Towards a Theory of Eccentricity
Introduction
1 At the very end of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1760-7), Tristram’s mother asks a question which the reader has been asking himself all along: “What is all this story about?” (IX 33, 457)[1]References to Tristram Shandy are given in the following form: book in Roman numbers, chapter in Arabic numbers, and page number in the Norton Critical Edition.. The answer she gets is at the same time the closing of the novel: “A Cock and a Bull, said Yorick – And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard.”
2 After this final remark we shut the book and are left with many open questions: although Yorick’s answer suggests that what we have been reading was just a big jest, a cock-and-bull story (Booth discusses the several meanings of the novel’s last sentence, 545), this does not satisfy. The question of what this novel is all about, what its message could be, still seems to be open. We feel that we are not able to get a grip on the novel’s ultimate purpose or its communicative intent. We are left with a certain kind of discomforting feeling towards the novel, a text which appears to be so unusual, so strange.
3 There are a number of other literary works which leave us with the same kind of uncomfortable feeling, resulting from similar interpretative problems. Take, for example, such diverse texts as Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper (1936), short-stories by Karen Blixen, the movie F for Fake (1974) by Orson Welles, or David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006). Although they do not have much in common, in every case we experience this discomforting feeling with regard to the interpretation and the question as to what the story is about and why we are being told this story in the first place. Thus, it might be reasonable to ask whether it would be possible to develop a concept of a narrative genre which would allow us to subsume all these texts and make sense of them as a group. This paper is an attempt to approach this question by proposing thoughts on a – necessarily very tentative – literary theory of eccentricity.
4 This paper thus takes on the question: “What might a theory of eccentricity look like?” I will try to develop a concept of eccentricity which I take to be useful for describing the kinds of literary texts we are dealing with. It will emerge that we can talk of eccentric characters (as a narrative motif) and of eccentric texts (as a narrative genre in its broadest sense). Since eccentric characters can be – and are frequently – employed by non-eccentric texts as well, the main focus of this paper will lie on the eccentric texts. However, since eccentric texts often employ at least one eccentric character, the main protagonist, we need to take eccentric characters into consideration, too. At the end, I will try to apply my concept of literary eccentricity to a very prominent piece of literature, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, arguing that the novel’s peculiarities might best be explained by its eccentric character.
1. The use of "eccentric" in everyday language
5 Although the noun “eccentricity” appears rarely in ordinary conversations, “eccentric” (both as a noun and as an adjective) is quite commonly used in everyday language. The Cambridge International Dictionary of English notes for the adjective: “strange or unusual, sometimes in an amusing way” and lists as examples “eccentric behaviour,” “eccentric clothes,” and “Don’t you think it’s eccentric to keep a pet crocodile in the bath?” The example given for the noun is: “She’s a real eccentric – she does the strangest things” (439). These synonyms and examples match with those which people usually give when asked to explain what they mean by “eccentric,” the most frequent being “strange” and “weird.”[2]This is the result of a personal survey I did with approximately 20 participants.