Off Centre.

2. Eccentricity, canon formation and the semiosphere

6 To come back to Natalie Barney and the literature of the Paris Left Bank, then, I would like to trace the formation of a lesbian literary canon with the help of Yuri Lotman's model of the semiosphere. Contemporary canon debates resonate strongly with a rhetoric of centre versus margin, demanding the opening or expansion of the canon to include ”forgotten“ texts or texts peripheral to the canon. Debates about the disparity between canonized texts and those outside it

tend to imagine cultural dynamics as a battleground between two polar forces – the oppressors and the oppressed – and to charge either of these diametric forces with absolute responsibility for either the perpetuation of the canon (equated with social injustice) or its rejection (equated with justified progressive revolutions). (Sela-Sheffy 150).

This debate results from an increasingly ideological notion of the literary canon which makes the problematic claim that representation within the canon mirrors representation in other spheres such as the social and political (Guillory 6-7; Kolbas 47-48).

7 One of the archives to have undergone a radical revision is the literary period of modernism. After the feminist interventions of the 1970s, the inquiries of lesbian critics posed a second challenge that uncovered a bulk of “lesbian” literature written during the modernist period but excluded from the canon. This attempt is an example of the kind of notion of eccentricity that I would label commonsense, namely the assumption that anything outside the centre or deviating from it is eccentric. It is quite obvious that this notion informs much of (lesbian) feminist criticism that poses male (heterosexual) modernist writing against supposedly suppressed lesbian writing, thus following the prefigured part of how to deviate from the centre:

Modernism as we were taught it at midcentury was perhaps halfway to the truth. It was unconsciously gendered masculine. [...] Typically, both the authors of original manifestos and the literary historians of modernism took as their norm a small set of its male participants, who were quoted, anthologized, taught, and consecrated as geniuses. (Scott 2)

By reclaiming what has been erased from cultural memory, an archive of the past is being re-constructed with the intention of providing a sense of the historical continuity of lesbian communities and a self-confident lesbian literary tradition. The lesbian community situated on the Paris Left Bank formed the centre of critical attention. The specific location as an expatriate Bohemian enclave on the left bank of the river Seine, detached from the rest of Paris and its rather repressive gender stereotyping, marks a distinctly eccentric space: “Indeed, certain neighborhoods in Paris may have seemed [...] like the eroticized coteries based on their defiance of conventional codes of behavior and their pursuit of an artistry linked to their love affairs." (Gilbert/Gubar 218/219)

8 Natalie Barney as the most liberated lesbian, “the mythic world of Parisian Lesbos over which Natalie Barney had presided” (Benstock 306), the activities in her backyard as well as her weekly salon feature strongly in accounts of the period by lesbian criticism and turn Barney into the central lesbian role model of her time. The lives of Barney and other lesbian writers such as Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Bryher and Hilda Doolittle, as well as their effort in establishing a distinctly lesbian community by searching for and creating their own lesbian literary tradition, provide a rich repository of the past. Bonnie Zimmermann stresses the special appeal of this period and its writers for lesbian critics: “Contemporary lesbians – literary critics, historians and layreaders – have been drawn to their mythic and mythmaking presence, seeing in them a vision of lesbian society and culture that may have existed only once before – on the original island of Lesbos” (141/142).

9 Much as a male-biased literary criticism has shaped the canon of modernism as distinctly male and heterosexual, lesbian literary criticism has shaped the cultural memory of the Paris Left Bank by adapting “lesbian” texts according to its own premises. In order to illuminate the process of this adaptation further, I will briefly introduce Lotman's model of the semiosphere. Lotman views culture – in analogy to the earth's biosphere – as a “semiosphere” that contains all languages, texts and the codes to decipher them. The centre of the semiosphere is rather static and highly organised. It is also the location where rules, norms and a given culture's metalanguage are produced when the system starts to describe itself. In this way, the integrity and organisation of the sphere is ensured because, according to Lotman, a system can only tolerate a certain amount of diversity. If the elements are too heterogeneous, the system will start to homogenize its cultural space. The centre of the semiosphere is inextricably bound to its periphery; the periphery consists of unorganised zones that trigger cultural dynamisms because they come into conflict with the norms of the centre. The continuous interplay between periphery and centre is the only way, according to Lotman, to initiate and maintain cultural change.

10 This aspect is especially relevant to my notion of eccentricity since it becomes obvious here how intertwined the centre and its outside are: the texts produced by the periphery can only come into conflict with the centre if they run contrary to its norms. I would argue that this, to stretch Lotman's model a bit further, can only be the case if the centre recognises the conflict as a deviation and it can only do so if the deviation is already prefigured as the flipside of the norm. In other words, there seems to be no escaping the never-ending binary interaction between centre and periphery. The process by which external texts are adapted into the semiosphere also shows the interdependence of periphery and centre. Adaptations of external texts into the semiosphere are regulated by its boundary that also guards the semiosphere's integrity. External texts can only enter by passing through the boundary whose basic function is their translation into the language of a given sphere, as well as selecting which contents are adapted. The criteria for the selection process as well as the language of translation correspond to the metalanguage of the semiosphere's centre. Thus, the centre at first identifies and even produces standardized transgressions from its norms and then adapts or assimilates the periphery's texts into the semiosphere in an attempt to homogenize its discourse once again.