Editorial
1 In a manner rare in literary studies, our interest in the eccentric has its origin in our discussions of one specific contribution to gender studies: Ina Schabert’s massive Englische Literaturgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts: Eine neue Darstellung aus der Sicht der Geschlechterforschung (2006). In it, she establishes for the first time the artistic and aesthetic coherence of a group of authors and their works, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Stevie Smith, Elizabeth von Arnim, and Virginia Woolf among them, who emerge from classic modernism but who also seem to have a place all their own, a place so curiously unclassifiable that they often find themselves in the category of the quirky, the odd, the sui generis, the eccentric (152-171).[1]Romana Huk tries to save Stevie Smith from the damages done by a reputation for eccentricity by translating her into the category of the “ex-centric,” understood here as a “liminal position in society and langue” which produces only “fractured sightings of the self in the shadow of ascendant cultural forces” (1). Obviously, having “unfractured sightings of the self” would be preferable in this reading (and appears possible for other subjects) and ex-centricity is a positional deficit which Smith’s art tries to work its way around.. By contrast, we would insist that the eccentric remain eccentric and should be valued as such, as a choice and a profoundly different model of how one may position oneself in relation to a whole range of issues, including those of seeing oneself in culture or not. Their work is characterized not so much by an oppositional (or for that matter: affirmative) attitude to norms but rather by a calculated indifference to them. Their work often features characters who appear “odd”: old maids who stubbornly refuse to submit to the regime of having to be either “tragic” or “comic,” missionaries forgetful of their missions, narrative voices which weave in and out of various topics in a mode of the spoken, the merely incidental, the chatty. And always: texts which seem to refuse taking up a position which can be firmly determined, “fixed” as it were in any one place, summarized.
2 These texts and the characters which people them seem to have only one aim: to get away. Sylvia Townsend Warner’s middle aged renegade Lolly Willowes, for example, moves from the centre in London to a rural periphery in Great Mop only to find herself moving even further into the indifferent, non-social company of shrubs and ditches while the novel itself playfully and in total disregard of the “rules” hovers between the realistic and the fantastic, the everyday and the occult, in an ironic mode which ultimately cannot be rescued onto firm non-ironic ground by a process of reversal. Taking her cue from one of the prominent examples of this literary mode, Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper (1936), Schabert calls these works “foot-off-the-ground” novels (though in Smith’s case one must also assume the existence of foot-off-the-ground poems). Foot-off-the-ground texts are characterized (and united as an identifiable group) by a specific general “attitude” towards all systems of classification and categorization (it is not by chance that one of Stevie Smith’s poems begins with the rallying cry: “No Categories!” [Smith, Poems, 258]). They display a profound scepticism towards and mistrust of such systems and seek to “lift off” from them, to escape their grasp, to avoid affirming their legitimacy, even their very existence, by trying to avoid positioning themselves either in affirmation or in opposition to them. At the same time, however, as the entire symbolic order – and with it language itself – is one of these systems, in fact the system most to be mistrusted and feared, this also means that these texts can “lift off” with only one foot (as Stevie Smith visualized the technique) while having to keep the other foot firmly on the ground in the very system – or we might say “centre” – they seek to escape from.
3 It is Schabert’s great achievement to have, for the first time, identified the group characteristics of these texts and given them a name. At the same time, however, the fact that this name had to be generated from the very language used by one of its practitioners, the object of study providing the terms of its own naming, is a measure of the success with which these texts have managed to evade the systems of categorization which they so deviously sought to disarm: there is no critical vocabulary by which they could collectively be named. As the foot-off-the-ground novel was being described by Schabert as a specifically English phenomenon exclusively developed by women writers (indeed Schabert sees it as a specifically female answer to the relentless demands of the symbolic and social order), we were trying to expand the radius of this term, to see if practitioners could also be found in other national contexts (Karen Blixen alias Isak Dinesen immediately came to mind), among male writers, in other media, in different historical periods. For this, a new word was needed, and we followed a suggestion by another colleague of ours, Isabel Karremann, to call these texts “eccentric.” This is how the quest for the eccentric began – and opened a view on a whole vista of unsolved problems. In Quest for the Eccentric
4 There is, at the moment, a tentative flurry of different works which seek to make the term eccentric available for critical usage. One of the earliest attempts is Daniel Sangsues Le récit excentrique (1987), which sets out to establish the term for a group of nineteenth-century French novels which follow the example of Laurence Sterne in developing literary textures of decentered ironies, playful parodies of the novelistic form, texts which resolutely turn away from the serious to embrace the frivolous and the marginal in terms of literary respectability. Here is how Sangsue begins his discussion:
Car si, nous le verrons, le corpus “excentrique” se constitue comme de lui-même a travers une communauté de pratiques parodiques, de references (dans lesquelles Sterne domine), et un jeu interne de renvois […] il reste à s’interroger sur sa spécificité et à dégager son originalité. (10).
5 What interests us here is not so much the question if Sangsues post-Sternian texts may be properly termed eccentric or how these may be related to Schabert’s foot-off-the-ground texts (though the question would be an interesting one), but how this critical term obviously had to be introduced. It enters the text in quotation marks as if the term could in fact not be applied without marks of authorial distance, could not be taken at face value, was itself unfamiliar in such critical surroundings (which it obviously is), may even be unacceptable for critical usage. No one would consider speaking of Lord Byron as a “Romantic” author in quite this manner (unless one wanted to suggest that there is something wrong with Byron’s Romanticism) because the term Romantic enjoys a long critical history which renders it immediately comprehensible and rich in meaning. Eccentricity by contrast seems to be a term itself eccentrically evasive and untested for critical usage. This collection of essays sets itself the task of first of all testing the viability and the potential radius of the eccentric as a category of literary analysis.