Off Centre.

6 Most current studies focus on the eccentric as a specific personality type and seek to position him (and more rarely her) within the social or psychological regimes of normality from which he or she supposedly deviates (Dörr-Backes, A. Assman et als., Carroll, Weeks/James). Highly suggestive here is Peter Schulman, who begins his study on “Modern French Eccentrics” with an alphabetical “List of Eccentrics” in various subcategories: subdivided into “Literary Eccentrics” (i.e. literary characters) and “Real-Life Eccentrics” and further differentiated by the historical period in which they reside. In this, he follows something that seems to have become standard procedure, for rather than setting out to define the eccentric either as a personality trait or as a mode of being in the world, scholarly and popular engagements with eccentrics have tended to work by establishing lists of eccentrics.

7 In these lists, eccentrics are not so much discussed as collected: assemblies of the odd and the weird, of curious habits and behaviours, of the nerdish and the harmlessly crazy, in short, of eccentric personalities. These personalities are set outside the norm and placed at the centre of the list’s interests: who they are, what their idiosyncrasies are, whether they may be genuinely mad or maybe only odd, and how to make sense of their strange indifference to those norms that compel us. These are typically collections of odd human beings who seem to be classifiable in distinct subcategories: crazy scientists, dandyish aristocrats, religious maniacs, off-beat geniuses, dedicated cross-dressers, fashion icons, grandiose architects, magnificent failures, immoderate creators, obsessive collectors. As we shall see, a particularly interesting example of such a list is itself a good candidate for the eccentric: Edith Sitwells The English Eccentrics (1933). Rich in material and also quite amusing among the many lists one may consult is Karl Shaws The Mammoth Book of Oddballs and Eccentrics (New York: Caroll & Graf, 2000).

8 It is obvious that lists of eccentrics and of their various subcategories could be potentially infinite and the main motive for collecting these specimens of the human seems to be a fascination with who they are, what makes them tick, what they are, sometimes with a curious frisson of voyeurism in the presence of the shamelessly deviant experienced by those who consider themselves normal (and maybe: condemned to normality). And so we learn that “real” eccentrics – the question of whether they are “real” or not accompanies this literature as a constant irritant – are never troubled about their own selves, live out their desires and refuse to be deformed by the pressures of conformity, and hence may even live longer and healthier lives than other people who are not gifted with this felicitous ability to detach themselves from the demands of normality (Weeks/James). At the same time, however, as these lists and studies assume that eccentricity is an essential quality in certain human beings which can and must be “real,” they also assume that it is an extreme form of performativity since it seeks expression in specific quirks of behaviour, of clothing, of self-stylization. In this way, the eccentric is also always under suspicion that he may not be truly crazy at all but a fake, his eccentricity only a pose, a performative illusion which both veils and reveals the “real” person behind the performance.

9 What these works have in common, then, is the attempt to see and categorize these individuals in relation to an assumed norm, to position them in an otherwise unspecified grid of normality in relation to specific markers: success, gender conformity, civility, sublimation of drives, etc. Its methods are those of psychology insofar as it is their psyches that are under investigation (Weeks/James), of cultural studies insofar as the history of eccentric behaviours is the object of study (Assmann et als., Schulman, Carroll), of sociology insofar as it is the positioning of these individuals within social systems that is at stake (Dörr-Backes). But there is another way of looking at eccentricity, and one that appears even more the proper object for literary studies as a discipline of “close reading,” of the investigation not only of larger structures of interaction but specifically of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has termed “texture” (13-25), the complicated and complex manipulations of affect, logic, and positionality which occur on the microtextual level. In this other perspective, one may think of eccentricity as a literary technique rather than a character trait.

10 It may help to go back to the linguistic origins of the word in Greek ekkentros and its Latin pendant: “out of” the centre. This is how eccentrics are commonly positioned: outside the centre (Dörr-Backes, 9), a place where they supposedly “are.” But it may be worth following up this coinage of the ex-centric, for example in its Latin roots for “ex”. For there, “ex” definitely does not denote a mode of being, or rather it situates a mode of being in relation to where something comes from, what something is related to, what it is made of: not, then, outside as an absolute condition, but from something. The sheer spread of these directionalities is quite suggestive. If we take the extensive entries in Lewis/Short, we for example get the following options:

I. In space: […] 1. To indicate the country, and in gen., the place from or out of which any person or thing comes, from […] 2. To indicate the place from which any thing is done or takes place, from, down from […] Hence the adverbial expressions, ex adverso, ex diverso, ex contrario, e regione, ex parte, e vestigio, etc. […] III. In other relations, and in gen. where a going out or forth, a coming or springing out of any thing is conceivable. A. With verbs of taking out, or, in gen. of taking, receiving, deriving (both physically and mentally; so of perceiving, comprehending, inquiring, learning, hoping, etc.), away from, from, out of, of […] B. In specifying a multitude from which something is taken, or of which it forms a part of, out of, of […] C. To indicate the material of which any thing is made of consists, of […] F. To indicate a transition, i.e. a change, alteration, from one state or condition to another, from, out of […] H. To designate the measure or rule, according to, after, in conformity with which any thing is done.