in the four domains of linguistic community.

Deleuze and Guattari write: “One language can fill a certain function for one material and

another function for another material. Each function of a language divides up in turn and carries

with it multiple centres of power.” (p. 24) This implies that the language can work at the political

level, the religious level, at the spiritual level or even at the very homely level. The authors use a

very interesting expression to express multilingualism in South Asia—“blur of languages”.

Indeed in South Asia we find a blur, because even in 2018, when we are speaking in a

metropolitan context, we find that many of us are using four to five languages in our day to day

communication, particularly if we have multilingual neighbours. A study of the recent short

stories published in Desh or other literary magazines bear ample evidence to the blur of

languages. It is a kind of cultural practice and a language usage which is rooted in modern

culture. This is the characteristic of minor literature. In minor literature, we do not find a
 Gangopadhyay 12

systematic expression of languages, rather there is a deliberate “blur”. And it is this blur of

languages that captures the cultural practices of a particular milieu in an optimum manner.

Latin once had a mythic function, and according to Deleuze and Guattari, it has now

being robbed of it. French had been both a vernacular as well as a vehicular language for the

people of France to a large extent, because the French are not in the habit of using English as

frequently as the Indians, probably because they consider that French has a greater variety of

emotional expressions. In fact there has always been a cold war in terms of cultural or linguistic

supremacy between the English and the French, but a detailed discussion of that is beyond the

scope of this paper.

In this context we can refer to the fact that while in England, U.R.Anantamurthy wrote

“Samskara” in Kannada, simply because he missed talking in his mother tongue and writing in

the language was the only way he could connect to his roots. This proves that an individual

carries a deterritorialized version of the language within himself or herself. The individual mixes

with the dominant language throughout, yet he seeks release while practising that language by

using the minor/deterritorialized language in an alien territory.

A pertinent question that arises here (and which Deleuze and Guattari also raise) is that

how a regional variation of a major language can serve the worldwide or transnational

technocracy. It is really a kind of the margin writing back. In other words, the margin or the

minor language or the minor literature in a way becomes the vehicle for revolutionary

movements. As an example, we can take the book “The Dust Storm and the Hanging Mist: A

Study of Birsa Munda and his Movement in Chotanagpur, 1874-1901, by noted anthropologist

and former IAS officer Kumar Suresh Singh. The book gives a fictional account of the Mundali

rebellion of 1899 and was the basis of Mahasweta Devi’s celebrated novel Aranyer Adhikar.
 Gangopadhyay 13

Both of these novels have many examples of Mundali expressions and phrases which were used

to inspire the Munda tribal people to revolt against the British. For example, we find a recurrent

expression of the word “Ulgulan”, which has a wide spectrum of connotations. Its immediate

meaning is obviously revolution, but ‘ulgulan’ is also coupled with other relevant expressions

which finally invest the language with a revolutionary fervour. So a minor language can also

have a major revolutionary impact if it is used in its own cultural context, with certain immediate

political or spiritual or religious compulsions that will help in integrating the population or the

language users. Hence language plays a major role in integrating the subjugated people. The

Indian revolutionary movement also shows the importance of language in arousing nationalistic

fervour among the people. For example, we can refer to the speeches of Vivekananda or the

regional folk variations of Mukunda Das. All of them used different variants of Bengali and all

the variants were used with a single purpose---to reawaken revolutionary consciousness and for

developing a unity of culture. So a revival of regionalism can contribute to revolutionary

movement.

Linguists, too, cannot take an absolutely apolitical stance or remain neutral. As Deleuze

and Guattari write—‘…but linguists don’t know about this, don’t want to know about this, since,

as linguists, they are “apolitical” pure scientists.”(p. 24) Language is always and at all times

embedded in the power politics of a particular region.

The minor has the potential to construct the major. The major is the manifestation of the

efforts and initiatives of the minor. Major is like the showroom and minor is like the godown

which contains all the raw materials. It is a kind of identity politics which is also played out in

the domain of language. The sustenance of the major/minor binary is also a part of the
 Gangopadhyay 14

perpetuation of the political discussion. Therefore, we cannot but agree with Deleuze and

Guattari’s words: “That is nothing that is major or revolutionary except the minor.”

Another extremely interesting concept that Deleuze and Guattari introduce is being “a

sort of stranger within his own language.” This can be expressed using the Greek word metoikos,

which means “resident alien”. In this context it is worthwhile to recollect that this is exactly how

T.S. Eliot described himself in Britain. He attempted throughout his life to be an Englishman, but

he remained throughout his life, profoundly American. This stranger identity is, however, very

convenient for creativity. If one looks at one’s own language with the eyes of an outsider, it

always opens up new possibilities and scope of discoveries within one’s own language. It is not

about mastering the language, rather it is looking at a language from the vantage point of an

outsider and this enables one, to use the words of Deleuze and Guattari “to make use of the

polylingualism of one’s own language.” For example, Bengali is not one language, there is

polylingualism in Bengali. For example, there is the Bengali of Jessore, Chittagong,

Mymensingh, Purulia, Asansol or Medinipur.

It is worthwhile to end this paper with Colebrook’s analysis of the concept of minor

literature as propounded by Deleuze and Guattari. According to Colebrook, literature, if it has to

fully extend its power of being a literature, must be minor literature. She calls minor literature

“great literature, not literature the literature of the minorities, although this can be the case.” For

example, according to Claire Colebrook, even Shakespeare can be considered a “minor” author

precisely because his works do not offer a unified image of man, or even a unified image of

Shakespeare. His texts are more like question marks, with each production or reading raising

new questions. Of course, when Shakespeare becomes an industry (of tourism, culture and

academia) he becomes a major author, we seek to find the real Shakespeare, the origin of his
 Gangopadhyay 15

ideas and the true sense of his works. He becomes minor again, according to Colebrook, only if

we recognize the potential in his work to be read as if we did not know who Shakespeare was. (p.

105). Thus minor literature, at a point ceases to be just a text, rather it becomes a saga of human

life which touches us and burns us.

 Gangopadhyay 16

Works Cited

Bama. Kakrukku. Trans.Laksmi Holstrom. Chennai: Macmillan, 2000. Print

---.Sangati Trans.Lakshmi Holstorm.. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003. Print

Deleuze, Giles; Guattari, Felix. “What is a Minor Literature?” Kafka: Towards a Minor

Literature, translated by Dana Polan, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. 16-27. Print.

Colebrook Claire. Gilles Deleuze. London: Routlege. 2002. Print

Devi, Mahasweta. Aranyer Odhikar. Calcutta: Koruna Prokashoni. nd. Print

Eliot, T.S. The Wasteland and Other Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 1999. pp102-109

Gangopadhyay, Sunil. Trans. Enakshi Chatterjee. East-West (Purbo-Paschim), Part One.

Kolkata: New Sahitya Akademi, 2000. Print

Joyce, James. Ullysses. London. Wordsworth Classics. 2010. Print

Keats, John. “Ode to a Nightingale.” The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats.

Boston and New York:The Riverside Press, Cambridge,1899. 142-143. Print.

Kamble baby. “The Prisons We broke” translated by Maya Pandit, New Delhi, Orient

Blackswan. Print

Limbale, Sharan Kumar. Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature: History, Controversies and

Considerations.Trans. Alok Mukherjee, New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007

Moner Manush. Dir. Goutam Ghosh. Perf. Prosenjit, Priyanshu Chantterjee, Raisud Islam Asad,

Paoli Dam. Impress Telefilm Ltd, Rosevalley Films Ltd, Vesctesh Films Pvt Ltd, 2010. DVD

Mukhopadhyay, Subrata. Rasika. Kolkata: Ananda Publishers.1991. Print

 Gangopadhyay 17

Singh K Suresh. Dust Storm and Hanging Mist: Story of Birsa Munda and his Movement in

Chhotanagpur, 1874-1901. Calcutta. Firma K.L.Mukhopadhyay, 1966. Print

Gangopadhyay 18