Not So Little Literatures: Reading Barbara Honigmann With (and Against) Deleuze and Guattari

Robert Gillett

doi:10.3828/mlo.v0i0.288

Abstract

Although a number of critics have applied the term ‘minor literature’ to the German Jewish writer Barbara Honigmann, this article proceeds on the assumption that the last word may not have been spoken on how it might be possible and desirable to apply Deleuze and Guattari to that author. In it, I extend the discourse established by Deleuze and Guattari beyond the colonial context and apply it to Barbara Honigmann in her capacity as a Jewish writer. This also involves reading what Honigmann writes about three other Jewish women writers both in the light of, and as a critique of, that Deleuze-Guattarian discourse, occasionally going back to Kafka in the process. And the conclusion is that, while Deleuze and Guattari can prove useful in drawing attention to certain traits of literatures produced by members of minorities writing as such, the dangers involved in trying to reclaim pejorative sobriquets remain incalculable, and that terms such as ‘minor literature’ are therefore probably best avoided when discussing major authors like Barbara Honigmann. Tweetable Abstract: In what sense can Jewish women writers be called ‘minor’? Robert Gillett explores this question with reference to Barbara Honigmann, a justly celebrated contemporary German Jewish woman writer, and in sometimes lively debate with Deleuze and Guattari on Kafka.

Highlights

I Of all the authors who have ever written in the German language, none can with less justification be said to be ‘minor’ than Franz Kafka
It is not just that Deleuze and Guattari are wrong about Kafka’s German. Their translation of Kafka’s ‘kleine Literaturen’ as ‘une littérature mineure’ (‘a minor literature’), makes it possible for them to include in the term precisely what is excluded from the German – namely minority contributions, like those of Heine, say, or Kafka himself, to a great literature (Casanova 1999, 200)
What in Kafka had been a passing remark expressing something like envy for literatures that do not boast giants like Goethe and appear less hierarchical while escaping the anxiety of influence, becomes in Deleuze and Guattari an untenable generalisation about the inability of minor literatures to bring forth major talents (Kafka 1990, 313–14; Deleuze & Guattari 1975, 31)

Summary

Introduction

I Of all the authors who have ever written in the German language, none can with less justification be said to be ‘minor’ than Franz Kafka. Deleuze and Guattari introduced the term into literary scholarship, using it in Kafka’s sense to characterise the impossibility for a minority to write in the language of the majority and to show how in the process an “unofficial” way of writing, a “marginal” literature can come into being’ (Honigmann 2000a, 831).

Results

Conclusion