Off Centre.

by Bettina Schreck, University of Tübingen, Germany

1 The literary world seems to be swarming with eccentric authors. Within the community of the Paris Left Bank, Natalie Barney as “the most active and candid lesbian” (Benstock 8) of her times has entered the lesbian archive as an eccentric person due to her promiscuity and sexual liberty. However, while we are quick to award the label “eccentric” to describe a certain type of people, other uses of this notion have remained unexplored. How can we conceive of eccentricity as a possibly productive concept for cultural or literary analysis? Can this notion, which seems to be so very commonsense when it refers to actual persons, be expanded to work in different and more complex environments as we encounter them culturally or in a literary text?

2 What I am trying to do in this essay is approach the slippery and mostly unexplored concept of eccentricity from two different angles. The first part of this essay will attempt to come up with a working definition of the eccentric for literary analysis and as a writing practice. I will then connect the notion of eccentricity with Yuri Lotman's cultural model of the semiosphere that revolves around the dynamism of periphery and centre. I will show how Lotman's model operates by taking a closer look at the reception of Natalie Barney and her novel The One Who is Legion by lesbian feminist critics.

3 In contrast to this established process of reception, a process that I will read as an effort to crop and tame the eccentricity and conceptual daring of Barney's novel, I will endeavour during the second part of this essay to see eccentricity as a specific textual practice; in particular, I will propose that in the case of Barney's novel, an eccentric way of writing can best be understood as a radical effort in deterritorialisation and becoming in the Deleuzian sense. The result is not only a new way of perception but a systematic de-gendering of the novel’s main “character”.

1. Eccentric comets

4 One of the definitions of eccentricity that captured my attention is despite its simplicity a useful one to start from. James Kendall, a priest charged with and censored for his alleged “eccentricity” in the 19th century, responded to these charges with a book entitled Eccentricity, Or, a Check to Censoriousness. This extensive attempt to justify (his own) eccentricity and feed it back into a religious context contains the following definition of the term: The word eccentricity, refers primarily to the motions of certain heavenly bodies, and must, therefore, be considered an astronomical term. Comets, for instance, by not describing an exact circle in their pathway through the general heavens, are said to take an eccentric course, that is, oval, or elliptical. Deviation from a centre, in fact, is the very thing which constitutes eccentricity. And I may suppose that the amount of eccentricity is in proportion to the degree of deviation. (Kendall 27)

5 What fascinated me most about this astronomical concept – which is still used in astronomy to refer to the degree to which the orbit of a star or planet deviates from a circular course – is that eccentricity does not refer to the fact of being outside a given centre – a notion that would certainly be the commonsense explanation of the term. This is not, however, the deviation that the term eccentricity primarily describes. Rather, I would propose that while being outside a given centre is a precondition for the eccentric, eccentricity lies in the degree to which one deviates from a circular orbit. Thus the deviation and its route are already prescribed by the centre (which due to its mass exercises an amount of gravity according to which objects circle it). Put differently, one could argue that each centre already restricts the way by which it can be transgressed or deviated from: we may assume, for instance, heterosexuality as the centre to which homosexuality is the prefigured transgression. Eccentricity, in contrast to that, occurs when an object deviates from this prescribed location, orbits differently, elliptically instead of circularly, spins off in directions that the centre could never have anticipated. Of course, the movement of the eccentric is still related to its centre but its potential lies in the aberration form a prescribed path. It is this potential to deviate with a difference, so to say, that I would like to claim as the core feature of the eccentric.