Neck curved to the paper, I read. The title – What Is a Minor Literature. It is an essay written collaboratively by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze originally published in French, now translated across to English. Of the copy I am working with, each letter is buffed with various blotches of printed error. It’s a bit of a struggle to wrangle the letters together, still, the words follow, ideas too, and early on, Franz Kafka’s writing is stapled with the term minor literature. Minor. Mi-nor. It implies an inferiority of sorts. Minor as lesser. Minor as unserious, as underage. Literature dubbed minor is in some ways all of these things. It is dry, slightly crap I suppose, the thing is that it still works, regardless of a cripple. Its opposite is major literature. The more popular or the language most spoken, could be French or English – this essay takes German to hand. These languages are cluttered of words – so many of them, and with so much, they are wide with potential. Yet so often the languages falter, many of us struggle, and literature becomes ironically inaccessible. The very thing built to relate one to another estranges us even further. Of major and minor literature, to be minor does not mean to stand entirely outside of a major language, instead it is to foster a minority of terms liberated of their original language. Minor literature takes the obscure, the non-sensical and spits them together in a third world zone[s] by which a language can escape. It is language appropriate for the strange idea. Language appropriate for struggle of not quite knowing. Spade the earth like a dog and thrust down its pit. Eventually the burrow will give away, collapse upon the animal – the author of that very burrow. Write just the same – towards a poorer version of language. In minor for its own sake, for the sake of figuring out – this is a minor literature. A literature devoid of masters, no higher nor lower, coherence and the unformed expression sat together. Its specious – looks right, superficially so, but it’s wrong, really and shouldn’t work. Not least as we expect it to. Minor is disjunction between the content and the expression – the mechanism at the fore, and the author in the margin. In the margin, yes, minor authors renounce tradition. No more narrator and character, man and beast. No, the individual likes to be a part of the herd. As in Kafka, Josephine the mouse will stop singing and so join the immense crowd of noise. No longer mouse, now just mice. Minor is all the more machine-like with no master to laude. Churning out scrawl without a title so that perhaps one thing can mean two. An idea may be misinterpreted and remade, towards the next one – maybe a better idea, maybe worse. What in great literature goes on down below, constituting a not indispensable cellar of the structure, here takes place in the full light of day. Minor literature is the lore painted in red, for all to read.