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“Paper Language” Up to a point, Stevenson operates along the lines of what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call “minor literature.” A Scotsman writing in English and living in the South PaciWc, Stevenson occupies the position of marginality characteristic of the “minor” writer.1 His Wction also exhibits each of the three deWning traits of minor literature sketched out by Deleuze and Guattari. “Deterritorialized” in its dispersed setting and medium of circulation, politicized in its deWance of the grand narratives of British imperialism, the South Sea Wction is also “revolutionary” in its announcement of an alternative “potential community” or “collective.”2 The parallels might extend farther: the polynesiansim, the cartographism , even a certain Americanness in Stevenson’s work correspond to particular motifs identiWed in Deleuze and Guattari’s original outline and elaborated in more detail in later writings, especially by Deleuze.3 These parallels might appear to converge at the point around which our reading of Stevenson turned, speciWcally, at the vanishing point marked by his map. From this perspective, the map would have the effect of—would in fact be the very Wgure of—the decisive “vanishing line” (ligne de fuite) traced by minor writers in the major literary tradition , according to Deleuze and Guattari.4 Such a convergence might indicate a broader correspondence between the “deterritorialization” that gives rise to “minor literature” and the mass mediacy at issue in what we are calling paperwork. After all, Stevenson’s encounter is with no ordinary map—it involves a medium that eschews traditional subjective boundaries, the phenomenological horizons of a self-conscious subject (the author himself), on the one hand, and a self-consistent object (a material map), on the other. What is more, as we have seen, Stevenson ’s map is borrowed from the foolscap of “The Gold Bug”: it is less the drawing of a space, than the opening of a network into which the subject itself is drawn. In this sense the map exercises a force similar to that of the newspaper in “The Man of the Crowd,” in the Dupin stories Chapter 3 Transatlantic Connections: “Paper Language” in Melville and, in a related manner, in the London dailies where Poe encountered Dickens’s journalistic sketches. Like the “vanishing line” of “minor literature,” then, paper withdraws in these works at points that break down subjective agency, releasing new, indeed “revolutionary,” collective potentiality.5 In “minor literature,” the point of breakdown also has something to do with paper. If paper dramatizes the elusive status of the material support under conditions of mass mediacy, “paper language” characterizes the precarious linguistic state from which “minor literature” derives. In an important late essay, Deleuze Wnds traces of this “paper language” across the Atlantic in the work of Herman Melville. But by taking up “paper language” in Melville Deleuze hits upon the very element that escapes the dialectical logic of the minor literary program.6 For paper in Melville surfaces where the national framework that is the necessary starting point for the minor literary program becomes unrecognizable. In spite of the emphasis on virtuality in Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of subjectivity and of a certain monolithic concept of national literature, “minor literature” remains the property of a national literary subject—a revolutionary possibility, as they put it, “in the heart of (au sein de) what is called a great (or established ) literature.”7 By contrast, the medium supported by paper in Melville’s writing is a force that exceeds subjective limits, not only on the level of the individual writer, but also when it comes to the national literary movement. This thesis, which has been implied in the interactions and transfers that we have been tracking between Stevenson and Poe, and before that between Poe and Dickens, becomes explicit in Melville’s treatment of paper. The broader question of the postnationalist or transatlantic dimensions of Melville’s work goes beyond the scope of this study.8 Our aim will be limited to outlining the trajectory of paper in a few key texts by Melville, a trajectory on which Deleuze touches as he pursues the “paper language” of “minor literature” in a transatlantic context. In his analysis of Melville, and in particular of “Bartleby,” Deleuze follows a paper trail receding from the national perspective of the minor literary program and leading to Dickens’s Bleak House. “Minor literature” starts with “paper language” (langage de papier). The phrase occurs twice in Deleuze and Guattari’s portrait of Kafka as “minor” writer.9...

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