Off Centre.

3. The One Who is Legion

16 The reception of Natalie Barney's novel The One Who Is Legion (privately printed in 1930) bears witness to the urge to read femininity back into a text that defies stable gender categories as well as identity categories. The novel tells the story of the resurrected shadow spirit of A.D. which merges with an angelic light and enters a genderless body, forming a multiple and ungendered “character” referred to as “the One and its legions.” This character follows the footsteps of its dead master/mistress through Paris, seeking to solve and revenge A.D.'s suicide. A.D., like the One, remains ungendered throughout the narrative. Critical reception of the novel suffers from a heavy autobiographical focus, reading it as Barney's attempt to come to terms with the suicide of her lover Renée Vivien (figuring as the dead A.D.). Shari Benstock, who certainly deserves credit for discussing this to then rather unknown novel, resorts mostly to an autobiographic reading and then claims that the novel “constitute[s] an effort to recover through language the feminine in Western culture" (298). Benstock reaches this quick and rather unsubstantiated conclusion because she anticipates exactly what the mode of resistance for a lesbian writer in a patriarchal society must “naturally” be. Lesbian critic Anna Livia provides a good account of the ungendered and plural narrative perspective but also reads the androgynous figure of the One as lesbian: “[Barney] presents this androgynous, dual being to demonstrate the expanded consciousness of the homosexual who must know both her own gender functions and how the lover of this sex should behave.” (64) Karla Jay also acknowledges the hermaphroditic and androgynous nature of the One and claims that the One is genderless and asexual, but still reads a femininity back into the character. She proposes that in contrast to the Platonic concept of the androgyne as a softened man, “the androgynes of Barney and Vivien are unique in that they begin with the Platonic model but always place the female principle in the primary position.” (99) Employing a rather monstrous neologism, Jay regards The One Who Is Legion as Barney's bid to proclaim a transcendental femaleness: “The aim of the creation of the gynandromorph is the emergence of a higher, more perfect being which would re-establish the principle of Femaleness in the universe.” (100) Although both Jay and Livia seem to work with notions of androgyny regarding the “nature” of the One, it is striking to see how fast this notion is neatly fed back into an identity category once more – be it the homosexual or the “gynadromorph”.

17 Barney's novel, however, does not allow any such identification of fixed identities, nor does it have an agenda to reinstate “femaleness,” transcendental or otherwise. Rather, I would suggest, the novel does something completely different, and doing is here an operative term: the focus I propose for a productive reading of the text is deliberately set on what the novel and its “characters” do rather than struggling to determine what they are. This kind of reading – as opposed to a hermeneutic reading practice – is one Deleuze and Guattari favour and employ, as Claire Colebrook points out:

It is always possible to read literature as an art of recognition, as about 'ourselves' and 'the' human search for meaning. This art of interpretation or hermeneutics requires that we 'overcode' literature, seeing each text as an expression or representation of some underlying meaning. [...] Alternatively, literature can be read for what it produces, for its transformations. (137)

18 To come back to my hypothesis that the eccentric can be thought of as an unexpected deviation from the centre, I propose that the novel's trajectory describes exactly that: a movement away from what the novel sets as its centre – the dead A.D. – that spins off in many unforeseen directions thus employing eccentricity as a mode of writing. Therefore, The One Who is Legion should be aligned with the concept of a Deleuzian minor literature that “does not write to express what it is (as though it had an identity to repeat or re-produce)” (Colebrook 118) but creates new styles of perception through a series of becomings and deterritorialisations that contrast sharply with any stable concepts of gender, sexual orientation and, in fact, identity. In contrast to this trajectory, lesbian feminist criticism has employed a strategy to interrupt this eccentric movement by pinning the main “character” down and making it signify and represent. Claire Colebrook notes that this line of thinking is often at work when

we start to think of women's writing as the expression of an underlying femininity that was lying in wait for literary inscription. The group becomes subjugated to an image of its own identity; its becoming is no longer open but is seen as the becoming of some specific essence. Writing becomes prescriptive and majoritarian. (117)

19 These two different concepts of thinking or, indeed, these different forces, are captured by Deleuze and Guattari with various terms; they are played out on the plane of organisation (which I would align with the reading of Barney's novel by lesbian feminist criticism) on the one hand, and on the plane of consistency on the other (this is the one on which the eccentric trajectory of the novel unfolds):

The plane of organization or development effectively covers what we have called stratification: Forms and subjects, organs and functions, are “strata” or relations between strata. The plane of consistency or immanence, on the one hand, implies a destratification of all of Nature, by even the most artificial means. The plane of consistency is the body without organs. Pure relations of speed and slowness between particles imply movements of deterritorialization, just as pure affects imply an enterprise of desubjectification. Moreover, the plane of consistency does not preexist the movements of deterritorialization that unravel it, the lines of flight that draw it and cause it to rise to the surface, the becomings that compose it. The plane of organization is constantly working away at the plane of consistency, always trying to plug the lines of flight, stop or interrupt the movements of deterritorialization, weigh them down, restratify them, reconstitute forms and subjects in a dimension of depth. Conversely, the plane of consistency is constantly extricating itself from the plane of organization, causing particles to spin off the strata, scrambling forms by dint of speed or slowness, breaking down functions by means of assemblages or microassemblages. (ATP 297/298)

20 As can be observed from this statement, the notions of becoming, deterritorialisation, lines of flight and assemblage are all interrelated. Hopefully, they become clearer as we proceed with the novel. For now, let it suffice to draw attention to the movement of the plane of consistency, especially to the “particles” “spin[ning] off the strata” and to the fact that the movement of deterritorialisation is not anticipated by the plane of consistency – thus, it is a movement that describes exactly the kind of eccentricity I have proposed[2]“Deterritorialisation frees a possibility or event from its actual origins. [...] Deterritorialisation occurs when an event of becoming escapes or detaches from its original territory” (Colebrook 58/59).. The novel effects this movement of deterritorialisation – “the movement by which ‘one’ leaves the territory” (Deleuze/Guattari ATP, 559) – by employing a “character” engaging in becomings and assemblages as opposed to a character with a fixed identity. The One Who is Legion effectively disengages from its territory and, indeed, its centre.