One isn't sure what to say about Djuna Barnes Nightwood after one read. There are characters. Things happen. Love triangles emerge for little apparent reason. People dream (literally, not in the sense of "following one's dreams"). People talk, constantly, therapeutically, one might say, but as a form of anti-therapy--the Doctor Matthew O'Connor (who isn't a licensed doctor, among his many transgressions), is the most talkative, and the best, of the characters, but as he says, those who come to him do so "to learn of degradation and the night" (161). The therapy isn't comforting, nor does it normalize. The talking both hides and reveals, but it is hard to say what.
The easiest analogy to the book I could find was Marx Brothers films. Language carries Groucho's monologues, full of puns, slippages, jokes. A dark humor is wrested out of grammar, not action. And, indeed, T.S. Eliot, in his introduction to the novel, calls attention to the fact that it is a truly stylistic novel, where prose as such becomes a constitutive factor to its aesthetic whole. Just as the Marx Brothers share something with surrealism, so does Nightwood, in its interest in the sleep world, the mental submerged which always surprises and erupts. Language, like automatic writing, shares something with nightmares and dreams, with sleep, which "demands of us a guilty immunity" (88).
The novel begins in a certain conventional 19th-century mode, with the birth of a child, but even there the language betrays something else, as if the drama we are watching is itself a dream covering over the much more significant Real:
Early in 1880, in spite of a well-founded suspicion as to the advisability of perpetuating that race which has the sanction of the Lord and the disapproval of the people, Hedvig Volkbein--a Viennese woman of great strength and military beauty, lying upon a canopied bed of rich spectacular crimson, the valence stamped with the bifurcated wings of the House of Hapsburg, the feather coverlet an envelope of satin on which, in massive and tarnished gold threads, stood the Volkbein arms--gave birth, at the age of forty-five, to an only child, a son, seven days after her physician predicted that she would be taken. (1)
The tone of distanced, wry, and "everyday" antisemitism returns later in the novel as a stereotype for the loss of origins: Felix, the infant on the bed, is read as a "Wandering Jew" trying to create a fake, non-Jewish identity, as his father had done before. The result is erasure: "from the date of his birth to his coming to thirty was unknown to the world" (7), which is generalized throughout the novel. All of the characters are cut loose from sociality, left free for the pure triangulation of their desires, or the failure to actualize on those desires. In other words, in a complicated and problematic move, Barnes uses antisemitic commonplaces as a way to get to an a-social space.
That said, this first sentence is perhaps the most extravagant description in the entire novel. Despite the relatively standard thematic introduction (on such and such a date, a child was born to this house, and thus our story begins), Barnes peppers the sentence with a subtle sensuality. Volkbein's anti-"feminine" "great strength and military beauty" is splayed out on the decadence of "rich spectacular crimson," "feather coverlets" and "gold threads." The crimson carries cruel, and fully embodied, undertones--for Hedvig Volkbein is dead from childbirth in the next sentence, which, in 1880, was a bloody mess. The body may be able to enjoy pleasure, but it is also a vulnerable, dangerous place. The inherent division in the human, both physical (pain/pleasure) and psychological (love/hate) is the true "subject", which is to say agent, in Barnes's novel.
And like so many good novels, it contains philosophical seeds with a richness that refuses to be constrained into a system. Two brief examples. Robin, the site of erotic conflict for most of the characters, is described in (D.H.) Lawrentian terms, as a woman whose "every movement will reduce to an image of a forgotten experience, . . . as insupportable a joy as would be the vision of an eland coming down an aisle of tees . . . a hoof raised in the economy of fear, stepping in the trepidation of flesh that will become myth"; that is, "a woman who is beast turning human" (37). By the end of the novel, Robin the process has been reversed, and Robin has become-beast, down on all fours, fighting with a dog as a dog. Deleuze would be all over this economy of flesh-becoming-myth; Robin's desire is continually diffusing, moving outward, productive of new things. On the other hand, the doctor uses Hegelianism dabbed with the dream world to define "the best and the most satisfying love" known by "the heart of the jealous": "that of the other's bed, where the rival perfects the lover's imperfections" (88). That dream-vision, where the beloved is in the bed of the other, is a revelation of the Real (our own perverse core). Deleuzian virtuality doesn't offer the trauma of these dialectics.
Barnes dances among these models, never embracing any, with a remarkable richness. Once the drama of social propriety is set aside, raw dreams take flight.
Posted by pjaussen at May 4, 2007 10:15 AM | TrackBack