Deleuze and Guattari’s anatomy of minor literature distinguishes four languages. Two of these chiefly concern me here: the vehicular language of government, cities, and commerce and the referential language of sense and culture. A vehicular language is subject to the deterritorializing forces of centralization throughout official discourse, which works to subsume national, ethnic, and regional borders. A referential language entails a “cultural reterritorialization.” A language moored to a particular place and time sedimented or striated with distinctive marks of landscape, climate, local color, dialect, temperament, and so on. I see the dialogism of these vehicular and referential languages as a stage in the development of a literary tradition in late medieval Scotland, with Henryson as its chief proponent, consolidating cultural influences from the south while staking out a referential language distinct from those influences.16
My synthesis of the theory of borders and marginality explores the articulations of this minority literature across various conjunctions. In Deleuze and Guattari, texts become machines productive not of a univocal meaning but differentially constructed by and conjoined to other machines. This is less a question of intertextuality or Oedipal anxieties than one of interactivity, because the functioning of one machine alters the capacity of others. In this sense, Henryson’s work is an invention in the two most common senses of the word today: a fiction or fable, as well as a new machine or apparatus. As has been exhaustively demonstrated, a dominant machine of late medieval English literature was the Chaucer tradition—an Oedipal mechanism of psychic defenses driven by fantasies of paternity, mourning, correction, completion, and loving conservation.17 Henryson interrupts the functioning of this machine at its source: Chaucer’s connection of Troilus to the ancient poetae and the subsequent English poets who in turn positioned themselves as