Sapphic Primitivism in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood

NTU Studies in Language and Literature 29 Number 21 (June 2009), 29-56

Sapphic Primitivism in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood

Jen-yi Hsu Assistant Professor, Department of English, National Dong Hwa University

ABSTRACT The paper examines the tropes of primitivist discourse prevalent in Djuna Barnes’s modernist classic Nightwood (1936) in conjunction with an analysis of Barnes’s aestheticism of decadence and its interrelationships among lesbianism, modernity, and fascism. It looks into how modernism’s obsession with primitivism complicates and destabilizes the hierarchical definition of the civilized vs. the savage, the normal vs. the abnormal, and the natural vs. the artificial. It argues that, by valorizing artifice over nature, Nightwood challenges the humanist/essentialist claims of sexual discourse in general and the category of “inversion” in particular. Moreover, the novel’s antiteleological drive manifest in the frequent tropes of sterility, illness, decay, and degeneration illustrates the defeat of systematic and patrilineal continuity. Reading Nightwood in its political climate of the 1930s, the paper concludes that the novel’s proud parading of the non-Aryan, non-heterosexual bodies and carnival freaks is politically transgressive insofar as it mocks fascist promotion of an identification that inscribes the power and purity of the Aryan model as the hegemonic, normative paradigm.

Keywords : Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, modernism, modernity, fascism, lesbianism, primitivism, decadence, the flâneur

30 NTU Studies in Language and Literature

論朱娜‧巴恩斯《夜林》中的莎弗原始主義

許甄倚

國立東華大學英美語文學系助理教授

摘要

本文探討巴恩斯現代主義經典小說《夜林》中的原始主義修辭，且分析巴恩

斯的頹廢美學與女同性戀、現代性、與法西斯主義的相互關係。論文審視現代主

義對原始主義的著迷如何複雜化及顛覆西方傳統對文明 vs.野蠻、正常 vs.變態、

自然 vs.矯造的階級性定義。藉由崇尚矯造及貶抑自然，《夜林》挑戰了人文主義

／本質主義對性論述的主張，特別是所謂「倒錯」這個範疇。此外，小說的逆目

的驅力及其瀰漫的頹廢修辭如不孕、疾病、衰敗、返祖退化等，闡明了父系承傳

體系的無效與挫敗。將《夜林》放在 1930 年代的政治風氣來閱讀，本論文最後

斷定：小說中充斥、炫示的非亞利安、非異性戀身體及馬戲團怪胎，的確是深具

政治顛覆性。原因在於，這些異端身體的誇耀，嘲弄了法西斯主義所提倡的純淨

亞利安模式與其認同霸權。

關鍵詞：朱娜‧巴恩斯、《夜林》、現代主義、現代性、法西斯主義、女同性戀、

原始主義、頹廢衰微、閒蕩者

Sapphic Primitivism 31

Sapphic Primitivism in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood

Jen-yi Hsu Despite the increasing critical attention it has obtained from feminist

revisions of the male-centered modernism, Nightwood (1936) remains one of the “most famous unknown[s]” of the twentieth century.1 Even though the novel carried a laudatory preface of T. S. Eliot, it does not seem to have been particularly successful at the time, being rediscovered by feminist and queer theorists later. The novel itself is about hybridization; it is a cross between the lofty and the vulgar, the learned and the vernacular in terms of metaphors, genres, styles, and discourses. Its language is a strange and rich mixture of queer slang, circus or cabaret argot, biblical history, philosophical lectures, and religious doctrine. In other words, this novel is anything but pure. Jane Marcus, by using anthropologist Mary Douglas’s concept of “purity and danger,” remarks that Nightwood is indeed a “dangerous novel,” for it offends against order by presenting the terror of impure defilement, hybridization, and liminality that threatens to unsettle the Cartesian ego accustomed to the practice and the ideas of purity, identity, and the Oedipalized sexuality.2 The denizens of Barnes’s nocturnal universe deny all structures and categories; they are “threshold figures” (circus performers and trapeze artists, bisexuals, transvestites, mock aristocrats, bohemian artists, racial others and wanderings Jews) who swing both ways, straddle two worlds, and thus transcend the limits of categorizations of all sorts.

The story is set in the 1920s, and the geography that the characters wander encompasses Vienna, Berlin, Paris, Munich, Budapest, and New York. The main characters are a Viennese Jew named Felix Volkbein who passes for Christian with a fake aristocratic title; two American girls, Nora Flood and her errant amour Robin Vote, “a tall girl with the body of a boy”; and a San Francisco-born Irishman, Dr. Matthew O’Conner, a middle-aged homosexual charlatan whose profound desire is to “boil some good man’s potatoes and [to] 1 Djuna Barnes to Natalie Barney, 10 Sept. 1967, quoted in Phillip Herring’s Djuna: The Life and

Works of Djuna Barnes, 348. 2 By interrogating the Book of Leviticus (19: 27-28) with Mary Douglas’s idea of the relationship

between purity and the symbolic boundary-maintenance and later with Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, Marcus, in “Laughing at Leviticus: Nightwood as Woman’s Circus Epic,” reads Barnes’s Nightwood as politically transgressive insofar as it mocks Levitical prescription for normative identity and racial purity.


toss up a child for him every nine months by the calendar.”3 The novel’s plot is fairly thin: Felix Volkbein meets an unlicensed gynecologist, Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain–of–salt-Dante-O’Conner, who introduces Felix to a mysterious, young American woman named Robin Vote, whom Felix marries and who gives the “Baron” a son through which he can continue his fabricated aristocratic bloodline. The eternally elusive (therefore eternally desirable) Robin soon leaves Felix and their child Guido (who turns out to be a defective imbecile) for a woman named Nora Flood. Although Robin lives happily with Nora and they adore each other, eventually Robin abandons Nora as well, leaving for America with an obnoxious woman named Jenny Petherbridge, impudently described by Matthew as “[a] poor shuddering creature…[having] pelvic bones…flying through her dress” (N 141). Robin is the center of the imbroglio of love and hate into which Felix, Nora, and Jenny are frantically embroiled. She is “the troubling structure of the born somnambule, who lives in two worlds—meet of child and desperado” (N 34-35). In other words, she is the strange mixture of the sensual and the innocent, a woman who breaks every heart she has ever loved and leaves ruins and devastation in her wake.

The essential part of the book consists of the conversations that Matthew alternately has with Nora and Felix, although they are rather monologues than dialogues. The monologues may sound torrential, extravagant, and blusterous (“Once the doctor had his audience…nothing could stop him,” N 15), but they often “lead to the palace of wisdom” for all that (Marcus, “Mousemeat: Contemporary Reviews of Nightwood” 204). His witty and fantastic speeches form the staple of the novel, scintillating sparks of philosophical insights and brimming with immense sagacity. As a Tiresias-figure, Matthew is a veteran of sufferings, betrayals, and victimization. Therefore, he becomes a sibylline consultant for those lovers who go through the agonies of passion, jealousy, infidelity, and remorse.

With Sianne Ngai, we might say that Nightwood is a novel saturated with “ugly feelings.” Feelings that are “ugly” precisely because they are “amoral and noncathartic, offering no satisfactions of virtue…nor any therapeutic or purifying release” (Ngai 6). The savage humor of Matthew’s compulsive monologues offers no salvation for Felix and Nora who howl in pain for the agony of love and come (as Matthew puts it) “to [him] to learn 3 Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, 91. Further references will be cited parenthetically as N.


of degradation and the night” (N 161). The doctor’s language fails to heal and to absolve. The novel embodies a negative transcendence which refuses the ultimate purgation of pity and fear made possible by the forms of tragic plots analyzed in Aristotle’s Poetics. In his confession of passion grown depraved, Matthew tells Nora that he cannot help but masturbate in church: “The roaring lion goes forth, seeking his own fury” (N 132). Preaching the acceptance of depravity, Matthew speaks to Felix about Robin’s “primitive innocence,” which “may be considered ‘depraved’ by our generation, but our generation does not know everything” (N 117-18). Sexually and socially dispossessed, the novel’s cast of misérables, however, does not seek for spiritual transcendence but relishes the state of eternal condemnation. Moreover, the novel’s bizarre and shocking ending, in which Nora sees Robin crawling after the dog, sexually inviting him and barking “in a fit of laughter, obscene and touching” (N 170), negates any possibility of redemption, and, as Teresa de Lauretis writes, “likely contributed to the ostracism Nightwood suffered in the U.S” (121). The final chapter has been read by critics as a horrible flaw, disgusting and incomprehensible. 4 However, Barnes refuses to explain Robin’s unassimilated excess and the novel thereby becomes famous (or notorious?) for its overall impression of bad manners and ugly feelings.

Of course one can argue that the book’s haughty defiance against rationalization might be a sign for avant-garde modernism, participating the history of modernist scandalization whose famous promulgators or “bad boys” included Charles Baudelaire, F. T. Marinetti, James Joyce, and Arnold Schoenberg. However, what makes Barnes’s “badness” differ from her male modernist colleagues is her foregrounding of decadent lesbianism. Recently, her daring foray into the land of Lesbos has made her a darling in the “new modernist studies” which incorporate various approaches from fields such as queer theory, anthropology, and cultural studies.5 Amidst this trend of the new modernism is the emergence of the phrases “Sapphic modernism” or “lesbian modernity” as part of a wider effort to expand the high modernist canon and to rewrite the queer genealogy of modernist narrative. This new focus on gender and sexuality triggers the explosion of critical works on a

4 For example, one critic wrote: “If flaw there is in the volume, it lies in the final pages of horror,

sinister and incomprehensible in implication” (Marcus, “Mousemeat: Contemporary Reviews of Nightwood” 197).

5 See the discussion of the so-called “new modernist studies or new modernisms” in the introduction of Bad Modernisms, ed. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz.


more diverse group of lesbian modernist writers such as Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, H.D., Radclyffe Hall, and Janet Flanner.6

As I said before, the excessive affect of bestiality that Barnes’s book arouses in her readers and critics has somehow caused a terrifying suspension of meaning. In fact, the novel is replete with the images of animals, beasts, cannibalism, the tropes of sterility, illness, decay, degeneration, and the frequent reference to “blood” and “racial memory.” How to account for Nightwood’s rhetoric of decadent degeneration in relation to lesbianism, modernity, and fascism? How can we explain the book’s scandalous production of epistemological rupture with a hypersensitivity to the cultural and political issues of Barnes’s times? These are important questions in need of being addressed when we discuss Nightwood.

Lesbianism, Decadence, and Modernity

The rhetoric of sickness in Nightwood makes the novel unpalatable not only for the prudish right wing but also for some Marxist critics. As Erin Carlston points out, “A Marxist critique is just as likely as a conservative one to reject decadence in the name of ‘health’” (55). The correspondence between decadence and political equivocality is linked and condemned by those more orthodox Marxists like Lukács:

Lukács is most straightforward in the essay “Healthy or Sick Art?”…Decadents are decadent not because they depict illness and decay but because they do not recognize the existence of health, of the social sphere that would reunite the alienated writer to the progressive forces of history. Sickness, then, is a reactionary mode of insertion into the class struggle.7

Therefore, the novel’s indulgence of decadence, according to the Lukácsian version of realism and its injunction against sickness, can be dismissed as a bourgeois solipsism, resulting in political inefficacy. This Lukácsian position is indeed endorsed by Philip Rahv in his review of Nightwood which appeared in the New Masses (May 4, 1937). In his review, the novel’s sick 6 For example, Tirza True Latimer’s Women Together/Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris

(2005), Robin Hackett’s Sapphic Primitivism (2004), Liz Conor’s The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s (2004), Laura Doan’s Fashioning Sapphism (2001) and Sapphic Modernities (2006), and Lisa Walker’s Looking Like What You Are: Sexual Style, Race, and Lesbian Identity (2001).

7 The quotation is originally derived from Barbara Spackman’s Decadent Genealogies and is cited in Carlston’s Thinking Fascism (55).


decadence, embodied by the novel’s “sexual perversion,” was trashed as political incorrectness:

It is not the doom of a world reeling to its destruction that Miss Barnes expresses, but those minute shudders of decadence developed in certain small in-grown cliques of intellectuals and their patrons cliques in which the reciprocal workings of society decay and sexual perversion have destroyed all response to genuine values and actual things. (qtd. in Marcus, “Mousemeat” 200)

Indeed, the novel’s trademark of eccentric individualism, its devotion to the ideology/aestheticism of degeneration and its theatrical excess slanting toward the campy flamboyance of the stylized artifice and of the performance principle stem from its undeniable decadent lineage in aestheticism, a tradition generally in opposition to the notions of “collectivity,” “positivism,” “genuineness,” “progression,” “progress,” and the like—keywords in the orthodox Marxist discourse. Before coming to Barnes’s defense against these Marxist accusations of politically evasive, one more observation concerning the relationship among decadence, lesbianism, and modernity needs to be made. When we talk about the idea of decadence, we must go to Baudelaire, commonly recognized as the first user of the word “modernity” and for whom the heroine of modernity was the lesbian. As a prototypical bohemian and a famous enemy of the bourgeois, Baudelaire detested the idea of progress propagated by the capitalist language of the Second Empire. His champion of the aestheticism of decadence can be viewed as politically provocative in its relentless opposition to bourgeois modernity and its optimistic promises of progress which were never delivered.8 If we resort to Marshall Berman’s definition of “modernity” as the historical experience linking modernization and modernism, or economic development and cultural/aesthetic vision or representation, we can get a better grip over Baudelaire’s advocacy of aesthetic decadence as a heroic modernism against a bourgeois kind of modernity which disproportionally leans toward technological and economic modernization at the expense of the cultural and the spiritual. What is interesting in Baudelaire’s decadent vision of modernity is his obsession with the figure of the lesbian and his inclusion of her into his heroic exemplars. In 8 See Calinescu’s tracing of Baudelaire’s approach to the problem of decadence (164-71). The

dialectical complexity of the relationship between the modern and the decadent is Baudelaire’s distinctive vision of modernity, which is a tension-saturated locus and is incarnated via a “poetic alchemy…by which mud is changed into something rich and strange” (86).


“Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” Walter Benjamin notices that Baudelaire on various occasions announced that his first anticipated collection of poetry (which became Les Fleurs du mal) would be entitled Les Lesbiennes.9 Benjamin also accords enormous importance to the figure of the lesbian in Baudelaire, stating that the lesbian incarnates the figure of the “heroine of modernism” (Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire 90). Benjamin writes: “Baudelaire’s heroic ideal is androgynous.” He also comments that Baudelaire admires Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, for her androgynous trait: “In her optimal vigour and her most ambitious goals as well as in her deepest dreams, Madame Bovary…has remained a man. Like Pallas Athene, who sprang from the head of Zeus, this strange androgyne has been given all the seductive power of a masculine spirit in an enchanting woman’s body” (Charles Baudelaire 92).

The decadence of the lesbian resides in her transgressing the prescribed role of the feminine and her refusal to reduce love to patriarchal family and pregnancy.10 In fact, this heroic imaginary of the lesbian figure in the midst of Benjamin’s concept of modernity springs from the subterranean (androgynous) history of the nineteenth century, from Saint-Simonism to Claire Démar, and also from various religious sects like the “divine androgyny” of Ganeau. Industrialization in the first part of the nineteenth century not only changed the traditional gender dynamics between the sexes because of the inclusion of female labor, but also brought forth the first great utopianisms including the myth of the androgyne and early forms of feminism. 11 Benjamin’s view of modernity is thus dialectical: Industrialization indeed has both good parts and bad parts, and the social imagination of the early industrial modernity indeed contains some utopian seeds. Benjamin dos not think we should throw the baby out with the bath

9 “Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High

Capitalism, 90. 10 As Benjamin writes in “Central Park”: “Lesbian love carries spiritualization forth into the very

womb of the woman. There it raises its lily-banner of ‘pure’ love, which knows no pregnancy and no family” (175).

11 As Benjamin states in the following fragment in “Central Park:” “The nineteenth century began openly and without reserve to include woman in the process of commodity production. All the theoreticians were united in their opinion that her specific femininity was thereby endangered; masculine traits must necessarily manifest themselves in women after a while. Baudelaire affirms these traits; at the same time, however, he seeks to free them from the domination of the economy. Hence the purely sexual accent which he comes to give this developmental tendency in women. The paradigm of the lesbian woman represents the protest of ‘modernity’ against technological development” (170).


water. As he shows us, the rise of industrialism was accompanied by feminism and androgynous utopianism. He is especially interested in the Saint-Simonian feminist Claire Démar. Quoting some extracts from Claire Démar’s book Ma Loi d’avenir, Benjamin notes that women’s emancipation must entail a rehabilitation of their bodily existence, the freeing of love from marriage, and the liberation of women from the patriarchally imposed maternity (Charles Baudelaire 91). Here we can see the utopian seeds of modernity, in which androgynous bisexuality is combined with a critique of the paternal and “phallogocentric” symbolism of Christianity, and of the social exploitations such as marriage and prostitution. However, to Benjamin’s great disappointment, modernity’s earlier utopian yearnings (informed by the myth of the androgyne and early forms of feminism) are later eclipsed by the hypertrophy of technological rationality, which culminates in horror and is embodied in the military type of the macho body and the beauracratic terror of Hitler’s Nazism.

Therefore, the linkages among lesbianism, decadence, and the critical strain of modernity become pronounced in Benjamin’s exploration of Baudelaire. Androgyny and feminism are the true origin of the lesbian as “the heroine of modernism” with her protest against patriarchy and its subjection of women to the slavery of maternity. But Benjamin also sees the ambivalence of Baudelaire, trapped in a dubious contradiction: “He had room for her within the framework of modernism, but he did not recognize her in reality” (Charles Baudelaire 93). For all Baudelaire’s admiration for androgyny, he nevertheless uses her as an aesthetic trope and denies her existence in social reality. Like his antipathy towards all emancipated women such as George Sand, Baudelaire reserves for lesbians the same fate of ostracism: “ ‘Descendez, descendez, lamentables victimes’ were the last words that Baudelaire addressed to lesbians. He abandoned them to their doom, and they could not be saved…,” writes Benjamin (Charles Baudelaire 93).

This feminine/androgynous concept of utopianism will later be picked up by Virginia Woolf and other Sapphic artists, writers, feminist modernists, and patrons of the arts such as Radclyffe Hall, Natalie Barney, Romaine Brooks, Gertrude Stein, H. D., and Renée Vivien.12 In opposition to those

12 For example, in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf notes that Samuel Taylor Coleridge may have an

ideal fusion of mind when he said that “a great mind is androgynous” (98). Shakespeare’s “incandescent” mind is also the type of the androgynous mind. She also notes that in her time “Proust was wholly androgynous, if not perhaps a little too much of a woman” (103). The novel Orlando (1928) is the product of her androgynous creation; the character of Orlando is


male modernist writers such as Baudelaire who had merely “appropriated” lesbians as a leitmotif of his discourse of aestheticism and denied their existence in reality, lesbian writers in the early decades of the twentieth century flaunted their visibility, celebrated erotics between women and rejected the traditional obligations of marriage and maternity upon which Victorian notions of femininity insisted. The emergence of dissident sexualities can be seen as an index of modernity, therefore explains phrases such as “lesbian modernism” or “Sapphic modernity” in the new modernist studies. In Barnes’s topsy-turvy world of Nightwood, the sexual dissidents, by “embracing their supposed ‘damnation’ and parading their abjection as a sign of divine election,” indeed sneer at Baudelaire’s condemnation of homosexuality (Boone 234-35). As the novel’s obsession, Robin is unaccountable, unapologetic, and uncontrollable. She is described by Matthew as “outside the ‘human type’” and as wanting, like the Coney Island freak with whom Matthew associates Robin, to “enjoy [their] own difference” (N 146). The young lady’s entrance into the novel is fantastically described; in fact, it is a scene in her hotel room in which Matthew is called to help when she faints, apparently drown in drink:

On a bed, surrounded by a confusion of potted plants, exotic palms and cut flowers, faintly over-sung by the notes of unseen birds…lay the young woman, heavy and dishevelled. Her legs, in white flannel trousers, were spread as in a dance, the thick- lacquered pumps looking too lively for the arrested step. Her hands, long and beautiful, lay on either side of her face. (N 34)

As a “somnambulist,” she is a supremely “threshold” being caught in the troubling limbo of sleeping and waking. Her name Robin evokes the name of a songbird. The tropes of primitivism such as “jungle,” “carnivorous flowers,” “wilderness,” “earth,” “plant,” “oil,” “fungi,” and “sea” are used to describe her primordial and elementary status (N 34-35). Later, Barnes employs a series of hybrid and lush visual images to characterize Robin’s threshold status which confounds the conventional separation between human and animal:

The woman who presents herself…[as] a woman who is beast turning human. Such a person’s every movement will reduce to an

androgynous from the beginning of the book. Also, see Susan Gubar’s “Sapphistries” for her exploration of how the figure of Sappho influenced women writing in the early decades of the 20th century.


image of a forgotten experience; a mirage of an eternal wedding cast on the racial memory; as insupportable a joy as would be the vision of an eland coming down an aisle of trees, chapleted with orange blossoms and bridal veil, a hoof raised in the economy of fear, stepping in the trepidation of flesh that will become myth; as the unicorn is neither man nor beast deprived, but human hunger pressing its breast to its prey. (N 37)

As “the infected carrier of the past,” Robin embodies our ancestral connection to the animal, and so “before her the structure of our head and jaws ache—we feel that we could eat her, she who is eaten death returning, for only then do we put our face close to the blood on the lips of our forefathers” (N 37). Or as the doctor evocatively describes, “[t]he Baronin had an undefinable disorder, a sort of ‘odour of memory,’ like a person who has come from some place that we have forgotten and would give our life to recall” (N 118). Using Marianna Torgovnick’s words, Robin, like primitives, represents “our untamed selves, our id forces—libidinous, irrational, violent, dangerous” (8). In other words, Robin is preverbal, prerational, and prehuman.

Exotic encounters and the exposure of Western civilization’s heart of darkness are central to the discussion of modernity. Several critics have shown us how an understanding of modernity is inseparable from an understanding of modernity’s “others”—the “primitive,” madness, sexuality, and the feminine. Avant-garde artists such as Picasso and Stravinsky revitalized modernist arts with primitivism and dramatized the modern as primitive. In other words, facing the self-congratulating Western civilization, primitivism seems to pose a provocative and dynamic interrogation. When we read Nightwood in light of primitivism, we find that the tropes of primitivism appear in a highly sexualized and racialized field. Robin’s primitivism lies in her lesbian sexuality, while the primitivism of other freaks such as “Nikka the nigger” and Matthew O’Conner lies in their racial or class differences. To put it another way, the “normalcy” of middle-class European heterosexuality is gauged by the “perversion” of the groups of primitive people, lower races, working-class people, as well as inhabitants of those places outside of Western Europe. As critics such as Sander Gilman and Robin Hackett point out, the history of imperialism and colonialism complicates notions of race and sex, and produces modern sciences such as sexology, ethnography and criminology. Dark-skinned and primitive people were deemed as promiscuous, hypersexual, and, according to sexologists including Havelock Ellis and


Sigmund Freud, tended to be tolerant of or even addicted to homosexuality.13 Tabooed sexual behavior such as homosexuality is thereby conflated with “primitivism,” an evolutionary throwback that is claimed to be already rejected by the modern, white civilization. The imbricated discourses of “degeneracy” encompass homosexuality, blackness, prostitution, disease, criminality, and the lower class. All these zones of inversion and taboo are present in Nightwood and provide forceful resources for transgression and evocation.

Nora and Robin meet at a circus, a “supernatural” place “where human beings can still communicate with animals and with our own ‘higher powers.’”14 Here, Robin feels a strong affinity to the circus animal:

…Nora turned to look at her; she looked at her suddenly because the animals, going around and around the ring, all but climbed over at that point. They did not seem to see the girl, but as their dusty eyes moved past, the orbit of their light seemed to turn on her…. Then as one powerful lioness came to the turn of the bars, exactly opposite the girl, she turned her furious great head with its yellow eyes afire and went down, her paws thrust through the bars and, as she regarded the girl, as if a river were falling behind impassable heat, her eyes flowed in tears that never reached the surface. (N 54)

The uncanny moment of recognition between the lioness and Robin signifies an unnamable kinship between them. It is interesting to note that whenever Barnes describes Robin in savage terms, her language acquires a narcotic quality: “there was in her every movement a slight drag, as if the past were a web about her, as there is a web of time about a very old building” (N 119); she is “a wild thing caught in a woman’s skin” (N 146); she smiles “sideways like a cat with canary feathers to account for” (N 103); she has “temples like those of young beasts cutting horns, as if they were sleeping eyes” (N 134). The strange hallucinations of the obsession with the savage Robin become the gravitation toward madness.

In addition, the emphasis on the non-visual senses such as smell, hearing, and touch places Robin further away from the human type and closer

13 See Robin Hackett’s Sapphic Primitivism, especially chapter 2. 14 Jane Marcus, “Laughing at Leviticus” (248). Also, many female writers are attracted by the

fantastic and carnivalesque setting of the circus or cabaret, which is associated with the subversion of hierarchies. For example, Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus; Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet.


to the realm of animality. In “Remembering the Senses,” Susan Stewart examines the history of the senses in Western philosophy, noting that philosophers have been preoccupied with hierarchizing “the five senses” to determine the status of the senses in relation to humanity and animality. As she writes: “For Aristotle touch (and thereby taste) was found in all animals and so became the lowliest sense…. He therefore posed a hierarchical order of the senses, from most to least valuable: vision-hearing –smell- taste-touch” (61). The rational world view premised on the Cartesian valorization of the scopic is rejected by Robin, whose drifty eyes have “the long unqualified range in the iris of wild beasts who have not tamed the focus down to meet the human eye” (N 37). Robin’s intercourse with the world is more tactile. Felix has noticed the peculiarity of Robin’s hand, which is “somehow older and wiser than her body” (N 44). He remarks on her intense tactile propensities in the following paragraph:

When she touched a thing, her hands seemed to take the place of the eye. He thought: “She has the touch of the blind who, because they see more with their fingers, forget more in their minds.” Her fingers would go forward, hesitate, tremble, as if they had found a face in the dark…. At such moments Felix experienced an unaccountable apprehension. The sensuality in her hands frightened him. (N 42)

Sound or the sense of hearing, conventionally thought of as the most promiscuous and libertine of the senses due to its fluidity and permeability (say, the Sirens’ song of seduction), is also indulged by Robin. In the chapter entitled “Night Watch,” Nora’s passionate devotion to Robin cannot keep her from resuming her dark habit of wandering (which always takes on a sexual connotation). At this point, some strange songs would insinuate themselves into their insular world of happiness, songs “that Nora had never heard before, or that she had never heard in company with Robin” (N 57). These haunting songs, “as tell-tale as the possessions of a traveler from a foreign land,” betray Robin’s secret of amorous adventures; they, “like a practiced whore who turns away from no one but the one who loves her” (N 57), are apparently tinged with sexual wantonness and licentiousness. These songs of alien origins alarmed Nora of Robin’s betrayal, her wandering into promiscuity: “…in these moments of insurmountable grief Robin would make some movement, use a peculiar turn of phrase not habitual to her, innocent of the betrayal, by which Nora was informed that Robin had come from a world to which she would return” (N 58).


Forever astray and drifting, Robin is the quintessential figure of the female flâneur, or flâneuse, whose existence was impossible in Baudelaire’s imagination of the “dandy” or the flâneur in his Paris of modernity.15 As a “heroine of modernism,” Robin the lesbian flâneuse challenges the epistemological claims of sexual discourse predicated on a heteronormative format of identity. She desecrates the holy sanctity by laughing in church; she reads the Marquis de Sade on the day she gives birth; she admires those women who were never tamed by their culture: “Louise de la Vallière, Catherine of Russia, Madame de Maintenon, Catherine de’ Medici, and two women out of literature, Anna Karenina and Catherine Heathcliff” (N 47). Her savage image can also be linked to another heroine of modernity: the suffragettes, who suffered through demonization for their militant fight against gender inequality. As Jane Marcus perceptively points out:

The name “Vote” signifies the suffragettes, often martyrs and victims of police and government brutality…. Martyrdom, sainthood, and the androgynous militant figure of the woman in men’s clothes were part of the mythology of this feminist modernism, and Barnes draws on its culture for Robin. (“Laughing at Leviticus” 248)

Freaks and Drama Queens on Parade

The profound otherness of Robin cannot be domesticated; this is why the relationship between Robin and Nora fails, for Nora “wants to capture Robin…within an Oedipalized framework, channeling Robin’s wayward energies into a familial structure” (Rohman, “Revising the Human” 68). Interestingly, a similar impulse to domesticate otherness motivates Eliot’s introduction to Nightwood. The book’s transgression was “framed” and legitimized by Eliot’s preface, which functions as a “grand narrative” that neutralizes the book’s eccentricities and differences by subsuming them under his religious schema of universal totality. Bypassing the issue of dissident sexual identity, Eliot says that the transvestite doctor must be seen as a

15 See Janet Wolff’s “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity,” in which she

takes issue with the masculinist paradigms according to which sociologists and cultural theorists have thus far approached the phenomena associated with modernity and urban spaces. The dandy, the “man of the crowd” of Edgar Allen Poe and Baudelaire, the flâneur figure as identified by Benjamin, Simmel’s the “stranger,” Richard Senett’s “public man”—all these variant heroes of modernity invoked to epitomize the experience of modern life—of course are all male figures.


“constituent of a whole pattern,” a character whose “egotism and swagger” are balanced by a “desperate disinterestedness and a deep humility” (N xiii). Praising the doctor’s humanistic concern about the universal malady, Eliot urges us to see that Matthew’s monologues “are not dictated by an indifference to other human beings, but on the contrary by a hypersensitive awareness of them” (N xiii). Dismissing the characters’ social/racial/sexual particularity, Eliot explains that “it is the whole pattern that [the characters] form, rather than any individual constituent, that is the focus of interest” (N xv). According to his universalizing schema, the novel is definitely “not a psychopathic study. The miseries that people suffer through their particular abnormalities of temperament are visible on the surface: the deeper design is that of the human misery and bondage which is universal” (N xv, emphasis mine). Therefore, having subsumed “particular abnormalities of temperament” into the theme of universality, Eliot concludes his preface with a tone of sympathy with Nightwood’s denizens of the invert underworld: “To regard this group of people as a horrid sideshow of freaks is not only to miss the point, but to confirm our wills and harden our hearts in an inveterate sin of pride” (N xvi).

As always, all master narratives are suspect. As we can see, the confrontationist design of the novel fights against Eliot’s essentialist conception of a coherent subjectivity, which in fact imposes rational grids upon the book’s carnivalesque irrationality and purges any toxic elements that may choke the “healthy” status of a humanist unity. Put simply, I insist that Nightwood remain a “horrid sideshow of freaks.” In his sanitizing crusade against the excess/abscess, Eliot apparently did not take Dr. Matthew O’Connor’s advice on the beneficial effect of embracing the impure:

A high price is demanded of any value, for a value is in itself a detachment! We wash away our sense of sin, and what does that bath secure us? Sin, shining bright and hard. In what does a Latin bathe? True dust. We have made the literal error. We have used water, we are thus too sharply reminded. A European gets out of bed with a disorder that holds the balance. The layers of his deed can be traced back to the last leaf and the good slug be found creeping. (N 89, emphases mine)

Matthew suggests that we make a mistake in abjecting the filthy portions of ourselves and that we should seek for a balance by refusing to purge the unclean. He says to Nora that she is “of a clean race, of a too eagerly washing people” (N 84). He mocks her American Protestant consciousness which is


too rigid to tolerate the messy elements of dirt and animality. When Nora asks him “what am I to do?”, Matthew teaches her to learn Robin’s way to embrace the unclean, to allow herself to “trace [herself] back by [her] sediment, vegetable and animal, and so find [herself] in the odour of wine” (N 84-85). He is telling her to revert to her savage roots, to break away from the constraints of the Cartesian subject, for this is the only way that Nora can comprehend Robin’s mode of being. For the doctor, “to think is to be sick” (N 158), as he replaces the Cartesian dictum—“I think, therefore I am”—with such a sinister sneer.

This night talk takes place in Matthew’s seedy room, in which Nora, in the nadir of her despair, comes to consult the doctor about the secret of the night into which her errant amour is frequently drawn to. In his squalid, tiny iron bed, the doctor is wearing heavy make-up, a nightgown and a woman’s wig: “The doctor’s head, with its over-large black eyes, its full gun-metal cheeks and chin, was framed in the golden semi-circle of a wig with long pendent curls…. He was heavily rouged and his lashes painted” (N 79). In fact, the doctor had been expecting someone else. Seeing the doctor in drag, Nora thinks: “God, children know something they can’t tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!” (N 79). Matthew’s conflation of gendered identities—as a figure who represents the Wolf disguised as the Grandmother—both frightens and fascinates Nora the Granddaughter.

Half shaman, half freak, half savant, half lunatic, half man, half woman, the doctor’s embracing of the impure hybridization is a positive force in Nightwood. The place where he lives—Place St. Suplice—is a center in the midst of the Latin Quarter, where, as Joseph Boone describes, “bohemian, expatriate, homosexual, and politically radical subcultures had long been at home” (236). As Boone continues to observe:

The cramped physical spaces and circuitous pedestrian byways of the sector, which had long been associated in the popular imagination with moral degeneration and political radicalism…, represented to progressive city planners the nightmarish inverse of the symmetries that Haussmann’s scheme of boulevards imposed on the Right Bank. (237)

In other words, we might use Foucault’s term “heterotopia” to describe the place where Matthew resides.16 Matthew repudiates Haussmann’s idea of the 16 See Michel Foucault’s discussion of the idea of “heterotopias” in his “Of Other Spaces.”


proper city (which in fact aimed to expurgate heterogeneity and differences) and revels in this “heterotopia” in which his outlaw and outcast status takes on a trangressive and positive color. With his irresistible language, the doctor leads us to go slumming with him in his stories of freaks and their grotesque sufferings.

Critics have noticed Barnes’s penchant for artifice/artificiality in both her art and writing practice, highlighting the subversive power of this insistence on an aesthetics of surface performance. Bonnie Kime Scott points out that Barnes “has a preference for nature as fabricated and deployed by culture” (71). She also suggests that Barnes, by rejecting the idea of so-called “original” or biologically based forms of identity, “breaks with binary tradition by calling attention to impositions of culture, including its rules of gender, upon nature” (73). Erin Carlston draws the connection between Barnes’s lesbianism and her aestheticism of decadence, noting that lesbianism’s opposition to “Nature” propels Barnes to valorize “artifice over realism” as a way of confronting essentialism (55). Similarly, Joseph Boone, borrowing Judith Butler’s idea of gender performance, talks about Barnes’s emphasis on the surface and theatricality and Nightwood’s recurring imagery of the circus and carnival as a means of illuminating the constructed and derivative nature of so-called “natural” or internally self-identical forms of subjectivity or sexuality (248).

At first glance, the craze for the excessively refined products of decadence seems to be hard to reconcile with the manifestations of “primitivism” that are shown in the previous section; however, a closer examination shows that the implications of “pathology” and the “impure” in the trope of primitivism have a close affinity with the artifice of decadence or of performance in its problematizing of the ideas of the “pure” and the “natural.” Although Robin is shown as primordial and primitive, her primitivism and her kinship with the realm of animality need to be inflected through lesbianism, which may sound “pathological,” “unnatural,” or “grotesque” from a civilized, Oedipalized, and phallogocentric perspective. Robin is not simply “natural”; she is anything but “pure.” Her lesbian “primitivism” paradoxically conflates the “natural” and the “unnatural.” While unusually attuned to the animals and the natural forces, as a lesbian she defies the patriarchal norm of natural/maternal procreation (and therefore she becomes “unnatural” and “depraved”). She is an in-between being who insists that society’s most fundamental organizational category—gender—is artificial.


Besides Robin, the privileging of the artifice is reflected in many of the grotesque characters we encounter in Barnes’s Parisian invert nightlife. The trapeze artist Frau Mann (a.k.a. the Duchess of Broadback) presents a body that is altered from a “natural” state. In the air, her body appears “much heavier than that of women who stay upon the ground” (N 13). Strong and muscular, her legs “had the specialized tension common to aerial workers; something of the bar was in her wrists, the tan bark in her walk” (N 12). Her performance costume seems to melt into her very skin, making an artifice of nudity:

The stuff of the tights was no longer a covering, it was herself; the span of the tightly stitched crotch was so much her own flesh that she was as unsexed as a doll. The needle that had made one the property of the child made the other the property of no man. (N 13)

The line demarcating costume/flesh, artifice/nature, clothing/nudity is blurred; by extension, the line demarcating the “natural” form of sexuality from the “unnatural” form of sexuality. Frau Mann’s sexuality and its “naturalness” are confused by performance; her androgyny and her virility in performance make her “the property of no man.” This is a spectacle that is too queer to be absorbed into Eliot’s matrix of universality (which can be presumed to be a normative category in the service of compulsory heterosexuality). The trapeze artist’s identity is based on theatricality and a self-creation through costume, underlining the performative dimension of all constructions of identity. Such a destabilization takes on an additional importance in a culture in which the categories “man” and “woman” are perceived as natural givens and homosexuality has been seen as “unnatural.” Instead, the story of Frau Mann is a resistance to the hierarchism of authentic nature/inauthentic artifice and furthermore to the doctrine of the difference between the sexes that works to justify oppression.17

Another carnivalesque character whose body has undergone similar alteration is “Nikka the nigger,” who is recalled by Matthew when he notices Frau Mann’s strange attire:

Well, but God works in mysterious ways to bring things up in my mind! Now I am thinking of Nikka, the nigger who used to fight

17 Also, Frau Mann’s uncanny doll-like status resembles Robin’s liminal condition between male and

female, inanimate and waking. As Susan Gubar writes: “A remnant of childhood play-acting, the transvestite-doll sustains our trace memories of an androgynous (pregenital?)time when we evaded the trap of gender” (“Blessing” 499).


the bear in the Cirque de Paris. There he was, crouching all over the arena without a stitch on, except an ill-concealed loin-cloth all abulge as if with a deep-sea catch, tattooed from head to hell with all the ameublement of depravity! Though he couldn’t have done a thing…if you had stood him in a gig-mill for a week, though (it’s said) at a stretch it spelled Desdemona. Well then, over his belly was an angel from Chartres; on each buttock, half public, half private, a quotation from the book of magic, a confirmation of the Jansenist theory, I’m sorry to say and here to say it. Across his knees, I give you my word, ‘I’ on one and on the other, ‘can,’ put those together! Across his chest, beneath a beautiful caravel in full sail, two clasped hands, the wrist bones fretted with point lace. (N 15-16, emphases original)

In Nikka’s tattooed body, Barnes simultaneously confirms and subverts the white man’s fetishization of black masculinity: its reputedly gigantic sexual organ (“at a stretch it spelled “Desdemona”), its cherubic innocence (the “angel from Chartres”); its black art of superstition (“the book of magic”); and its ancestral history in the slave trade (suggested by the word “caravel”). 18 When Matthew asked Nikka “why all this barbarity,” he answered that “he loved beauty and would have it about him” (N 17). Nikka’s narcissistic indulgence of difference proves hard to be domesticated in Eliot’s humanist totality. He flaunts rather than represses his otherness. Shamelessly and ostensibly exhibited, Nikka’s monstrous body parades its historical exclusion from the category of the “human” which is in fact constructed by a falsified conception of racial/sexual myths.

Overall, the novel is too particular to be universal. Sexual/racial perversion—depicted as a relentlessly wretched difference from the norm—is staged as stylized spectacle. Barnes’s manifestation of aesthetic eccentricism cannot be easily accommodated into Eliot’s doctrine of “depersonalization” so famously proclaimed in his “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Her style of decadence should be understood as a repudiation against traditional authoritarian requirements such as universality, hierarchy, objectivity, etc. It is this rejection of the tyranny of tradition that Barnes’s queer decadence coincides with the dissident strain of modernity.

18 This reading is indebted to Jane Marcus’s detailed study of Nikka’s savage tattoo in “Laughing at

Leviticus” (224-25).


Critique of Fascism

So far we have seen that the critical-polemical impetus of Barnes’s novel will be missed if we impose on the book and its particularity the interpretive straitjacket either shaped by Eliot’s reading (in the name of Christian universality) or dictated by the vulgarized Marxist reading (in the name of socialist realism). Barnes’s style of decadence, as Erin Carlston asserts, must be understood “as a rejection of a liberal or Marxist positivism that she found totally inadequate to solve the problem of suffering and mortality, as did many of her contemporaries who turned to fascism” (55). Carlston’s mention of fascism alerts us to the need of contextualizing the novel in the climate of the 1930s. As we investigate Nightwood’s relationship to fascism, we will find out that there are striking resemblances between the orthodox Marxist condemnation of decadence and the fascist rejection of the “sick art” of Barnes’s brand of decadent modernism. Decadence and its antiteleological drive are equally disavowed by Marxism and fascism in the name of progress. It is at this juncture that the novel’s intractability becomes the most pronounced and it is important to link this recalcitrance to the novel’s overall resistance to domination or categorizations of all sorts.

For a basic understanding of the fascist aesthetic and Barnes’s departure from it, we must turn to Carlston, who notes that the notion of “Nature” (by extension, the organic, the mimesis principle) plays an important role in shaping fascism:

Perhaps more than any other motif, the desire for a nature as guarantor of unchanging order—and as the alternative to the metropolis as the locus of individuality and democracy—marks the various fascist literary imaginations: the German literature of blood and soil, Pound’s invocations of the natural order of ancient China, and above all the cult of nature in Hamsun.19

Barnes’s cultivation of a form of aestheticism that celebrates artifice over nature, grotesque over beauty is undoubtedly anti-fascist. Her campy style that favors exaggeration, queer eroticism that questions traditional gender constructions, and an ironic attitude toward the cultural mainstream certainly have their political importance as a subversive strategy to mock fascism’s promotion of unity and purity.

19 Carlston, 77. This quotation is originally derived from Russell Berman’s “The Wandering Z.”


After World War I, fascist movements emerged as a response to a postwar society afflicted with spiritual dissolution, economic depression, and thwarted nationalist hopes. By the 1930s, liberal democracies were almost everywhere failing and fascist movements had gained support in Germany, Italy, and Spain. The year 1936 saw the start of the Spanish Civil War. In June 1938 Virginia Woolf published Three Guineas in which she reflects on the roots of war and the interconnection of patriarchal and fascist tyranny. At first glance, Nightwood does not seem to have any direct relationships to fascism. However, a closer analysis reveals that, as Jane Marcus suggests, Nightwood’s proud parading of the downtrodden outcasts—the non-Aryan Jews, the Irishman, the circus people, social misfits, the mentally or physically weak, transvestites, and homosexuals—opposes an Aryan ethic of “uprightness,” and that the book itself can be read as “a kind of feminist-anarchist call for freedom from fascism” (Marcus, “Laughing” 223, 221).

As we have noticed, Nightwood’s theme of the decadent lesbianism with its emphasis on the sterility of lesbian sexuality is a modernist gesture of defiance. Lesbianism foregrounds the “unnaturalness” of the myth of a stable gender identity and challenges the conventional view that sexual procreation is a “natural” law assuring the continuation of the human race. In fact, what the novel vehemently attacks is the idea of familial inheritance secured through the biological continuity of fathers and sons. Barnes’s strong antipathy to the idea of history promoted by an allegiance to the masculinist or fascist principle is unequivocal. The book is a satire that forcefully announces the defeat of systematic and patrilineal continuity. The patriarchal obsession with perpetuating the name of the father contains the seeds of its own undoing, as demonstrated by the genealogical decline of the Volkbein family.

The history of the Volkbein family starts with Felix’s father, Guido Volkbein, who was an Italian Jewish man inventing himself an Austrain, Christian aristocratic pedigree by marrying a Viennese woman named Hedvig who embodies the martial virtues of her nation to the point of caricature: she walks with a “goose-step of a stride” (N 3) and plays piano “in the dueling manner” (N 5). He even secures for her a house befitting his assumed title of barony—a museum-like house pompously decorated to foster the illusion of his aristocratic heritage. In the salon of this house he hangs “copies of the Medici shield and, beside them, the Austiran bird” (N 5); he even displays in his study “life-sized portraits of [his] claim to father and mother” (N 6) that are actually “reproductions of two intrepid and ancient actors” (N 7).


Childless, Guido died on Hedvig’s breast “troubled and alone” (N 3), for without a son to carry on his fake aristocratic bloodline, Guido’s dream of nobility is incomplete. However, six months later Hedgiv, at the age of forty-five, gives birth to Felix. The birth scene, ironically, is also the death scene in which no sooner does Hedgive name her son than she “thrust[s] him from her” and dies (N 1).

Although Felix never meets his father, he inherits his father’s neurotic obsession with aristocratic birthrights and traditions:

With the fury of a fanatic he hunted down his own disqualification…, listening with an unbecoming loquacity to officials and guardians for fear that his inattention might lose him some fragment of his resuscitation. He felt that the great past might mend a little if he bowed low enough, if he succumbed and gave homage. (N 9)

In this paragraph, Felix’s exhibition of servile compliance is subject to great ridicule. His penchant for royal tragedy is described when he confesses to Matthew: “I like the prince who was reading a book when the executioner touched him on the shoulder telling him that it was time, and he, arising, laid a paper-cutter between the pages to keep his place and closed the book” (N 21). This is a spectacle at once tragic and pathetic. In fact, Felix’s aristocratic yearnings are at odds with the era of modernity in which the connection between the past and the present is becoming tenuous. The situation makes Felix become “the embarrassed” (N 9) whose earnest devotion to the past and whose faith in a “pure” and organic aristocratic European bloodline can only sound ridiculous and anachronistic. He in turn seeks comfort in the entertainers and becomes a dévoté of the circus and the popular theater because “in some way they linked his emotions to the higher and unattainable pageantry of kings and queens” (N 11). Obtaining a sense of belonging amidst the carnival of the circus, “[h]ere he had neither to be capable nor alien. He became for a little while a part of their splendid and reeking falsification” (N 11).

In fact, Felix’s fixation on a teleological history that perpetuates the patriarchal bloodline mimics a fascist conception of history that promotes the synchronic unity of the Aryan nation with its Hellenic past. Unfortunately, Felix chooses a non-maternal Robin as his child-bearer who, according to his naïve imagination, “might bear sons who would recognize and honour the past” (N 45). But Robin, being “outside the human type,” proves to be unaccommodated by Felix’s model of historical time. Shortly after the birth


of a child Robin walks out on her husband and her son and disappears. The son, named Guido after Felix’s father, is described as “[m]entally deficient and emotionally excessive, an addict to death; at ten, barely as tall as a child of six, wearing spectacles, stumbling when he tried to run” (N 107). In fact, Guido’s idiocy fulfills Matthew’s prophecy that Felix’s aristocratic lineage will eventually dead-ends in madness: “The last muscle of aristocracy,” he tells Felix, is “madness.” He continues: “[R]emember that…the last child born to aristocracy is sometimes an idiot, out of respect—we go up—but we come down” (N 40). Matthew concludes with an excremental image: “In the king’s bed is always found, just before it becomes a museum piece, the droppings of the black sheep” (N 40). Matthew’s recognition of Felix’s penchant for museum is shown in the reference to the museum piece, in which the purity of tradition and of past is considered hermetically sealed. The juxtaposition of the lofty history and the lowly “droppings” not only illustrates Matthew’s characteristic profanity but also emphasizes the inevitability of decadence and decline in the single-minded preservation of patrilineal heritage.

Conclusion

As I have shown, Sapphic primitivism in Nightwood works to undo a series of phallogocentric ideas such as the phallic identity, the linear progress, purity and “Nature”—concepts that are normative and exclusionary and ultimately lead to the terrorism of fascism. In the novel, ontology is replaced by scatology.20 The valorization of the phallus is deflated by a celebration of the limp penis of the transvestite Dr. Matthew O’Connor who masturbates in church, and “all the while Tiny O’Toole was lying in a swoon” (N 132). Also, Matthew’s passionate desire to be a woman—he confesses to wanting “a womb as big as the king’s kettle, and a bosom as high as the bowsprit of a fishing schooner” (N 91)—is noted by Marcus as “womb envy,” which is “so strong that it parodies Freudian penis envy mercilessly” (“Laughing” 233). Felix’s heroic fantasies of biological and cultural inheritance ultimately lead to decadence and sterility. All in all, the driving desire of the novel is to move backward to a “primitive,” or an “archaic” time (of history or of the individual) that language premised on an authority of humanist (phallic)

20 For an analysis of Barnes’s toilet theme and her excremental imagination, see Jane Marcus’s

“Laughing at Leviticus” (225-26, 238).


identity cannot effect. The downward movement of this novel is articulated in a move from top to bottom, humanistic uprightness to downward bestiality, speech to silence. Or, as Kenneth Burke writes, the novel seems to aim at “a kind of ‘transcendence downward.’”21 By the end of the novel, this trajectory of negative transcendence reaches towards degraded abjection and sheer bestiality—a scene, according to Teresa de Lauretis, “without words but full of sound and fury, signifying something beyond, or before, representation” (127).

The final and controversial chapter, entitled “The Possessed,” is merely four pages in which bizarre events are swiftly reported without any further explanations. After arriving in New York with Jenny, Robin is anything but tractable. Resuming her peripatetic habit, she “began to haunt the terminals, taking trains into different parts of the country, wandering without design” (N 167). Jenny becomes hysterical. Robin’s “desperate anonymity” is unacceptable to Jenny, who “accuse[s] Robin of a ‘sensuous communion with unclean spirits’” (N 168).

In fact, Robin not only shares a feeling of communion with “unclean spirits” in the nonhuman world, but she also has a private engagement with the discourses of the animal. Unwilling to be kept or fixed, she must wander, deviate, and resist any physical or epistemological grids and zones. She then walks in the open country, “pulling at the flowers, speaking in a low voice to the animals. Those that came near, she grasped, straining their fur back until their eyes were narrowed and the teeth bare, her own teeth showing as if her hand were upon her own neck” (N 168). In this uncanny passage, Robin’s private communion with the animals is palpable; furthermore, we witness the strange conflation of animals and Robin the human—Robin grasps the animals as if she grasps herself.

The line differentiating human from beast is scandalously removed in Robin’s final encounter with Nora’s dog in a chapel. Heading into Nora’s part of the country, Robin comes closer to her house and sleeps in an abandoned chapel nearby. One night, the dog becomes restless and keeps “running about the house…, barking and whining” (N 168). The dog eventually runs out of the house and Nora follows him. When she arrives at the chapel, “plung[ing] into the jamb of the chapel door,” she sees Robin on all fours, “crawling after [the dog]—barking in a fit of laugher, obscene and touching.”

21 Burke’s words are quoted in Teresa De Lauretis’s “Nightwood and the ‘Terror of Uncertain Signs,’”

(126).


The dog began to cry then, running with her, head-on with her head, as if to circumvent her; soft and slow his feet went padding. He ran this way and that, low down in his throat crying, and she grinning and crying with him; crying in shorter and shorter spaces, moving head to head, until she gave up, lying out, her hands beside her, her face turned and weeping; and the dog too gave up then, and lay down, his eyes bloodshot, his head flat along her knees. (N 170)

In this passage, Robin does not just refuse to use word language but emits non-articulated cries and literally crawls “on all four” to undo human behavior and meaning. Teresa de Lauretis instructs us not to seek for narrative or referential meaning in this enigmatic passage which apparently eludes any rational readings, but instead to go “with the figural movement of the text and acquiescing to the otherness in it, the ‘inhuman’ element in language” (118). The word “inhuman” reminds us of Lyotard’s critique of humanism based on the “metaphysics of development.”22 He urges us to acknowledge our debt to the wild, savage, inhuman part—an uncivilized “remainder” of our native inhumanity. This is the source of our resistance aiming at counteracting the ideology of inexorable development prevalent in our mainstream society. Herein lies Nightwood’s political message and its radical force. Mistrustful of the positivist strains within the traditional discourse of humanism, Barnes aims at attacking a realist mode of representation by her outright offense against the notions that conventionally buttress the idea of the “human.” In Nightwood, she fuels her radical project of negative transcendence with the unruly laughter of the carnival, which claims that comedy and irony can liberate us from the pretentious lie created by the too uptight/upright humanism or even fascism. Unapologetically queer and feminist, Nightwood draws our attention to those stigmatized bodies and body parts, degraded affects, and differences that have been historically dismissed, demonized, or sanitized.

22 See Lyotard’s The Inhuamn, especially the Introduction.


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[Received 6 August, 2008; Accepted 1 May, 2009]

Sapphic Primitivism in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood

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