This study examines Thomas Pynchon’s mammoth novel Against the Day in terms of the minor practice of language as proposed by Deleuze and Guattari in their book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, which opens up new possibilities for literary criticism. With his idiosyncratic, intense and inventive practice of language, Pynchon shatters pre-existing notions of appropriate and homogenizing forms of major language. The novel demystifies the institutionalized meaning system of language and in many ways resists identifiable, decipherable meaning,’s Against the Day 122 as well as the covert and overt deterritorialization of language, the escape from “territorial” and “representational” language, the disregard for meaning, the neutralization of meaning, asyntactic language, phantasmagorical and absurd narratives, enigmatic jokes, silly songs and asubjective free indirect narration. The linguistic practice of Against the Day prefers the territory of asubjective insignification to subjective, symbolic and signifying language in order to dismantle the territory of representation; thus it pushes the great language to its limits or even beyond.

by Ali Salami & Razieh Rahmani

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