Off Centre.

21 I would first like to take a closer look at the very beginning of the novel which describes the creation of the main “character” and sets up the relation of the One and its legions to their alleged centre – the dead A.D. The creation of the One makes it clear from the outset that we are not dealing with a subject or being but rather with a becoming in the Deleuzian sense. Becoming is directly related to deterritorialisation as it opposes notions of minority (e.g. lesbian subjects): “Jews, Gypsies, etc., may constitute minorities under certain conditions, but that in itself does not make them becomings. One reterritorializes [...] on a minority as a state; but in a becoming, one is deterritorialized.” (Deleuze/Guattari, ATP, 321) A minority, then, is constructed by the centre – the state – and so is its prescribed deviation with little leeway for escaping this condition.

22 The beginning of the novel is set in a gothic Parisian graveyard. Over the grave of the dead A.D., her/his shadow, who is also the narrator, hovers: “I, the most faithful of dead shadows, have hovered about this spot since my master-mistress' burial” (Barney 11). The graveyard is described as reeking with the residue of buried corpses ready to jump on you: “Graveyards are places of infection; not all is taken away by the dead – the diseases of their brain, their last thoughts, their desires, their failures, lurk in the air like poisoned wine to intoxicate the new-comer with the besetting characteristics of the deceased” (Barney 12/13). The “birthplace” of the One can thus be considered as a typical Deleuzian setting of infection that opposes “traditional” ways of conceiving and reproduction:

How can we conceive of a peopling, a propagation, a becoming that is without filiation or hereditary production? A multiplicity without the unity of an ancestor? It is quite simple; everybody knows it, but it is discussed only in secret. We oppose epidemic to filiation, contagion to heredity, peopling by contagion to sexual reproduction. (Deleuze/Guattari, ATP, 266)

The shadow-narrator explains that apart from him/her there are many “disembodied fragments” (Barney 13) who are keen to join a source of light that is also present. The light itself is not a unity either for it contains “so many personages only remotely connected with its centre” (Barney 13). It finally allows the shadow to merge with it and together they enter a genderless dead body they find lying on the ground murdered – “This fallen rider whom a nightmare had thrown seemed neither a man nor a woman” (Barney 15). The resurrection of A.D. is completed by the arrival of a woman who “breathed into the pinched nostrils that expanded to her breath” (Barney 18/19), thus bringing the One to life. The result of the conjunction of A.D's shadow, the light and a dead ungendered body is the multiple entity “the One and its legions” who describe themselves as such: “We've met with too many persons and allowed them all to cross and join in us. We shall never get ourselves clear now. This collective organism must at least be made harmonious” (Barney 24/25). From then on, the narrator also refers to this multiple character using plural forms (“we”, “our”) which can be read as another refusal to attribute gender or a unified identity.

23 Before we look at the One and their legions in more detail, let us briefly return to the alleged centre of the novel, the dead A.D. As has been proposed by various interpretations of the novel, A.D. signifies the dead Renée Vivien whose suicide Barney could not overcome. The resurrection of the One thus serves to investigate the suicide of A.D who killed herself, according to Shari Benstock, because she could not deal with the “effects of self-division in women” (Benstock 299) enforced on her by a patriarchal society. However, One’s efforts at revenging A.D.'s suicide – “We would revenge the suicide, make good the failure, go back in A.D.'s stead, [...] take over this broken destiny, be stronger than life” (Barney 30) – are immensely complicated by the fact that the One and its legions are reborn without memories.

24 The plot of the novel unfolds in a quasi-detective style, the One trying to piece together fragments and clues about A.D.'s life. This endeavour is complicated and in the end doomed to failure due to several facts. The first is the rather uncertain subject status of A.D. Going back to the beginning of the novel, the reader is left unable to fathom who, or indeed how many, A.D. was/were. The gender question cannot be solved since the narrator refers to A.D. as her/his “master-mistress” (Barney 11), and A.D.'s sexual orientation cannot be pinned down as the One and its legions find love letters to A.D. by male and female admirers. Karla Jay's rather desperate effort to maintain A.D.'s lesbianism is not convincing at all: she argues that the fact that the book the One and its legions find in a chapel close to the graveyard is bound in leather made of breasts “suggest[s] that A.D.'s particular interest was in women” (102). The second complication is that it is left open whether A.D. was indeed one or many or maybe a couple. At the very beginning, the shadow-narrator refers to A.D.'s grave as follows: “I, [...] have hovered about this spot since my master-mistress' burial. This is our tombstone with an engraved urn – the double of the urn in which their ashes are mingled and sealed togethe.” (Barney 11; emphasis added). This passage is highly confusing since it can be read in different ways: one could claim that the narrator is the surviving part of a couple (“our” ashes); or, that A.D. was a hermaphrodite, a “master-mistress”: “Had I not already shadowed a master-mistress, a couple so united that I could never cut one from the other in separate silhouettes” (Barney 14). The last sentence in which the narrator detaches himself/herself from A.D. – referring to “their” ashes – brings the final confusion because we can now also view A.D. as consisting of at least two persons. A further confusion arises out of the novel's exceptional set-up “beyond time”: since it is the One's task to piece together the fragments of A.D.'s past life and possibly remedy it, the trajectory of progress is to step back in time. This scrambles the whole endeavour and entirely confuses the One whose additional problem is memory loss: “By progressing we risk a fall into the past. What past?” (Barney 25), “As we cannot well remember, let us move on to forget. Movement backward or forward?” (Barney 43). Since the novel ends without providing the reader with a notion of who A.D. was and who the One and its legions are, I would argue that instead of following the futile attempt in recovering A.D.'s identity, the novel rather invites the reader to drop this detective plot-line altogether. As I have stated earlier, it is much more productive to look at what this novel does and so refuse a narrative of representation and identity.

25 To come back to the question of how the One and its legions are related to their alleged centre – the dead A.D. – it should be obvious by now that the novel thwarts any attempt of the reader to establish a clear-cut connection between the two, the three, the many. This is due to the fact that the resurrection of the One is neither a rebirth nor a creation of a subject but a becoming that typically lacks an origin, is not an imitation of someone else and is therefore not a version of A.D. Deleuze and Guattari's thoughts on becoming and the relation it establishes, or rather evades, between its two reference objects best express the relation between the One and their centre A.D.:

A line of becoming is not defined by points that it connects, or by points that compose it; on the contrary, it passes between points, it comes up through the middle, it runs perpendicular to the points first perceived, transversally to the localizable relation to distant or contiguous points. A point is always a point of origin. But a line of becoming has neither beginning nor end, departure nor arrival, origin nor destination; [...] A becoming is neither one nor two, nor the relation of the two; it is the in between, the border or line of flight or descent running perpendicular to both. (ATP, 323)