Djuna Barnes and "Nightwood":
Love, Language, and Gender Identity
Nightwood by Djuna Barnes (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1937, reissue: New Directions, 2006, ISBN 978-0-8112-1671-5) is a complex, dense, and stunningly beautiful novel, and one can well understand this admonition by T. S. Eliot in his classic Introduction to the novel: “only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it” (p. xviii). But after looking at the critical sources, one begins to wonder if the popular interpretations really hit the mark with what seems to be an apologetic approach to how the spectacle of the novel was misunderstood in its own benighted times and only now rediscovered and reclaimed by our more enlightened Modern minds. Certainly there is a case to be made for this, but one wonders if it doesn’t miss the mark by not giving the work credit for what it tells us today about our own enlightened selves.
Identity, Decadence and Transformation
It is a novel about love, loss, language, and identity that challenges understandings of gender, identity, and sexuality, suggesting that these categories are unstable, ever-shifting entities. Barnes evokes a carnival atmosphere of Decadence that scorns contemporary society and its manners, and champions the artificial, the morbid, and the grotesque in a search for novelty and the dark underside of experience. The sensuality and self-indulgence of novelty and spectacle, however, are inevitably followed by dissatisfaction and ennui, a hangover of the soul that leads to sadness and a sense of unwholesomeness.
One of the central themes of Nightwood is an omnipresent yet ever-shifting presence which embraces the process of change and transformation, “the Night.” This presence of transformation, this entity invoked by Dr. Matthew Mighty-grain-of-salt Dante O’Connor as “the Night” is the underbelly of love: it is possession, domination, expansion, aggression, dissolution, despair, alienation, colonization, and assimilation. It is into this presence that Robin runs seeking satisfaction for a material maternal loss that remains unfulfilled by love, both heterosexual and Other-wise: the lack of a tradition of womanhood adequate to her needs in a society of rapid transformation and her subsequent self-identification with the carnivalesque spectacle of alterity.
Alterity and Spectacle
Barnes also raises the problem of definition or classification, of whether or not a stable definition of lesbian experience can exist, but she refrains from (re)producing a popular view of the spectacle: the frame of reference that the audience already knows. We are taken out of our comfortable customary experience of lesbianism as theorized by reproductive heterosexual ideologists for the edification of other reproductive heterosexual ideologists, and placed into the direct empirical reality of alterity, the experience of being Other than what we assume we are.
Robin participates in both sides of this spectacle: she is both an object of desire, a blank screen on which Nora and Felix project their desires, and part of an alienated public searching for the satisfaction of their desire in the spectacle's promise of happiness, a promise that constantly evades them. Robin sleepwalks through her life. Robin eventually leaves her lover for the anonymous, alienated spaces of the late night bars and streets. Following Robin, Nora unwillingly moves from circus spaces to isolation as their relationship is transformed from participating in the heterogenous public spaces of theatres, circuses, and roadside attractions to becoming a dark drama of loss and betrayal in the streets of Paris. All Nora can do is remember their early relationship and their travels to heterogeneous public spaces, mourn its loss, and helplessly witness the relentless dissolution of Robin’s self-identity.
Tradition and the Circus
In the end, tradition emerges in Nightwood not as sentimental, bourgeois banality, but as the circus. The circus performers in Nightwood take on fake aristocratic titles in order to make themselves mysterious: Princess Nadja, Baron von Tink, Principessa Stasera y Stasero, King Buffo and the Duchess of Broadback. They are at home in the disquiet and falseness of entertainment — their identities are never natural but are knowingly performed in complex, multiple and dynamic ways. In true carnivalesque style, Nightwood inverts the privilege of tradition over circus, raising up the meek and casting down the mighty, if only for “the Night.” Thus, it becomes more than a “lesbian novel,” embracing instead the stranger which we all must sometimes be.
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