Eccentricity and Deterritorialization in Natalie Barney’s The One Who is Legion — Page 7:
31 Since the One and its legions become everything, they scramble the notion of ever having emerged from or related to a centre: “to be all. The ebb of life within charged with life from without” (Barney 31). This move can certainly be called eccentric according to my definition since it is ever changing, not to be anticipated and, in the end, leaves nothing to deviate from. Deleuze and Guattari refer to this way of perceiving as becoming imperceptible; rejecting the common way in which we perceive the world, namely by sorting perceptions into objects,
we become imperceptible [...] by becoming one with the flow of images that is life. [...] By approaching or imagining the inhuman point of view of animals, machines, and molecules we no longer take ourselves as unchanging perceivers set over and against life. We immerse ourselves in the flow of life's perceptions. (Colebrook 128)
At the end of their “quest,” the One and its legions fuse back into A.D.'s tombstone and become literally imperceptible by dissolving further and further: “We looked at our hands, through our hands, our bloodless shadowless hands, relieved from form and motion, folded within each other, at rest in the still centre of movement, as immaterial as the crystal air, and hardly distinguishable from the crystal objects still about us” (Barney 157).
32 The One and its legions “are” not a subject but engage in a line of becoming that brings them further and further away from their alleged centre. It should also have become quite clear that whatever they “are” or become, we are certainly not dealing with a suppressed lesbian subject.
4. Conclusion
33 If a minor literature has the power to engage in a movement of deterritorialisation, Barney's main “character(s)” certainly proceed upon this path. The One and its legions move on a Deleuzian line of flight that is “a path of mutation precipitated through the actualisation of connections among bodies that were previously only implicit” (Parr 145). In doing so, they radically undermine the notion of a stable and clearly gendered subject that progresses and evolves in predictable ways. Through constantly engaging the reader in a radically different way of perceiving the world, the novel thwarts any attempt to be pinned down, categorised and made to represent a certain (lesbian) identity. This novel resists falling into a dynamic of centre and periphery because of its constant, unexpected turns, alliances, becomings. Lotman's model aptly captured the novel's treatment by lesbian critics because it showed that they indeed operate strongly on a binary centre-periphery dynamics. This runs counter to anything this novel attempts to do: it offers us a truly eccentric way of writing that spins off its centre in entirely unforeseen ways. These “particles [...] spin[ning] off the strata” will never be captured by the “plane of organisation” (ATP 297/298), or, in other words: no matter how hard you squeeze, you will never make an eccentric orbit circular.