Eccentricity and Deterritorialization in Natalie Barney’s The One Who is Legion

Abstract

Rather than focusing on eccentricity as a character trait in human beings or literary characters, this essay engages with Natalie Barney’s experimental novel The One Who is Legion (1930) in order to demonstrate how its techniques, in following a Deleuzian trajectory of deterritorialization, are “eccentric” in the sense that they are designed to elude altogether any binary dynamics of the centre and its peripheries. Drawing on Yuri Lotman’s model of the semiosphere as a structure defined by a centre, a periphery and a boundary, the essay shows how Barney’s novel resists the normalizing attempts of a criticism eager to recover a tradition of “lesbian” writing by insisting on its own eccentric conceptions of gender and sexuality. The “eccentric” is here a literary technique that seeks to deviate from an identified centre in unforeseeable, as it were “elliptical,” ways.