Minor literature and oriental outlook in George Bernard Shaw's Getting Married

Abstract

Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘minor literature’ has three basic characteristics: the use of a deterritorialised language, having an inherently political content and the call for the creation of a people to come with a collective and revolutionary enunciation. Shaw’s play Getting Married written in 1908 has all three characteristics. Firstly, it is critical of the writing rules of English language and does away with the apostrophe in its dialogues. Secondly, it launches an attack on both the marriage system of Christianity and the current civil marriage act in Shaw’s time in Britain from a political stance as the “will of the world”. Finally, the play ends with a conclusion shocking for both other characters and the reader. It turns out to be a defence of a reformed Islam against Christianity in its call for the creation of a people to come. In this final enunciation, the play reinforces its minoriental outlook already prevalent in its long preface but undermined by most critics and reviewers. In this study, I will analyse the play within the framework of minor literature with a "minoriental” outlook which can be defined as an immanent approach to encounters between the West and the East based on the presence of any positive, prospective, symbiotic, evolutionary and unconscious lines of flight.