Off Centre.

21 It is in this manner that the entire text of The English Eccentrics may best be understood as a continuous – and in no sense harmless! – game with various “centres,” a game whose aim is in no way the development of an alternative programme, not even that of a literary avant-garde, but rather the production of a continual destabilization of the direction of the narrative gaze, of the places we are looking from and the objects we are looking at, of the places we assign values from, of the differentiation between “inside” and “outside,” of “authoritative” and “deviant,” “defective” perception. In this game, it is even the dichotomy between centre and periphery itself that can no longer be maintained, for what is being imagined here is a model of thought and of perception in which finally the “centre” is everywhere and the place towards which the imagination is forever reaching without reaching it, the place of philosophical longing, is neither centre nor periphery but a place outside any structure.

22 Sitwell’s collection of eccentric personalities may be considered paradigmatic for an investigation of eccentricity. She herself defines eccentricity as “the supreme case of Ordinariness, carried to such a high degree of perfection that it becomes eccentric. Again, any dumb but pregnant comment on life, any criticism of the world’s arrangement, if expressed by only one gesture, and that of sufficient contortion, becomes eccentricity” (21-22). In this vision, eccentricity would be an extreme reduction of contact with “the world’s arrangement,” a refusal to feel with and care for the world, in its final resting point a reduction to a mere physical presence in the world. However, the literary production of eccentricity is an attempt to develop from within this movement of retreat – to communicate by and through this retreat – a distinct aesthetics and mode of communication. If, then, for Sitwell the eccentric is a form of normality that has been pushed to an extreme and thereby “becomes eccentricity,” it is this which the non-eccentric public has to be made aware of: “Might I not, indeed, write of those persons who, beset by the physical wants of this unsatisfactory world, can, by the force of their belief, satisfy those wants through the medium of the heaven they have created for that purpose. In this heaven, anything may happen; it is a heaven built upon earth, yet subject to no natural laws” (24). What is at stake, then, is the presentation of human beings who went in search of a place in which anything may happen, a “heaven built upon earth” which would not be subject to any “natural laws” (here not so only the laws of nature but also those social and cultural “laws” simply deemed “natural”). In providing its list of eccentric personalities, it is in fact the text itself which creates them as eccentric, making them speak to and for this desire for an eccentric location from which to look back with indifference on the values and meanings generated at the “centre.” Exploring the Grid

23 As Schabert’s intuition about the foot-off-the-ground novel being a specifically female mode of interacting with the social and symbolic order already makes apparent, and as Sitwell’s intervention in the debate on what it means to be “human” would confirm, the eccentric – both the personality and the technique – has to be investigated in terms which take into account both the gendered expectations which render a mode of thought or behaviour identifiable as eccentric and the gendered investment an individual may have or not have in the options provided or withheld at the centre. For clearly norms and expectations, the “centres” against which eccentricity would seek to articulate itself, have different values, different contents, even a different desirability for men and women, for heteronormatively compatible and non-compatible subjects. In fact, as some of the contributions will show (Schreck, Hahn, Comfort), we may assume that eccentricity stands in a special relationship to those techniques currently discussed as “queer” if by “queer” we mean not the establishment of a sexual identity but rather its opposite: the destruction of sexual identities. One may further hypothesize that the attractiveness of the eccentric would very much depend on how heavily an individual is invested in the “centres” (of meaning, of power, of knowledge, etc.) he or she can or cannot be a part of, wants to or refuses to side with. The question then would be: for whom and under which circumstances does it make sense to cease cooperation with such a centre and the pre-defined “others” it is orbited by to embrace the eccentric?

24 In its focus on the investigation of specific literary textures and in its attempt to think outside the binary box, an investigation of eccentricity may, we hope, prove to be useful in following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s demand that we need to find new, non-automatized ways of investigating the full reach of our ways of being and interacting beyond the modes of inclusion and exclusion, essence and deconstruction, the normal and the deviant, etc. which ordinarily structure our grids of perception even when we seek to “deconstruct” such binaries (Sedgwick, 1-3). Sedgwick thinks of this as an “art of loosing” (3, her emphasis), of releasing our objects of study from such binary blinkers. Rainer Emig has recently put forward the idea that the eccentric (as a personality concept) may in fact be one way towards such a move beyond a binary identity politics and pleads that we should try “to establish eccentricity in theory as a counterweight to binary structuralist models of culture and as an ally of postcolonial studies and Queer Theory” (93). We believe (and our experience confirms this) that an exploration of the eccentric – both in the models provided by those considered eccentric personalities and as a technique of positioning narratives, voices, perspectives – would be nothing less than a training programme for the “art of loosing.” For this to work, however, we believe that such an investigation of the potentials of eccentricity as a critical tool should begin by first circling, surrounding, investigating the notion itself, to move it more into the theoretical realm in order to produce more and more varied models of what the eccentric may do for us and we for it.

25 A history of eccentricity and its uses in gendered performances does not exist at the moment. However, it would be well worth writing and we understand our collection of essays as a very small first step in this direction as we have asked our contributors to provide discussions designed specifically to fathom various theoretical options for making eccentricity viable as a concept and as a critical tool. In keeping with our concept of eccentricity one may expect that eccentric texts do not present (or simply deny) a binary concept of gender but that gender will emerge as a blurred, ignored, or simply indifferent, invalidated category, and this is borne out by the majority of the articles collected here.