Off Centre.

26 As mentioned earlier, the foot-off-the-ground person is “anders ohne subversive Absicht. Sie hebt ab, weil sie nie die richtige Bodenhaftung hatte, weil sie plötzlich Lust dazu bekommt, weil sich eine günstige Gelegenheit dazu bietet” (Schabert 154). Miss Malin seizes the opportunity of the presence of a young man, a young woman and a “Cardinal” to continue creating the night. Kasparson, impersonating the Cardinal, actively engages in her game. Playing the role of the man he murdered, he alters the traditional wedding ceremony at his will (161). The wedding ceremony is not held for sentimental reasons but because of Miss Malin’s desire to be responsible for shaping the night. In general, people marry out of love, because they are expected or even forced to, or simply for financial reasons. None of these reasons apply in this case since, as Miss Malin rightly puts it, with death almost upon them, they “have no need for procreation,” “run but little risk of fornication” and could not escape each other’s company even if they wanted to (160). Miss Malin’s intentions are of a playful nature; she plans the ceremony because she wishes to add fanciful details to “her” night.

27 In general, marriage is part of the heteronormative system that includes “Institutionen, Denkstrukturen und Wahrnehmungsmuster, die Heterosexualität nicht nur zur Norm stilisieren, sondern als Praxis und Lebensweise privilegieren” (Degele 19). Clearly, Miss Malin’s invented wedding ceremony does not fit this ticket as without procreation, sex, or indeed very soon without life, there is no life style to privilege or heteronormative regime to practice. But neither is it an act of subversion: she does intend to defeat the traditions and conventions that a wedding ceremony usually entails. Instead, she is interested in getting all her companions involved in performing a play – her play. It is at this point that a queer analysis has its shortcomings since it must be stressed that Miss Malin does not show any interest in challenging social norms but rather remains indifferent to the institutions of marriage and family beyond the confines of her own artistic imagination.

28 Miss Malin does not display any interest in future events. She does not arrange the wedding to secure the future but to entertain her present company. In this respect, she takes a position opposite to what Lee Edelman terms the “reproductive futurism” (2) which characterizes heteronormativity. Speaking from a political viewpoint, Edelman states that “politics […] remains, at its core, conservative insofar as it works to affirm a structure, to authenticate social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the form of its Inner Child” (3). He describes how most actions within society are carried out to serve future purposes and “links queer theory to the death drive in order to propose a relentless form of negativity in place of the forward-looking, reproductive and heteronormative politics of hope” (Halberstam 823). Although Miss Malin organises the wedding, she encourages her companions to live for the present rather than project their hopes onto the future. In this, she is neither a proponent of “futurism” nor of Edelman’s “no futurism” but remains indifferent with regard to the demands of teleology. It becomes evident that she pays no regard to social conventions or economic benefits. Her form of negativity is not political; she does not engage in a political negativity that promises, as Halberstam describes it, “to make a mess, to fuck shit up, to be loud, unruly, impolite, to breed resentment” (826). Miss Malin simply turns away from the outside world and pursues her path without allowing anybody to disturb her.

Conclusion

29 This essay shows the extent to which “The Deluge At Norderney” is concerned with telling stories, inventing truths and creating realities and why these aspects are interesting from a queer perspective and how they additionally make the story eccentric. The way in which the characters repeatedly reinvent themselves and their life stories creates a profound indifference to notions of stability and truth. With regard to Queer Theory, Nikki Sullivan states that “as a deconstructive strategy, [Queer Theory] aims to denaturalise heteronormative understandings of sex, gender, sexuality, sociality, and the relations between them” (81). The emphasis here lies on deconstructive strategy: queer approaches pursue a political goal and aim at showing that human perception and society are subject to discursive mechanisms. While it is worthwhile to apply this theory to texts like “The Deluge,” this essay shows that it does not suffice to explore the text satisfactorily. Eccentric texts are not subversive in the sense that they make a point of disclosing power formations or of actively opposing hierarchies. Rather, they remain indifferent to actions that occur in any established centre. It is with regard to this eccentric positioning that queer approaches fall short. The indifference that becomes apparent on different levels of eccentric texts derives from the awareness that any action carried out by humans can only ever be carried out within the confines of human society and is always limited by human perception. Rebelling against these confines or even entire systems would merely confirm them from a different point of view while precisely the same framework and limitations would apply. Therefore eccentric texts such as “The Deluge At Norderney” do not aim to instruct or to convey an ideologically angled message but remain detached from the doxa and its implications.

30 As Sullivan describes the “relationship between reader and text” with reference to Foucault and Barthes, “We are always […] implicated in the production of meaning and identity, and hence are both agents and effects of systems of power/ knowledge” (189). That is to say, the reader always participates in the process of producing text in the Barthesean sense (cf. Barthes 1470-1475). In this sense, readers always engage with and develop the texts they read, even the eccentric ones. Yet on a different level a text such as “The Deluge At Norderney” and its stories-within-stories often slips away and deliberately risks leaving its readership entirely disoriented.