Abstract
At the other end of the modernist timeline, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood picks up in many ways where The Turn of the Screw leaves off. As with James, the quintessential features of childhood take on grotesque features in Barnes’s late modernist novel. The quote that leads the title of this chapter stands as a warning against the childlike impersonations of the novel’s central character Robin Vote. But the line and the character double, I argue, as a caution for modernism itself, as a literary period positively energized by such impersonations, characterized broadly by the period’s mantra to “make it new.” Modernism’s love affair with the new has been linked to youthful resistance, to experimentation, and to innovation, but in the late 1930s—on the cusp of the Second World War—Barnes suggests that it can also be viewed as a cooptation of innocence that is artificial, empty, and even heartless.
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Notes
- 1.
In addition to Benstock, who sees the novel as a critique of patriarchy rendered through its debased internalization in the novel’s characters, and Marcus, who argues that the novel represents a critique of fascism by affirming the lives of those whom that movement would come to target, Merrill Cole and Carrie Rohman are two recent critics who view the novel as offering similar kinds of critiques against historical master narratives (in the case of Cole) and against humanist (read: imperialist and masculinist) discourse (for Rohman) in favor of the “unspeakable” desires (Cole 395) and “nonlinguistic” animal subjectivity (Rohman 57) figured for the novel by Robin. Andrea L. Harris makes a similar argument about Nightwood’s thematic interest in the “third sex” and its own narratological inversions. Harris writes that Barnes takes the “classical binary oppositions governing Western thought and inverts the hierarchies, privileging the feminine term: the night, the irrational, the unconscious, the improper, the anonymous” (65).
- 2.
What would ultimately grow into the idea for the unwieldy and unfinished Arcades Project began first as an idea for a 1927 newspaper article before it was transformed into the intermediary idea for the essay to be titled “Paris Arcades: A Dialectical Fairyland.” I have quoted here from this title (873) and from the unfinished notes (390). See also Eric L. Tribunella’s essay on “Children’s Literature and the Child Flâneur” and Margaret R. Higonnet’s “Modernism and Childhood: Violence and Renovation.”
- 3.
The collection, Discovering Child Art: Essays on Childhood, Primitivism and Modernism, edited by Jonathan Fineberg, includes essays on each of these facets and figures.
- 4.
184. Again, Higonnet’s essay provides an especially in depth analysis of Futurism’s relationship to youth.
- 5.
In many ways this represents the condensation of an implicit debate between the second wave of Nightwood’s critical resurgence, which read the novel (largely through the lens of identity politics) as an affirmation of sexual liberation, feminist and queer identities, and carnivalesque social transformations, and the one currently underway, which has repeatedly taken this former set of readings to task by shoring up evidence for the novel’s darker, dystopic, and self-critical discursive practices. Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank and Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, edited by Mary Lynn Broe, and including, most especially, Jane Marcus’s controversial “Laughing at Leviticus: Nightwood as Woman’s Circus Epic” are cornerstones of the first order. The readings of Georgette Fleischer, Karen Kaivola, Robin Blyn, and Dianne Chisholm (among others) exemplify the recent countertrend, arguing respectively for the religious degeneration, sexual differentiation, freak show decadence, and profane illumination of the novel.
- 6.
Nightwood’s transitional status, between modernism and postmodernism, is a point of rare consensus in Nightwood scholarship. Louis F. Kannenstine describes Barnes as a “transitional writer” whose approach is so intensely and “willful[ly] depersonaliz[ed]” that she must be placed in a broader tradition spanning at least “the early innovators of this century and the later generations of experimental writers” (xvii). Jane Marcus also famously recharacterizes Nightwood as “making a modernism of marginality” (223), of participating in a revision of modernism by its “hysterical heteroglossia” that renders it very nearly “postmodern” (222). Carolyn Burke similarly describes Barnes and Mina Loy as two women who “wrote as ex-centric or outsiders” to the period, recalling Linda Hutcheon’s theorization of postmodernism as similarly “ex-centric.” And most recently (and most substantially), Tyrus Miller theorizes “late modernism” as a precursor to postmodernism and devotes a chapter of that study to Barnes.
- 7.
Plumb offers the gloss on this line that “it is unlikely that Barnes had in mind here Gertrude Stein’s statement to Hemingway that his was ‘a lost generation,’ though Barnes herself belonged to that generation,” but provides no further explanation as to why such a connection is “unlikely.” Since Hemingway himself published the comment as an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises in 1926, it was certainly in public circulation well before Barnes wrote Nightwood.
- 8.
The full title for Barnes’s article, “Djuna Barnes Probes the Souls of Jungle Folk at the Hippodrome Circus,” offers an allusion to W.E.B. Du Bois’s collection of essays The Souls of Black Folk. In bulk the article seems to represent an entertainment piece about the Hippodrome Circus until the very end where Barnes rebels against her own narrative, refusing to add anymore to the man-eater storyline that excites the audience so. “The animal,” she writes, “has long enough had human life upon its menu” (197).
- 9.
For a further discussion of Rousseau’s and The Dream’s sources and reception, see Christopher Green’s “Souvenirs of the Jardin des Plantes: Making the Exotic Strange Again,” from which I have quoted here, as well as Frances Morris’s “Jungles in Paris” and “Mysterious Meetings,” all in the collection Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris.
- 10.
In 1981 Frank reflected that his “preoccupation” with spatial form “was never abstract or theoretical,” focused as it was on an effort rather “to say something helpful and enlightening about” the “particular work” of Nightwood (qtd. in Glavey 755). It is not surprising that Nightwood’s role in the formulation of Frank’s highly influential theory of the modernist aesthetic would be missed since, as Glavey elaborates, its original “lengthy exegesis of Nightwood was left on the cutting room floor, an amputation repeated ever since” (755).
- 11.
This is one of many homophobic remarks attributable to Barnes. Though her relationship with Thelma Wood was no secret, Barnes never identified as a lesbian, and she repeatedly took issue with the characterization of Nightwood as a lesbian novel.
- 12.
The most significant instance of this error actually comes from Barnes’s friend and editor, Emily Coleman, who repeatedly beseeched Barnes to edit down the roles of Felix and O’Connor, feeling that they detracted from the core subject of the novel, the relationship between Robin and Nora (or, for her, between Thelma Wood and Barnes). Coleman’s objections to Barnes are paraphrased by Plumb (xvi–xvii); her objections, recorded in her own diary, are paraphrased by Herring (203–204).
- 13.
Barnes was very open about the fact that Robin’s character was based on her long-time lover Thelma Wood and Jenny on Henriette Metcalf with whom Wood began an affair in 1928. Wood and Barnes had been living together in Paris since 1922. Wood and Metcalf moved to America where they lived together until at least 1942.
- 14.
Chisholm grounds much of her reading of the “obscene modernism” of Nightwood in the doctor’s “primary tactic of demystification…his shocking use of obscenity” (177).
- 15.
The similarities between Robin, O’Connor, and Sylvia counter, to my mind, those readings of the novel which interpret Nightwood as affirming the narrative of Nora and Robin simply because it returns to them in the final chapter. See AnnKatrin Jonsson’s claim, for example, that this ending “suggests resistance” to O’Connor’s prediction at the end of “Go Down, Matthew” by giving “Nora and Robin’s relation…the final word” (274–275).
- 16.
From J.M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy, 148.
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Phillips, M. (2016). Nightwood: A Bedtime Story. In: Representations of Childhood in American Modernism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50807-2_5
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