2 - Reflecting the Galactic Varnish

Summary

Ah, one learns when one has to; one learns when one needs a way out; one learns at all costs. One stands over oneself with a whip; one flays oneself at the slightest opposition. My ape nature fled out of me, head over heels and away …

— Franz Kafka, “A Report to an Academy”

GILLES DELEUZE AND FéLIX GUATTARI'S TEXT Kafka : pour une littérature mineure (Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 1975) is useful for contextualizing questions that arise in a study on Miller's inventive literary form. Miller's writing exhibits qualities of a minor literature in the way that it subverts the conventional assumptions of functionality of the major language of English from within. Upon close inspection, his seemingly haphazard, obscure, or nonsensical and plotless literature reveals itself to contain significant allusions and stylistic nuances that call attention to the act of writing as more than just a secured literary form being submitted to the process of categorical and reductive literary analysis. Instead, Miller's fragmented and forceful, sometimes insipid and vulgar prose, often traipses along calculatingly, as though its only purpose is the traipsing itself, and, indeed, this activity is precisely what is of interest in Miller's style. Writing becomes an endeavor motivated solely by its existence as writing — the movement of writing — and through its resistance to the submission of literary standards.