Homo-aesthetic Inhumanities:
Affect, History, and Community in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood
A Thesis
Presented to
The Division of Literature and Languages
Reed College
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Bachelor of Arts
Andrew Hereford
May 2013
Approved for the Division
(English)
Jay Dickson
Acknowledgments
There is no further feeling of the pleasure of company than when one is most alone. This is what I have discovered in the writing of this thesis. Therefore, though I wrote a great deal of it in withdrawal, both unintended and created, I have a great many thanks to make.
First, my interminable gratitude goes to my advisor Jay Dickson, without whom this thesis would not have been possible. The first instances of what has become this project were the discussions I had with and the papers I wrote for him while taking his course on modernism and the British novel. I want to sincerely thank him for his constant support and productive feedback, and for putting up, in his own gracious way, with my admittedly frustrating style of work. It is because of his encouragement and passion that I see this thesis, not as an end to be lamented, but as the beginning of an invigorating academic career. I look forward to meeting him again somewhere along the line.
And to all of the other professors who have given me, whether directly or circuitously, the fervor I have for my intellectual work: to Kris Cohen, Ann Delehanty, Becky Gordon, Maureen Harkin, Hugh Hochman, Robert Knapp, Charlene Makley, Luc Monnin, Bill Ray, Pancho Savery, and Michael Taylor. I am also indebted to the Eddings Opportunity Grant for English Majors at Reed College for funding the research I did in developing this project.
To my mother and my father, I am so very fortunate to have your love and support.
To all of my friends, I count myself in nothing else so happy—to embrace words—as in a soul remembering you. I would particularly like to thank: Patrick Lyons, in whose brilliance it has been my pleasure to bask, and whose self-sacrificing friendship I could not have made it without; Nick Irvin, whose quiet virtuosity I can only but fail to live up to, and who was always there when my caustic bitchiness needed a fellow pair of eyes; Cora Walters, to whom I could always turn when I needed a bit of unrelenting warmth; Andrew Pritzkau, who has been with me since the beginning and who will be there until the end; and Janelle White, whose recent absence in my life has not attenuated my love for her.
…
And to my pink narcissus, never have I made a more beautiful world than with you.
Table of Contents
Introduction. Headways: Nightwood & Queer Thought ...... 1 Nightwood as Minor Literature ...... 2 T. S. Eliot, Affect, and Impersonality ...... 4 Affect/History/Queer: A Methodology for Reading ...... 7 Schizoanalysis, Psychoanalysis, and the Intermezzo ...... 10
Chapter One. “History at night”: Affective Relationality ...... 13 Introduction ...... 13 History Without Affect: Several Inadequacies ...... 18 Sodom/Gomorrah: Affective History, Queer Relations ...... 32
Chapter Two. Love’s Becomings ...... 43 Introduction ...... 43 The Possessed: Becoming-Animal as a Theory of Love ...... 45 Is Writing Inhuman?: An Emerging Love ...... 62
Chapter Three. Narcissistic Aesthetics (Reflections on Subjectivity & Art) ...... 71 Introduction ...... 71 Impersonal Narcissism and the Aesthetic Subject (Reflection 1) ...... 77 The Great (Aesthetic) Bed: Communities of Incest (Reflection 2) ...... 94
Conclusion. An Appealing Community ...... 113
Appendix. Plot Summary of Nightwood ...... 119
Bibliography...... 123
Abstract
This thesis argues that Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936) demands a reconsideration of current queer theoretical paradigms, not by rejecting or discrediting these paradigms, but by insisting that thought, by its very nature, lives in the intermediacy of critical practice; it uses community as the point of departure for thinking through and between issues of queer belonging, becoming, and relating. The first chapter argues that Nightwood outlines a framework of historical affectivity as the basis for queer community in which we necessarily encounter the past as enacted upon the body in moments of negative or depraved affect. In turning to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the second chapter develops this in order to show that a modality of ethical engagement emerges within the novel in which inhumanity is queerly reestablished as the basis of relationality in general. Love—both as a mode of becoming that tends toward the nonhuman and as an instance of writing—will be my name for this relation. Chapter Three then abruptly turns to the work of Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit. In so doing, it argues that Nightwood promotes a version of narcissism in which the subject continually reaches beyond itself to find inaccurate replications of its own being, thus producing a virtual community of aesthetic associations. This thesis, therefore, sees within Nightwood (and in the critical conversation it posits between Deleuze & Guattari and Bersani & Dutoit) a possibility for the improbable task of queer thought—a possibility that connects us, in art, to the impossibility of our mutual existence.
—For Djuna, who would have hated this
Beauty’s name spreads too thick. —Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
And this was the likeness of his love: she was, as he was also, of large limbs and of a beauty outside of the imagination and quite beside what men would call the point. She was terrible in her ways, which simply means that her ways were not our ways,—and she was fettered to the earth for a season of harvesting, after which she was to return to the gods. Her feet were thinly hoofed, and her hair was many coils, and her face was not yet, and her breasts were ten. —Djuna Barnes, Ryder
Estranged from Beauty — none can be — For Beauty is Infinity — And power to be finite ceased Before Identity was leased. —Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems
INTRODUCTION
Headways: Nightwood & Queer Thought
“The Great Enigma can’t be thought unless you turn the head the other way, and come upon thinking with the eye that you fear, which is called the back of the head,” says Dr. Matthew O’Connor, the Tiresian harbinger of Djuna Barnes’s 1936 lesbian modernist novel, Nightwood (89).1 Thinking itself must be done with the back of the head, with those parts of our intellect that we never thought to use. Only by turning our heads away from where we think we are “headed” can we momentarily discover the object, that interminable Great Enigma, of any critical endeavor. Exegesis is the incident of our undoing. Nightwood, in other words, asks us to reach out, if only to subsequently fail, for the unfamiliar, the anonymous, the multiple, the demonic—in short, for the fleeting moments towards which we would never have thought to position ourselves. Furthermore, insofar as Nightwood associates the queer with that which “lies beside oneself” (read: both, beside the “self as singular” and beside the “self as self”), a “turning-of-the-head” as the gesture of thought itself must be redescribed as a motion of queer thought, as an agitated movement that possesses the mobility of desiring indirection.2
This thesis, then, presents itself as a type of thought-experiment: it attempts to, if solely out of the corner of the eye, consider the current status of queer thought. What is it that we can do with queer theory? What is the relation between thought and text,
1 Unless otherwise noted, all references to Nightwood refer to: Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (New York: New Directions, 2006). See the appendix for a detailed plot summary of the novel. Cf. Ed Madden, Tiresian Poetics (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008). Madden argues that O’Connor serves as Nightwood’s “sexually variant and rhetorically performative Tiresian figure,” through whom Barnes represents “a body that stubbornly voices sexual and social difference, and stubbornly performs difference through tropes of effeminacy and the codes of public sexual practices” (170). As we shall see in the third chapter, though the doctor may articulate what Madden calls a “Tiresian poetics,” he certainly does not give voice to sexual and social difference as such; in fact, he questions the ethicality of an uncritical focus on difference as the primary category of being. 2 By “queer,” I here mean an affective force that insists upon and celebrates the historical instability of desire, the imperfectly sutured condition of the subject, and the impersonality attending all attachment. I will define this in greater detail later in this introduction and will follow its implications throughout this thesis.
2 critic and artist? Where, when, and how does this queer relation allow us to orient ourselves if not around the self as such? With this set of questions sustaining the current analysis, I am not endeavoring to give a programmatic set of maxims by which a queer hermeneutic must abide. I am instead offering a mode of thinking which can be taken as a point of extension into new ways of approaching and relating to texts. Therefore, in responding to what queer theory can do, I am not so much constatively asserting a definite or solidified paradigm, but performatively enacting what I find to be a more ethical model of critical engagement.
With Nightwood, in all of its bewildering splendor, Djuna Barnes invites us to engage in an unanticipated and unique way with a mode of queer thought. The novel suggests that to do so is to simultaneously engage with questions of sexuality, affect, history, aesthetics, and community. In this thesis, I argue that Nightwood outlines a framework for an affective relation to history in which the past is produced on and between bodies in instances of depraved sensation. Within this affective historicity, then, the impulse of community formation is towards a relentless becoming, which relates not only humans to each other, but, more importantly, humans to the nonhuman—the human to its own inhumanity. This would then create the conditions for an ethos of transformation in which we experience the world as a way to pleasurably reconfirm the mutuality of our imperfect being. Within this ethos, community is radically changed, for the terms by which we are currently able to articulate the communal become irrelevant. This thesis, in responding to Nightwood, is a gesture towards a new form of relational being that enables us to live with each other and with the world in a profoundly more ethical way.
Nightwood as Minor Literature
Nightwood facilitates, even necessitates, this kind of critical movement because of the difficulty it presents us to our standard modes of reading. It disdainfully eschews the customary hermeneutic patterns for producing intelligible understandings from texts. In this way, Nightwood functions as what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari refer to as
3 emblematic of a “minor literature.”3 Deleuze and Guattari characterize a minor literature in three ways. First, a minor literature affects the “major” language with a “high coefficiencient of deterritorialization” (Kafka 16). By this they mean that it appropriates the major language and makes it speak in unprecedented and strange ways that distorts the colonial aims of the majority. Second, a minor literature is a literature in which everything is political (Kafka 17). Due to the way language is transformed in a minor literature, the individual becomes as an immediacy within the political; the individual is inseparable from the social. Lastly, because a minor literature dispenses with the concept of the “masterful artist,” it “finds itself positively charged with the role and function of collective, and even revolutionary, enunciation” (Kafka 17). Any individual enunciation, within literature, is separated from an enunciating subject as either cause or effect of the enunciation itself, and instead enters into the “collective assemblage of enunciation,” in which language is neither yours nor mine, but forever in the process of becoming for a coming community (Kafka 18).
Deleuze and Guattari take a Czech author writing in the German language, Franz Kafka, as their model for each of these characteristics of the writing of a minor literature. Djuna Barnes, however, was an American author writing in English (though positioned among the Parisian bohemia), and therefore the features of Nightwood that make it a minor literature lie elsewhere. It is, I would argue, in its queerness that the novel assumes its role as a minor literature. Insofar as Nightwood focuses our attention on the way it uses language, as a function of its queerness, to corrupt the authority of the majoritarian, it deterritorializes the heteronormative postulates of discourse, makes that deterritorialization political, and uses this politics as the constitution of a collective set of desires. Nightwood, however, is “minor” in another, if related, aspect as well: it positions itself at the margins of the modernist canon. “I am the ‘most famous unknown of the century!’ I cannot account for it, unless it is that my talent is my character, my character my talent, and both an estrangement,” Barnes famously declares in a letter dated May 31, 1963 to Natalie Clifford Barney, an American author who ran a notorious literary salon (frequented by both expatriate modernists and French intellectuals) on
3 Dianne Chisholm similarly comments (in a footnote) that insofar as Nightwood highlights a “nomadic exodus” from “traditional and urban social spaces,” it can be considered a “minor literature” (198-99, note 19).
4 the Left Bank of Paris. The “estrangement” that Barnes feels from the established literary world registers as an infamous anonymity: everyone knows of her, yet no one knows her name. The minor position Barnes has within the catalogue of great modernist texts reflects this precariousness.
Nonetheless, rather than indicate that it is “time to give Barnes her due” as a major modernist author (though it surely is), I want to suggest that Barnes’s lasting state of infamous anonymity within the modernist canon is a consequence of her challenging aesthetic project. The attempt to bestow upon Djuna Barnes her (rightly) deserved place within modernism will always fail due to the difficulty of her work. Stylistic difficulty is a feature of almost any modernist text. The difficulty of Nightwood, however, is a function not only of its demanding style, but also, and more importantly, of the obstacles it creates (of which its style would be one) as the reader attempts to draw near and make contact with the novel.4 If Barnes is the most famous unknown, it is because she writes from this perspective. If Nightwood bears the burden of infamous anonymity, this is its damnation—we cannot disregard the importance of Nightwood, yet neither can we unreservedly place it at the center of the modernist canon. Nightwood, as a minor literature, will never have a “proper” place within modernism. Nonetheless, Nightwood challenges our understanding of what modernism is, precisely because of its perilous place within such a paradigm. This tension can be seen in the relation between Barnes and her “properly-placed” editor, T. S. Eliot.
T. S. Eliot, Affect, and Impersonality
Though Barnes had finished Nightwood sometime between the summers of 1932 and 1933, it was not published until October 15, 1936, after her friend and editor Emily Coleman had taken the manuscript to T. S. Eliot, who then edited and added an introduction to the novel for publication. The relationship between Barnes, Eliot, and what came to be known as Nightwood (at first called “Bow Down”—eventually the title
4 In saying this, I am confirming what Brian Glavey calls Nightwood’s strategy of “queer ekphrasis,” or “a tense and trembling vibration between motion and stasis that aestheticizes moments of loss and withdrawal, giving aesthetic form to experiences of stigma in order to transfigure—but not transcend— them” (750). Thus, Glavey argues, Nightwood rejects Manichaeism and is purposively caught between “a redemption that is impossible and a possibility that is damned” (751).
5 of just the first chapter) was notoriously antagonistic: Eliot allegedly influenced many cuts to the original draft, which had included “offensive” sections that made him uncomfortable (Benstock 428; Broe 20). Most of the passages that Eliot remarked for omission from the draft were related to sexuality, and were taken out in an attempt to blur “sexual, particularly homosexual, references and a few points that put religion in an unsavory light” (Plumb xxiii).5 Eliot’s introduction was, in a similar way, a point of ambivalence, not only due to the way it worked to “[lead] attention away from its homosexual theme” (Plumb xxiv), but also largely due to its hesitant endorsement of the text in general. Though famously noting that Nightwood is “so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it,” he qualifies this by saying, “For it took me, with this book, some time to come to an appreciation of its meaning as a whole” (“Introduction” xviii, xvii). Eliot’s designation that only a certain “sensibility” can appreciate the novel is curious considering the fact that affect and emotion have a tenuous place in his work. The uncertainty of Eliot’s introduction emerges as a response to the challenge Nightwood poses to a modernist aesthetic.
In Eliot’s own essays, the relationship between artistic production and historical embodiment establishes an analogous relationship between emotion and impersonality. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), Eliot attempts to place singular artistic ability in a dependent relationship with literary tradition—or, in other words, with the synchronized configuration of the history of artistic production. This, for Eliot, means specifically the literary production of Western Europe. Artists must cultivate a vigorous awareness of the past, in which their work does not posit a discontinuous relationship with tradition in order to create something “new.” Genuine innovation comes from a perpetual sacrificing of the self to poetic tradition. He thus repeatedly stresses the importance of what he calls a “historical sense” that “involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence” (“Tradition” 38). This historical sense would not only necessarily connect the poet to the past by means of the emotions
5 The following is one compelling example of Eliot’s editorial hand concerning homosexuality in Barnes’s text (the brackets designate the omitted material): “And the lining of my belly, flocked with the locks cut off love in odd places that I’ve come on, a bird’s nest [of pubic hairs] to lay my lost eggs in, and my people as good as they come, as long as they have been coming, down the grim path of ‘We know not’ to ‘We can’t guess why’” (Nightwood: The Original Version 85). Eliot was concerned about the homosexual implications of the passage, especially the erotic tension created between the act of “coming” and the locks of pubic hair that line Dr. O’Connor’s belly in this passage. Eliot circled the reference to pubic hair to be removed in order to contain the explicit homoeroticism.
6 expressed in art, but would also necessitate a revaluation of modernism not as the privileged site of historical rupture, but instead as firmly implicated in the networks of feeling that traverse between past and present. In other words, the characteristic novelty of the modernist aesthetic would not be located in the way in which that project breaks away from its history, but would only be successful—or in Eliot’s term, “mature” (“Tradition” 40)—inasmuch as it determines and discovers the past already deeply imbricated in the present moment of writing.
Eliot’s theory of poetic creation therefore decisively embeds itself in a robust sense of historical embodiment. He explains that the poet must take “great labour” and write not only “with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer” (“Tradition” 38). There is, however, an anxious tension in Eliot’s essay between a feeling of historical embodiment and the idea that this comes at the price of an “extinction of personality” (“Tradition” 40). Poets can only produce art in the present moment of the past if they sustain a level of emotional detachment from the work being constructed. Great art, for Eliot, is solely the consequence of a kind of dispassionate objectivity. “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion” he declares, “but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality” (“Tradition” 43). The impersonality of emotion in art will lead to Eliot’s assertion of the “objective correlative” in his essay, “Hamlet” (1919). Here, he says that the only way to adequately express an emotion and still attain the value of high art is to find the “objective correlative” for that emotion, or “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked” (“Hamlet” 48). The aforementioned tension is refigured here as between a full emotional self-sacrifice to the past and finding a “formula” to evoke an emotion; this is a tension that can have no resolve, for to utterly give oneself over to the intense emotionality of the past is also to reject the idea of a systematic model of affect. That is, emotions—especially the volatile emotions traveling within temporal networks—are unpredictable and arise out of impulsive and unreserved intensities, and therefore can never be systematically accounted for by any inelastic formula, or fit into a “finely perfected medium” of the kind Eliot envisions (“Tradition” 41).
7
“One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express,” says Eliot, “and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse” (“Tradition” 43). Djuna Barnes’s work revels in the perversity of affect, generating the peculiar impropriety that Eliot emphasizes as misguided in modern art. Nightwood, in particular, meets Eliot’s condemning charge of searching for novelty “in the wrong place.” In other words, though it coincides with its editor’s aesthetic project of producing the past as an emotional response in the present and as an immersion into impersonality, Nightwood nonetheless displays contempt towards the idea that such an emotional response can be rationally or objectively controlled. Its vision of affect and of historicity is a much more complex, unstable interchange between emotionality, historical embodiment, and sexual desire. If the impersonality of affect is crucial for artistic production, it is not in the sense that the escape from personality is an escape from affect. Nightwood insists that impersonality and affectivity are essentially tied to one another; yet, to see so might require us to depart from Eliot’s dominant model of how they meet. Impersonality is not the separation of the self from affect, but the estrangement of the self as a self in affect. In the creation of poetry, in the production of an aesthetic, there is nothing but affect, and this fact might force us to turn, if not lose, our heads.
Affect/History/Queer: A Methodology for Reading
In approaching Nightwood in a way that acknowledges its emotionality, its historicity, and its sexuality, I will attempt to put queer theory in a dynamic negotiation with theories of affect and historical embodiment or belonging. For the purposes of this thesis, I will tentatively define affect as a relation of sensational intensity that travels within and between bodies, and between historical moments, which compels some kind of relational movement or act of those bodies, and which appears as a somatic force that influences (inter)personal organizations. In this way, I am using “affect” in a manner similar to that of Brian Massumi, who, developing the affective genealogy between Spinoza and Deleuze, makes a sharp distinction between emotion and affect, saying that they “follow different logics and pertain to different orders” (27). Whereas emotion, for Massumi, is a “qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of
8 intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning” (28), affect describes “virtual synesthetic perspectives anchored in (functionally limited by) the actually existing, particular things that embody them” (35). Therefore, affect is “autonomous” insofar as it “escapes confinement in the particular body whose vitality, or potential for interaction, it is” (35). While I do not demarcate such a pronounced border between emotion and affect—for if affect is an unpredictable relation of feeling, it has the potential to congeal around conventional emotions—I do retain a permeable distinction between structures of relational intensities, which can be designated by affect, and personal or internal characteristics of feeling, which are named as emotions.6
In light of this view of affect, I will define history as an assemblage of unfulfilled and emergent potentialities made possible by the affective force of past moments that have not ceased the process of becoming-historical nonlinearly through time; this potentiality, then, can be constructed within a text and stimulated by a reader. In other words, history is an organization of situational forces of imminence and becoming that defy any definitive or systematic structuration. Though it may be expressed through personal/familial “history,” literary “history,” national “history,” etc., history, as I am employing it here, is not singularly reducible to any of these sites. When thought in this way, “history” becomes not only about how we organize and narrativize past events, but also about the process of “becoming” itself. History must not be confined to the name we give to the state of things past, because it reinforces the notion of “what’s done is done,” the belief that the past is irrevocably and permanently past. On the contrary, we may be through with the past, but the past is never quite done with us. Thinking of history as an emergent potential that is inseparable from becoming allows for a conception of the ways that the past emerges as a living and affective force within the present. In other words, to think about history in an affective framework is to abandon the presumptive idea that historical events will always unfold along a linear path, for affective intensities do not know a temporality bounded by ideological or conceptual anxieties. In some senses, then, this model of history would have to reflect upon the future, insofar as becoming points toward that which has not happened yet.
6 Cf. Raymond Williams, “Structures of Feeling,” in Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 128-35.
9
As a result, the critical category of “queer” would have to be reconceptualized. The standard definition of the “queer” has, from its very theoretical inception, signaled the impossibility of subjectivity, and thereby the instability of sexuality, desire, and object choice. This conceptual delineation, however, has been contentious as the site designated by “queer” has at certain times been understood as defying any definition whatsoever, while at others as an oppositional term that negates the normative.7 In any case, the discourse on “queerness” tends to centripetally pull “queer” back into a site of identity and set it upon a logic of either/or in which something is either queer or not queer. The conceptual pitfall here is that it tends to establish simply an alternative social ontology, instead of questioning the condition of ontology as such.8 In describing queer affectively, I promote the suspension of participation within this binary logic that political discourse often demands. Instead, I define queer as a force—one among many others—that assembles erotic energies into a potential disruption of the processes of normative historical development; the force of queerness affectively exposes the historical instability of desire, the imperfectly sutured condition of the subject, and the impersonality attending all attachments, compelling us to acknowledge the ethical implications of such a historical embodiment. Queerness, in this account, attains its ethical status insofar as it disallows the stability or permanence of any social form, including the terms of its own articulation. Queer, as it is thought here, allows us to see beyond the theoretical traps of identity or knowledge, for it circumvents answering the question, “Who or What are you?” and instead assembles beside these interrogations as
7 For instance, on the one hand, David Halperin famously defines “queer” as “by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. ‘Queer,’ then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative” (62). For Halperin, queer designates a position without an essence, a position that can nonetheless be occupied by lesbians and gay men as well as other sexually marginalized people. On the other hand, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner argue that queer cannot have a “stable referential content and pragmatic force,” but instead aspires to create intimate “publics” (“What Does Queer Theory” 344). Thus, the term “queer,” they argue, cannot be used as a coalition of gays, lesbians, the transgendered, et al. They instead argue that “[q]ueer publics make available different understandings of membership at different times, and membership in them is more a matter of aspiration than it is the expression of an identity or history” (“What Does Queer Theory” 344). For Berlant and Warner, “queer” cannot be occupied, but is aspired to as an ideal of community formation. Nonetheless, despite the intentions of their formulators, these definitions of the queer tend to coalesce around stable, identifiable positions such as a “queer” person or the “queer” community. 8 In her essay “Critically Queer” from Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler suggests that if queer is to continue to be the “point of departure for a set of historical reflections and futural imaginings, it will have to remain that which is, in the present, never fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes” (228).
10 an affective force of becoming.9 This becoming might appear, however, as we shall later see, as a becoming-same.
Schizoanalysis, Psychoanalysis, and the Intermezzo
In order to approach Nightwood, it is necessary, as I have said, to think beside ourselves, with the back, or with a turn of the head—this is the intermezzo, the in- between, the middle. To be able to meet the novel’s demand to think otherwise, to produce thought as queer, I have found it necessary to think with models that might seem to hold each other in contempt. In this thesis, in order to think with the queer rhythms of the intermezzo, I turn to both schizoanalysis (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s term for their approach) and psychoanalysis (in the work of Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit).10 These are two camps which rarely think together.11 Nonetheless, it is in the contradictory space between schizo- and psycho- analysis that I have found a mode of thinking that gives energy to queer theory and to thinking alongside Nightwood. In the place where we do not think to think, in the impossibility of thinking anything but the failure of thought, I have found a way to say: I can’t go on, I’ll go on.12 If Deleuze, Guattari, Bersani, and Dutoit make unlikely bedfellows, the orgy of such an encounter produces the ability to simply “go on.” Despite all their differences, the Deleuzian strain of affect theory and a version of psychoanalysis inflected by Bersani, in their most transformational formulations, are emboldened by a profound and imperfect sameness. In the space between schizo and psycho, we can lie beside ourselves.
9 This is the intuitive force, I believe, behind Michel Foucault’s enigmatic claim about homosexuality, in the interview “Friendship as a Way of Life,” that our endeavor is not to discover some truth of ourselves, but instead “to use one’s sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships. And, no doubt, that’s the real reason why homosexuality is not a form of desire but something desirable. Therefore, we have to work at becoming homosexuals and not be obstinate in recognizing that we are” (135-36; emphasis added). 10 “Schizoanalysis,” Guattari writes in his Chaosmosis (1992), “rather than moving in the direction of reductionist modelisations which simplify the complex, will work towards its complexification, its processual enrichment, towards the consistency of its virtual lines of bifurcation and differentiation, in short towards its ontological heterogeneity” (61). 11 A notable exception to this is the emerging work of Mikko Tuhkanen on the subject. See his, “Becoming Same: Bersani and Deleuze,” UMBR(a): Sameness (2002): 131-45; and, to a lesser extent, “Queer Hybridity” in Deleuze and Queer Theory, ed. Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009): 92-114. 12 This famous phrase ends Samuel Beckett’s novel, L’innommable [The Unnameable] (1953), the final book of his trilogy of novels. See: Samuel Beckett, Three Novels (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 414.
11
In chapter one, I outline a framework of historical affectivity in Nightwood. In so doing, I argue that Barnes sketches an affective context for a sensual and sensuous historical relationality in which the past can be encountered upon the body in moments of intensity, which are themselves connected to the negative affectivity of experience. A queer historicity in Nightwood always appears as a perversely depraved relation, insofar as the forms of eroticism and sexuality in the novel are intimately associated with forms of debasement. Within this historical affectivity, new communities must emerge, ones in which the continuity between past and present is seen as necessary for the possibility of any relation whatsoever. This chapter serves as the milieu through which the subsequent discussion of relationality and community emerges.
In chapter two, I turn to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming-animal” in order to grasp onto the enigmatic final chapter of Nightwood, “The Possessed.” I argue that Nightwood makes possible an escape from the “human” in order to become historical and sexual, whereby a modality of ethical engagement emerges in which inhumanity is queerly reestablished as the basis of human (and other) relations. Within this framework, the human is divorced from love; we rediscover, within the affective intensities of a becoming-animal, a love without knowledge of human ontology. I will then argue that queer life—a mode severed from individual identity—is an intimacy enacted in the shameful act of writing. If shame possesses Nightwood, it emerges as a response to our mortal shame of our own human being. The novel implicates its readers in a reconfiguration of relationality, in which queer love is an attachment to the inhuman becoming of writing.
In chapter three, I then touch upon a correspondence between Bersani and Dutoit’s theory of the “impersonal narcissism of an aesthetic subjectivity,” and the vision of community that Djuna Barnes enables in Nightwood. In enacting the (pleasurable) meeting of Bersani and Barnes, I will argue that Nightwood promotes a version of narcissism dissociated from the authority and violence of the self. In Nightwood, the subject continually reaches beyond itself to find inaccurate replications of its being. In so doing, and with the transience of anonymity, it produces a virtual community of aesthetic associations. The extensible narcissism by which we acknowledge ourselves past the self will not only implicate us in and develop an
12 ethically impersonal attachment to each other, but may also teach us to live within a universal rhythm of being. In this exploration of what queer thought can do, how it can think, when and where it can go, I find that “community”—in all its relations—becomes the sustaining category for thought itself. What am I doing when I think, when I read? How do I relate when I do so? How can reading become the constitution of a “we”? And how might this discursively fashioned collective be different from already established forms of communal being? If we find ourselves, in a passive defeat, with our faces “turned and weeping” by the end of Nightwood, perhaps this is not something to be lamented (180). Perhaps this is the only manner in which we truly find each other.
CHAPTER ONE
“History at night”: Affective Relationality
Introduction
Let us read the affective:
Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood can so enthrall you in the passion of its embrace that it jolts the nerves and arouses tremors of uncontrollable sensation. This experience of reading refuses to allow a cognitive distance between reader and text, folding the space between the two into each other as if to tie them into a knot of feeling, emotion, and ecstatic frenzy. To read Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood can be to sustain just such an experience; to read Nightwood is to be enveloped into its intricate web of emotionality and loss.13
It is this type of affective reading strategy—a reading that is both attuned to the emotional structures of the text and responsive to the tensions, erotic or otherwise, that these structures enable and produce—that I will galvanize in coming in contact with Nightwood (1936).14 If we, as readers of modernist novels, of texts, and of experience more generally, can allow ourselves to be enthralled in such a way by the sensation that texts are liable to engender, the relations with which we inevitably make in order to
13 “Let us read the affective.” My admittedly bombastic opening is meant to suggest three related ideas: (1) an imperative to explore the new and emerging critical space(s) that “affect” offers to scholars of literature; (2) the irrepressible relationality of “affect” which always entails more than the singularity of a particular encounter; and (3) the suggestion that in reading a text, we are always-already embedded within its affective dimensions. 14 I am here specifically working off of what Raymond Williams calls a “structure of feeling” in his seminal Marxism and Literature (1977). Williams defines a structure of feeling as a social experience that is “still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which in analysis (though rarely otherwise) has its emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics, indeed its specific hierarchies” (132). A structure of feeling thus indexes an indefinite formation of social relations that has not yet, as of the present, entirely materialized as a comprehensible unit. In attempting to process the present, a structure of feeling emerges as a way to sense the condition of the moment (and our understanding of it), before a definite articulation of that sense becomes possible. For Williams, then, a structure of feeling is akin to a “cultural hypothesis” that derives from “attempts to understand such elements and their connections in a generation or period, and needing always to be returned, interactively, to such evidence” (132-33).
14 understand the world will be significantly transformed, both within the present and in relation to the past.
In this chapter, I will explore the vicissitudes of a historical affectivity in Nightwood and its implications for how we must approach historical embodiment. In so doing, I will argue that any genuine historical relation must decidedly not exclude formations of degraded affect and that the very energy of the modernist paradigm—an often anxious one—is consequentially related to the enactment and performance of this genuine historical relation. To ignore or exclude these affects from a consideration of how an aesthetic of modernism is created is effectively to dismiss a productive and primary mode of political and social organization, insofar as this provides a mode for contesting and reconfiguring forms of belonging and becoming that are truly novel, opening up a space to “make it new.” This rearticulation of the terms of communal relations is the point at which a queer relationality materializes within the text. In Nightwood, a sense, a feeling of queerness is expressed through the emergence of this aforementioned historical emotionality, whereby queerness does not necessarily designate a stable, identity position, nor does it describe a category inevitably bounded by humanity, by what can count as “human.” In fact, queerness here may not be something describable at all, but instead emerges as a force of historical becoming, the terms of which can never be decidedly established. Though there are plenty of things that could be identified as signifying “queerness” in Nightwood (Dr. O’Connor’s transvestitism/drag, the lesbian relationships, etc.), I argue that queerness emerges more cogently within the text as a force that implicates such affectively depraved historical relations. The beauty of Nightwood lies in its queer insistence that a development of forceful affective attachments is the only way to “lay hands on the shudder of a past that is still vibrating” (Nightwood 126).
Within the past decade, academic interest has increasingly been invested in the site at which sexuality, emotion, and the production of historical narrative meet, especially in the fields of affect studies and queer theory. In order to explore what it means to be embedded within history, what the stakes are of feeling oneself within history, how we can sense the past within the present, and what kinds of erotic exchanges are produced within such encounters, critics have engaged with a comprehensive archive ranging from the articulation of community in medieval
15 accounts of sexuality to novels of the historical present that attempt to deal with the harsh, quotidian commonalities of the post-9/11, neoliberal world.15 The most consequential of these engagements for my analysis of Nightwood is Heather Love’s critical study, Feeling Backward (2007), in which Love deals with the desire to feel historical as a function of the emergence of homosexuality within the modern period. She argues that contemporary queer readers and interpreters are conventionally accustomed to rescuing or restoring the abused figures of the queer past, yet not every text allows such redemption. When a text performs the refusal of liberation from the harmful conditions of its moment, it disrupts the narrative of queer identity that is often conditioned upon progress and pride, disturbing an easy attachment to these figures. In explicating a more comprehensive politics of feeling and of the past, Love contends that critics must engage with “negative affects and with the intransigent difficulties of making feeling the basis for politics…engaging with affects that have not traditionally been thought of as political and also dealing with the disjunction between affective [sic] and the social” (14). In other words, far from disowning or mending the history of marginalization, the imperative of the critical gesture must be to acknowledge and sense the ways in which this history structures queer forms of belonging and community in the present moment. Queer identity, for Love, does not come at the cost of a renunciation of negative affect, but is in fact predicated upon an acceptance of this negativity, insofar as an attention to the social damage of the past informs and illuminates the way in which this damage lives on in the present.
The value of Love’s theoretical framework for my interpretation of Nightwood is primarily in how she manages to clarify the link between negative affectivity, queer history, and political configurations that cannot necessarily be named by means of any
15 The scholarly work within affect and queer studies that has had the largest impact on my views of affect, history, and queerness includes: Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); Lee Edelman, No Future (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Carla Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time & Place (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Heather Love, Feeling Backward (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Christopher Nealon, Foundlings (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). And to a lesser extent: Ben Davies and Jana Funke, eds., Sex, Gender, and Time in Fiction and Culture (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 201); E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen, eds., Queer Times, Queer Becomings (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011).
16 predetermined social ontology. I share Love’s sense that as (queer) critics approaching (queer) texts, we are missing something indispensible in the operations of these texts if we assign them to a place within the narrative of “gay pride” and “queer progress” from the outset. Texts such as Nightwood, which refuse to play along with such sanguine scripts of social construction, defy a logic that dictates the disavowal of the “bad feelings” in the present or past, associating and circulating their affect within the productive ambivalence of “feeling backward.” In keeping with Love’s work and other recent scholarship on mutual theories of affect, history, and queerness, I will explore the ways in which approaching history attuned to the affective forces that form and reformulate both the past and the present helps us to reconsider what it means to feel historical, how this feeling of historicity forces us to reassess what kind of structures the category of “queer” designates, and how these are all activated within Nightwood.
More recently, Julie Taylor has provided an indispensible framework for looking at Nightwood as an affective modernist text in her book, Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism (2012). Taylor contends that Nightwood is the textual performance of the affect of “shame,” arguing that
Nightwood inscribes trauma and shame at the heart of subjectivity as it gestures towards the way that shame is partially reprocessed as pride, that shame is indeed what makes pride possible…Critically, a consideration of Barnes’s engagement with this complex affect allows us to understand the ways in which modernism’s shame might also be regarded as its guilty pleasure. (113)
Taylor’s argument relies on the view of affect set forth by Silvan Tomkins and later revitalized by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.16 Taylor analyzes the trope of “bowing down” in Nightwood as an instantiation of the performativity of shame. In Nightwood, Baron Felix quotes Jenny Petherbridge, a lover of his wife Robin, as saying that shame was always tied to Robin: “Well, she went on to say that when they met the Baronin had so obviously forgotten all about her that the child was ‘ashamed.’ She said ‘shame went all over her’” (124). Shame, Silvan Tomkins argues, is predominantly a response of “facial communication reduction” (136). It is on the surface of the face, that is, that shame can
16 See: Silvan Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank; Sedgwick and Frank, “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins,” in Shame and Its Sisters (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 1-28. See Touching Feeling for Sedgwick’s other work on affect, performativity, and literature.
17 be seen and experienced. Thus, in the affect of shame, the blushing of the face “is a consequence of, as well as a further cause for, heightened self- and face-consciousness” (136). When Dr. Matthew O’Connor of Nightwood claims, “There is eternity to blush in!” (135), he is therefore establishing shame as a motivating force of the novel.
For Taylor, this powerful affect has the ability to shape challenging forms of community. She suggests that “some of the constituent qualities of modernist textuality are not fundamentally new but are reworkings of tropes found in discredited genres” (142). Thus, again relying on Sedgwick, Taylor argues that “Barnes suggests that shame can be reparative, that it is through enacting scenes of shame that we might access traces of the positive affect that has been denied or blocked…” (121).17 In this way, Taylor helps to see how Nightwood develops its affective dimensions and how this performative affectivity is related to the modernist movement.
Though Taylor’s work has greatly influenced the way I read Nightwood, I pose the following questions to her analysis: What would it mean to open up the investigation beyond the analytic of “shame” in particular? How might other negative affects, or a structure of negative affectivity, be employed within the text? And relatedly, must we construe an interpretation that necessarily enacts the reparation of negativity? What would it mean to allow the text to refuse to move past negative affect? In answering these questions, I will depart from Taylor’s productive interpretation. This is not to say that her framework does not continue to shape my thinking, but that in order to understand the full enactment of affect within Nightwood, it becomes necessary to look at the ways in which affect cannot be contained within a singular category such as “shame.”18 In broadening the analytic scope, it will also allow me to comprehensively examine the intricate ways in which historicity and sexuality, and their relation, are constructed in Nightwood. In so doing, I will show that negative affectivity in Nightwood is something beyond “repair,” and that it develops a true impersonality of attachment, even going so far as to suggest that to become historical and to become sexual is to become something other than human. Over the course of the novel, Barnes outlines an affective framework for a kind of erotic historical relation in which the past is vividly
17 Cf. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” in Touching Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 123-51. 18 I will have more to say on “shame” in Nightwood in the next chapter of this thesis.
18 produced upon the body in moments of intense feeling that are themselves inevitably connected to the penetrating pain of experience. An erotic historicity in Nightwood is always produced as a kind of perversely tarnished relation, insofar as the forms of eroticism and sexuality in the novel are intimately associated with forms of debasement. The model of “history at night” (Nightwood 92) that the novel works to explicate is able to incorporate the powerful feelings of hurt and loss, as well as the erotic pleasures of historical embodiment, and, in so doing, shows how the two are inextricably linked. In compelling its reader to register the inescapable ambivalence of historical affectivity (an ambivalence that is nonetheless politically and socially fecund), Nightwood gestures towards the splanchnic potencies that can organize peripherally or nonessentially to the side of conscious knowing, which appears as a gesture to something other than the emotion in and of itself.
History Without Affect: Several Inadequacies
From its first few moments, it is clear that Nightwood is a novel that is obsessed with and consumed by questions of time, history, and the relation between past and present. “Baron” Guido Volkbein, who is really no baron at all but a Jewish-Italian immigrant to Vienna who continually pays a “remorseless homage to nobility” (5), introduces Nightwood’s challenge to ideas of historical feeling and belonging. As a result of both the lack of aristocracy in his blood and his embarrassment towards his Jewish descent, Guido takes the name of “Volkbein,” adopts the sign of the cross, creates a coat of arms, manufactures a catalogue of royal ancestors from which he supposedly derives, and marries a Viennese woman who, for him, carries the “promise that hung at the Christian belt” in the form of an expected child (Nightwood 5). It is this lineage, this ability to produce an heir that would make the artifice of Guido’s “birthright” concrete. He dies at the age of fifty-nine, however, childless and unsettled (though his wife, Hedvig, does in fact later give birth to a son, Felix). Guido Volkbein’s relationship to history, as well as to his own past in particular, sets the novel in motion, creating the conditions for which the rest of the novel will unravel. History, for Guido, here becomes not a complex accumulation of past times and of the residue of former events embedded within experiential relations of the world or of a text, but instead a solidified and
19 bounded abstraction that demands an unaffected obsession for the present, from which it is unalterably estranged.
Guido Volkbein’s “remorseless homage to nobility,” where the nobility figures an embodiment of history as untouchable tradition, distances a relation to history from the feeling of a distinct historical embodiment; such a method of dissociation bars access to a conception of history as fluctuating among modes of affect. This latter relationship with history could not be thought of as a relationship with an intangible totality closed to any modification or alteration. In other words, neither a genealogical pedigree that links father and son through reproductive associations of (contrived) nobility, nor a nostalgic reification of the past as past typifies a feeling of historicity in Nightwood. The former, which articulates a relation to history solely as a procreative connection between male heirs, limits a feeling of historicity to either the nuclear family or a restricted chain of explicitly male successors, ignoring or obscuring other, more cogent forms of historical embodiment. The latter, which formulates the past as a finished and bounded entity that is irrevocably in the past, idealizes a certain kind of immobile idea of “past-ness” that seeks only to remember the “decent” moments of history by estranging those moments from the present and enshrining them in an untouchable casing of nostalgia.
The problem for Barnes in these modes of historical expression is that they expurgate history of its disorder and filth: they uselessly purify the past of its degraded substance, of the very values that gives it the quality of history. Nightwood suggests that a proper relationship to the past would excise it of neither its messiness nor its detriment, but rather embrace a complex and composite network of historical embodiment, affect, and sexual desire. In order to recognize such a difficult vision of historical emotionality, the text proposes that it is in an embrace of affect and of affective connections with history that the degradation and the excessive emotional remainders of the past can be productively and powerfully confronted. This recognition of affective historical assemblages, however, requires the near impossible task of turning to face history and allowing the loss of a concrete sense of self as the body produces the past upon its surfaces and throughout its musculature. The past, in this mode of expression, would be felt in and on the body as a sensation, affecting the way in which we understand and articulate a relationship to the past, present, and future. This, in
20 turn, produces new ways of feeling in regards to ourselves and in regards to the communities in which we act and express feeling. In so doing, we can not only relate to the past as never entirely complete, but we can also begin to acknowledge and experience a history that repudiates itself as a coherent object of cleanliness, propriety, or compulsory affirmation. In its staging of the history of the night, in its acceptance of the historical “stench of excrement, blood, and flowers,” Nightwood forces us to feel our own bodies as sites of historical affect that are incessantly overflowing with excessive and depraved sensations (Nightwood 96).
The structure of Nightwood focuses on three people who cannot figure out how to produce a genuine interaction with history and its excessive disturbances: Felix Volkbein, Nora Flood, and Jenny Petherbridge. All three of these characters hopelessly attempt to detach from the violent vibrations of the past by distancing and disaffecting themselves from the impossible relation of historical feeling—personified in the figure of Robin Vote—either through a nostalgic calcification, an objectification, or a banal imitation and privatization of a thereby pasteurized, ideal “past.” Felix, Nora, and Jenny each develop a relationship with Robin, yet all three relationships turn out to be ineffective and each character will accordingly lose her in the process. The bulk of the novel thus becomes about the way in which Felix, Nora, and Jenny respectively attempt to regain what they have lost, and their subsequent failure to do so. Robin, on the other hand, remains always aloof, always askew, but always embedded within the field of residual feeling and desire; she is the intolerable and unattainable object of history itself, the very impossibility of a complete realization of any historical identification whatsoever.
What Robin figures is a terminal illness that is endemic to the subject before its infection, which is to say that she figures something embedded in history that has yet to happen—or, more precisely: “the face of an incurable yet to be stricken with its malady” (45). “Nightwood would have us remember something that, properly speaking, is not a memory at all,” argues Merrill Cole. “It would derange the sequential registration of meaning indispensable to the progression of traditional narratives, as well as to their reception, in order to contrive an altar to the unspeakable” (405). Robin, that is, comes to figure that which escapes historical containment: she represents the remainder of a complete historical identification, the irreducible gap that is always left between the past
21 and the present in any relation to history, but that which is also a necessary condition of history qua history.19 In other words, this irreducible gap between past and present moments is necessary for history to function as history, for if a completely undifferentiated identification with the past were obtained, it would entail the complete loss of the subject. That is, if a subject could ultimately make no distinction whatsoever between the past and the present, the mind would lapse into insanity for it would no longer be able to discern any difference between its own cognition and the influences of the past. In Nightwood, identification with the past cannot be continuous and stable, but fragmented and momentary. Dr. O’Connor intuits just that when he says, “Everything we can’t bear in this world, some day we find in one person, and love it all at once. A strong sense of identity gives a man an idea he can do no wrong; too little accomplishes the same” (144). What is left is the unattainable but nonetheless affecting—both inside and outside the diegesis—figure of Robin. Nonetheless, in the confrontation with this radical unattainability, Felix, Nora, and Jenny all fail to accept and encounter its significances, displacing their terrible anxieties onto simplistic or sterilized notions of time and memory, and thus expelling (or, at least, attempting to expel) the exorbitant effects of history’s defiled happening.
Just after seeing Robin for the first time, Felix Volkbein says to Dr. O’Connor, “To pay homage to our past is the only gesture that also includes the future” (43). This response may not at first seem to be antithetical to the idea of an affective historical relation, for in a certain sense such a relation would require a turning to view the past in order to create a viable future. The arrogant suggestion, however, that a compassionless “homage” is the only act which constitutes the possibility of such a future is full of empty nostalgia and naïve idealism; it struggles to repudiate a “touching” historical emotion that would allow him to feel connected to the past instead of estranged from it. Felix reifies his forged ancestral past, embalming time in the thick shellac of nostalgia, barring the convolutions of feeling from travelling in the hysterical networks between past and present. This is then performed, much like his father, in the desire for a male
19 Cole continues, in a Lacanian mode, that the narrative excesses of Nightwood remind us, with the figure of Robin, of a past that escapes historical grasp, noting that “Nightwood remarks an outside of history that is also most intimate to it, even if disavowed—an uncanny other scene, what in Lacanian terms is the extimate. What the doctor calls ‘the shudder of a past that is still vibrating’—what we cannot truly remember—is history’s absent cause, as elusive as Robin” (404).
22 heir; a son, for Felix, would solidify his ascendance into the echelons of the aristocracy, giving a reality to his place among the noble.
In other words, Felix’s faith in the fulfilling power of the child entombs the past in a state of quiescence and defers the moment of satisfaction into the future in what queer theorist Lee Edelman has called “reproductive futurism.” Edelman identifies a movement in Western culture in modernity to reify the heteronormative social order as such in the continual consecration of the symbolic figure of the Child as the unequivocal guarantor of a future realization of meaning. Reproductive futurism, for Edelman, imposes certain conceptual parameters on political discourse, thereby sanctioning the structure of heteronormativity by casting the potential for an alternative organization of communal relations as absolutely unintelligible. Politics would then represent itself as “bringing to fulfillment the narrative sequence of history and, with it, of desire, in the realization of the subject’s authentic presence in the Child imagined as enjoying unmediated access to Imaginary wholeness” (10). Queerness attains its ethical status within this framework insofar as the queer poses a resistance to the social order and repudiates the viability of both sociality and futurity in general.20 The Baron thus wishes for “a son who would feel as he felt about the ‘great past’” (42). A feeling of historicity for Felix lies not in a complex emotional assemblage that produces the past on and between bodies, but in a mimetic reproduction between father and son of a feeling of
20 See: Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). He argues that the queer figures the negativity of the social structure’s death drive, and thereby refuses “history as linear narrative (the poor man’s teleology) in which meaning succeeds in revealing itself—as itself—through time” (4). Consequently, the queer “comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to the social, to every social structure or form” (4). While I do not share Edelman’s complete rejection of the future in and of itself, I welcome his insightful and compelling arguments. The idea of “reproductive futurism” becomes highly pertinent to Nightwood insofar as the text stages the rejection—a perverse refusal, if you will—of the future realization of desire and meaning, emphasizing the indispensable impossibility of historicity itself. I do not wish, however, to simply set up an insurmountable dichotomy between queer and “non-queer” (i.e., heterosexual/heteronormative/etc.), nor to imply that the boundaries of what is considered “queer” are ever given or uncontested, nor especially to make explicit exclusions as to what is or is not queer on an individual basis. The history of queer studies has since its foundation had a contentious relation with the boundary between theoretical speculation and a particular praxis. It is not my intention to further antagonize such contentious relations, but instead to suggest a way around them. My view is that the category of “queer” is a powerful and affective force that indicates much more than just an individual identification or instantiation of it, and operates in complex and multidimensional ways within any given text. Thus, it is not my goal to simply align certain characters in Nightwood with an indissoluble queerness and others with an inevitable hetero-ness (though some characters do suggest a more pronounced queer relation within the text—Dr. O’Connor or Robin, for example). Instead, I wish to bring out the queer energies within Nightwood, which have an intimate and passionate connection to the affective relations to history that the novel outlines.
23 aristocratic fit that would fulfill his inability to realize a historical wholeness, and, in turn, would perpetuate the static value of the social order throughout history. Later, after marrying Robin, he chooses a destiny for her, so that “she might bear sons who would recognize and honour the past. For without such love, the past as he understood it, would die away from the world” (49). “The past as he understood it” is a past that is removed outside of history and replaced with a fetishized fixation on nostalgia for an idealized (and thereby sanitized) moment that never was.21 Felix will even go so far as to name this son “Guido” after his own father, hopelessly fortifying the singular transmission of historical embodiment down the linear line of the nuclear family.22
Nightwood makes a mockery of Felix’s ineffective efforts to do just that, for the child Guido is born a profane amalgamation of Felix and Robin, of the arrogance of nostalgia for a noble past and the excessive uncontrollability of historical affect:
…[Felix’s] child, if born to anything, had been born to holy decay. Mentally 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, with cold hands and anxious face, he followed his father, trembling with an excitement that was a precocious ecstasy. (114-15)
The child Guido is both “mentally deficient” and “emotionally excessive,” both awkward and unable to move properly as he “followed his father” and “trembling with an excitement that was a precocious ecstasy.” Guido, the unfortunate production of two incompatible modes of historical embodiment, is doomed to flounder in the liminal space between “controlled” heredity and uncontrollable affect. It is in “accepting his son [that] the Baron saw that he must accept a demolition of his own life” (115), for to acknowledge Guido as his heir is to acknowledge the failure of his pious adherence to a model of contrived nobility. Thus, Felix initially sees Robin as merely an instrument for
21 For an analysis of the limitations of a nostalgic relation to the past, see: Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001). She argues that nostalgia, as the response to the process of modernization, is a “mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values; it could be a secular expression of spiritual longing, a nostalgia for an absolute, a home that is both physical and spiritual, the edenic unity of time and space before entry into history” (8). 22 Though history here becomes a literal relation of body to body, this relation is nonetheless produced solely within the confines of a biopolitics of reproductive futurism. This version of historical embodiment reconfirms, instead of talks back to, the deployment of sexuality and its relation to the production of a historical narrative of sex. On this, see: Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, Trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), esp. 135-45.
24 the production of a child, not realizing that she cannot be contained or secured within the confines of such a static identity as, for example, “mother.”
As a result, Dr. O’Connor tells Felix that his “devotion to the past…is perhaps like a child’s drawing” (119). Devotion here, in Felix’s case, is not an intense affective connection, but a pretentious and exalting piety that renders the vicissitudes of history no more complexly than the drawing of a child. The doctor thus stresses in Felix’s misguided understanding of the past a devout veneration of the child, a devotion to the cult of meaning-forever-to-be-realized. In his response to this accusation, Felix replies:
My family is preserved because I have it only from the memory of one single woman, my aunt; therefore it is single, clear and unalterable. In this I am fortunate; through this I have a sense of immortality. Our basic idea of eternity is a condition that cannot vary. It is the motivation of marriage. No man really wants his freedom. He gets a habit as quickly as possible—it is a form of immortality. (119-20)
Felix’s faith in the monotonous, intelligible, and immobile conditions of the past are thus linked to his ideas of marriage and procreation as the channel to immortality. Habit—as in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, to which Nightwood makes numerous allusions—represses the destabilizing powers of emotion, for it is in an unvaried and allegedly constant state of being that one wards off the affectivity that has the ability to truly effect an encounter with the past.23 Nevertheless, the Baron is forced to admit, “Yet, if I tell the whole truth…the very abundance of what then appeared to me to be security, and which was, in reality, the most formless loss, gave me at the same time pleasure and a sense of terrible anxiety, which proved only too legitimate” (120). It becomes impossible to sustain the illusion that what history can offer is an unwavering sense of self and itself as a dead object waiting to be revered. The notion of security gives way to the pleasures and anxieties of a “most formless loss,” an overwhelming
23 One example of just such a Proustian allusion is when the doctor narrates: “The wise men say that the remembrance of things past is all that we have for a future, and am I to blame if I’ve turned up this time as I shouldn’t have been when it was a high soprano I wanted, and deep corn curls to my bum, with a womb as big as the king’s kettle…?” (97). Julie L. Abraham also notes a similarity in the ways that Proust in Sodome et Gomorrhe (1921) and Djuna Barnes in Nightwood construct “the social and historical experiences of Jews and gays…using Jewish stereotypes and history as analogies to illustrate [an] account of homosexuality” (256). Barnes was unabashed about her love for Proust and À la recherche, even writing in a letter to Emily Coleman that “Proust is the greatest writer (to me) of the last century” (5 January 1939). For more on the relationship between Nightwood and Proust’s Sodome et Gomorrhe, see the third chapter of this thesis.
25 feeling of historicity that cannot be easily recuperated into a programmatic catalogue of identity, and which proves to be “only too legitimate” to be ignored indefinitely. This amorphous and unstructured loss can never be recovered or reclaimed, but is, on the contrary, the immoderate residue created by the excess of historical affect in the gaps between ‘then’ and ‘now.’ It is in realizing this historical remainder that Felix descends into the night, thereby immersing himself into the darkness of historicity; or, as he notes, “It has placed me in the dark for the rest of my life” (121).
Robin also comes in contact with Nora Flood (after abandoning Felix and their son), a young lesbian who runs a literary salon in America for “poets, radicals, beggars, artists, and people in love” (55). The relationship between Robin and Nora—which can be in equal parts called loving, erotic, and passionate, or destructive, traumatic, and unstable—forms the centerpiece of the novel both in its creation and its dissolution. From the very moment of their introduction, Nightwood indicates that a general sense of unease plagues the relationship between Robin and Nora, and that these feelings of anxiety are primarily a problem of the divergent ways in which each character responds and relates to history.24 Though Nora’s mode of relating to history differs from that of Felix, who, as we have seen, unsuccessfully attempts to sequester a feeling of historicity in a shroud of nostalgia, she still fails to incorporate the degraded emotions that constitute history in Nightwood into her own sense of historical embodiment.
At Nora’s salon, it is said, “one felt that early American history was being re- enacted” (56). It soon becomes clear that this reenactment comes at the price of censoring or removing the more problematic and difficult emotional investments that a connection to history demands. Nora feels as though history can be approached as an objective observer apart from the affective entanglements that are always created in a turn to the past: “The world and its history were to Nora like a ship in a bottle; she herself was outside and unidentified, endlessly embroiled in a preoccupation without a problem” (59). Nora’s approach to historical embodiment begins precisely as a perceived lack of embodiment whatsoever; she attempts to stand outside of history, observing its manifestations and movements as the objective and unaffected witness who is untouched
24 The relationship between Nora and Robin is likely based on the complicated relationship between Djuna Barnes, represented in the former, and her lover Thelma Wood, represented in the latter, in Paris (Benstock 235-36).
26 and unimplicated in the very process that she observes. The image of the ship in a bottle suggests that history is simply a decorative feature of one’s life that one might put on a mantel as an intermittent reminder of the past, but which does not entangle the possessor in the very process of history’s construction. The ship, small and ineffective because decorative and impractical, has been built and encased within the impermeable glass of the bottle; it is lifeless, inert. The classification of history as belonging to the world with the use of the possessive pronoun reinforces the notion that Nora considers herself external to and unidentifiable within history. Though it could be argued that this is a symptom of her lesbianism (i.e., that because Nora is a lesbian, she is placed outside of history, not eligible to meet normative demands of inclusion), it remains crucial to realize that she considers herself “endlessly embroiled in a preoccupation without a problem.” The problem is that Nora exempts herself from the difficulties of historical embodiment.
Nora’s position, however, is quickly put into question, for the next line prophetically reads, “Then she met Robin” (59). It is Robin who shatters Nora’s objective sense of historicity and propels her into an intense feeling of the past’s production upon the body. An earlier description of Nora notes that if encountered at an opera or play, “one would discover in her eyes, large, protruding and clear, that mirrorless look of polished metal which report not so much the object as the movement of the object” (Nightwood 57). Julie Taylor interprets this description as a way in which “Nightwood privileges sensations of movement and the registering and feeling of objects rather than fixed objects—or identities—themselves” (111). While this is an apt understanding of the description of Nora in its insistence on the way Barnes dwells on affect as it is experienced throughout and among bodies, it is important to integrate the subsequent line into Taylor’s interpretation: “As the surface of a gun’s barrel, reflecting a scene, will add to the image the portent of its construction, so her eyes contracted and fortified the play before her in her own unconscious terms” (Nightwood 57). The sensation of movement is, as Taylor notes, a movement of affect, but it is also a movement from one performative scene to another, with Robin serving as the intermediary term linking the two. Barnes presents, in succession, three different performative enactments of history: the reenactments of early American history at Nora’s salon, the performance of the play/opera that Nora witnesses, and the
27 performative scene of Nora and Robin’s first encounter—the circus. Robin becomes the portent of the move from one performative scene to the other, which is to say that she becomes the catalyst for Nora’s descent into the night and into an affective historical relation. The first scene—the reenactment of American history at the salon—is characterized by discrete events, characters, and signs of that history (“The Drummer Boy, Fort Sumter, Lincoln, Booth, all somehow came to mind; Whigs and Tories were in the air…Boston tea tragedies, carbines, and the sound of a boy’s wild calling…” [56]). This, again, is the “ship in a bottle” view of historical relations where distinct events or characters can be easily distinguished from other distinct events or characters in a dispassionate fashion. It is nonetheless performative, even if this performance entails a disavowal of its own practices. The second performative scene is the aforementioned scene of Nora at the opera/theater where the performance is connected to the “movement of the object,” which is in turn connected to the portent of Nora’s doom: that is, Robin. This intermediary term connects the first scene to the third in which Nora and meet Robin at the circus: “Clowns in red, white and yellow, with the traditional smears on their faces, were rolling over the sawdust as if they were in the belly of a great mother where there was yet room to play” (59; emphasis added). Not only are the clowns connected to “tradition,” but also to the womb as a symbol for the past. Yet this is a past where there is “yet room to play,” where the performative enactment of history upon the body is not bound to discrete events in the past, but is a continual “smearing” of tradition on the face and an incessant “rolling over the sawdust” of history.25
It is because Nora cannot accept the “unruly” parts of history, because she constantly exempts herself from an immersion within an embodied feeling of historicity
25 In this way, it recalls Bakhtin’s famous formulation of the “carnivalesque” in Rabelais and His World, where laughter and parody put binary relations into flux and open the natural boundaries of the body onto a grotesque relation with the external world (10-11, 365). For Bakhtin, carnivalesque laughter is generative insofar as it creates novel ways to invoke momentary ambivalences, and insofar at it produces a grotesque body as the hyperbole of the corporeal, in which “the material components of the universe disclose in the human body their true nature and highest potentialities” (366). Thus, the carnival represents a “world of becoming” (420). Bakhtin ultimately links the carnival to the “lower body stratum” as well (370). Nightwood takes up this emphasis of the lower body in both its repeated emphasis on bowels and excrement, as well as its trope of “downward movement.” I believe that we can also understand the name “Volkbein” (German for “people-leg”) in light of the emphasis on the “lower body” in carnivalesque enactments. Felix is described as having an affective “tension in his leg” (114) and thus is “damned from the waist up” (29) because he cannot incorporate affectivity into his historical relations. Cf. Jane Marcus, “Laughing at Leviticus: Nightwood as Woman’s Circus Epic,” in Silence and Power, ed. Mary Lynn Broe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 221-50; and Diane Warren, Djuna Barnes’ Consuming Fiction (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), esp 58-59.
28 that the relationship between Nora and Robin is doomed from the start, whereby Robin herself comes to serves as the portent of the relationship’s destruction. In response to Nora’s failure to accept the affective dynamics of a connection to history, Dr. O’Connor proclaims, “You are full to the brim with pride, but I am an empty pot going forward, saying my prayers in a dark place” (156). Nora’s pride is that of thinking herself objective and outside of the emotional force of the past. O’Connor distinguishes himself as an “empty pot,” capable of both being filled with any combination of substances and transferring those substances into other organizations, in a “dark place,” necessitating an intimate interaction with the “dark” aspects of historical emotion.
Due to the insupportable nature of the relationship between Nora and her elusive lover Robin, the narrator says:
Robin’s absence, as the night drew on, became a physical removal, insupportable and irreparable. As an amputated hand cannot be disowned because it is experiencing a futurity, of which the victim is its forebear, so Robin was an amputation that Nora could not renounce. (64-5).
Victoria L. Smith accurately notes that this image, in pointing not to the amputated hand itself but to the body that has lost the hand, implies that “although the hand is lost, it cannot be given up and continues to make itself felt as a kind of phantom” (203).26 Djuna Barnes’s employment of the amputated hand stages the inextricability of fiction from history and history from fiction. Though the hand here figures as a breakage or severing, Barnes primarily uses the image to suggest that this breakage is not a distinction from history, but an immersion in it. In this sense, the amputated hand becomes a metonym for history itself and the process of historical embodiment— perfectly in keeping with Smith’s notion that Nightwood “narrates something besides its overt narrative and tells itself through stories that stand beside the narrated events” (195). Earlier in the novel, Dr. O’Connor explains to Felix the intermingling of fact and fiction, of history and fiction, into what he calls legend:
26 Robert L. Caserio, in an analysis of Willa Cather’s 1931 novel, Shadows on the Rock, interprets Cather’s anxiety over the fantasized loss of her hand and her subsequent turn to writing not as a way to affirm her own agency over a fracturing of emotion or artistic control, as has been traditionally thought, but instead as a way to be “more broken rather than less, to suffer breaks rather than repair them” (“James, Cather, Vollmann” 113). Caserio sees Cather’s writing as restaging the distinctness between fiction and history, whereby the severed hand stands in for this distinction.
29
[T]hink of the stories that do not amount to much! That is, that are forgotten in spite of all man remembers (unless he remembers himself) merely because they befell him without distinction of office or title—that’s what we call legend and it’s the best a poor man may do with his fate; the other…we call history, the best the high and mighty can do with theirs. Legend is unexpurgated, but history, because of its actors, is deflowered… (18)
Barnes here opposes “legend” and “history,” in which the former designates an unexpurgated historical relation that incorporates the obscenities of the past, while the latter designates an expurgated historical relation that is “deflowered” from the erotic vicissitudes of the past. The only thing that distinguishes history, as it is formulated in this passage, from legend is that the former has the distinction of authority; for Barnes, only the “high and mighty” can create the illusion of a sterile and official history that can be separated from fiction. Legend becomes the only sustainable historical relation, for it, unlike official history, does not work to differentiate history from the uncleansable. For Barnes, there is therefore no difference between history and historiography—that is, between history and the writing of that history. The image of the “phantom” hand, then, cannot be interpreted as an index of the separation of fiction from history, but is rather necessarily linked to a feeling of historicity. Insofar as the hand’s violent elimination from the body is connected to both an experience of “futurity” and its “forebears” (i.e., its past), it thereby unites fiction and the feelings of historicity. These intense and very dark sensations must be appropriately understood and allowed to be felt in the body and to pass onto other bodies, for only in experiencing these dark emotions can we generate a viable future. Nora’s failure is a failure to do just that, yet it, like Felix, places her “in the dark” by the end of the novel nonetheless.
Near the end of her relationship with Nora, Robin meets another woman, Jenny Petherbridge, who seems to be the character that Nightwood has the least amount of sympathy for, and runs away with her.27 As soon as Jenny is introduced, the narrator makes clear that her primary characteristic is her “second-hand dealings with life” (72). Everything that Jenny owns, everything that she surrounds herself with, everything
27 Jenny becomes an almost comical figure in the novel because of the unambiguous abhorrence that the text expresses towards her. Though Dr. O’Connor eventually says that he would pity Jenny if he were to find her face down and dead, he has no reservations in asserting his hatred of her in very explicit terms: “And I said to myself: For these I would go bang on my knees, but not for her—I wouldn’t piss on her if she were on fire! I said, Jenny is so greedy that she wouldn’t give her shit to the crows” (112).
30 that she strives to collect does not “belong” to her: “Someone else’s marriage ring was on her finger; the photograph taken of Robin for Nora sat upon her table. The books in her library were other people’s selections. She lived among her own things like a visitor to a room kept ‘exactly as it was when—’” (72). She is therefore defined as “a ‘squatter’ by instinct” (75). It is this dislocated appropriation that stops Jenny from feeling an affective historical relation, for she steals and privatizes every part of her own life, including her emotions.
Jenny, ultimately, does not want an affective relation within anything or anyone, but wants to hoard the pieces of another’s life and claim them as her own. That is, Jenny wants to remove affect from its embedded position within a social field of relationality, from a public space of transformation and contestation, and anchor it—cold and unaffected—into her own private sphere of commodity accumulation. Dr. O’Connor reflects on Jenny’s problem in saying that she “stands there between two tortures—the past that she can’t share, and the present that she can’t copy” (133; emphasis added). Jenny cannot “share her past” because she repudiates the relationality of historical affect, where the act of sharing indicates the move to act within a field of social relations. This move resists Jenny’s need to privatize her historicity outside of or in opposition to historical relationality; she cannot produce a present because her inability to open up her past to a network of relations instantiates this present.
Her relationship with Robin is therefore doomed from its outset. “[Jenny] could not participate in a great love, she could only report it,” the narrator says. “Since her emotional reactions were without distinction, she had to fall back on the emotions of the past, great loves already lived and related, and over those she seemed to suffer and grow glad” (74). Though Jenny “falls back on the emotions of the past,” she cannot develop a genuine historical relation because her emotions have no “distinction,” that is, they strictly adhere to forms that have already been established, prohibiting a rearticulation of emotionality that is untethered from systematic formulation. Jenny can only “report,” or tell about, great love, not participate in it. In her desire to “own” the great love that she had read about in books—books that had themselves been stolen from others—she “appropriated the most passionate love that she knew, Nora’s for Robin” (75). Robin, in her eyes, is therefore not a way to develop an unpredictable and intense affective relation, but a way to finally play out, to its fantasmatic fulfillment, a romantic plot.
31
Jenny’s need to accumulate historical emotions as a form of wealth, then, is connected to her compulsion to assert a full and present sense of agentive power: “She had a continual rapacity for other people’s facts; absorbing time, she held herself responsible for historic characters. She was avid and disorderly in her heart. She defiled the very meaning of personality in her passion to be a person” (74). Here, the “responsibility” that Jenny feels for the motions of history and its characters constitutes her sense of historical belonging, insofar as, in her eyes, she does not belong in history, but history belongs to her. Jenny does not want to face the affective forces of an embeddedness within history, and thus ventures to vehemently assert her own personhood as a type of agentive purchase of her own action. In other words, if she can rapaciously consume the facets of the lives of others, then she can amass a history of her own without the exigencies of a historical relation, and thereby accumulate a firm conviction in the status of her own personhood. In a way, Jenny’s capitalistic consumption of historical facts is then predicated upon a repudiation of the impersonal, of that which gravitates away from a conception anchored by the imperative of the person. Lauren Berlant defines impersonality as “the state of the interruption of the personal, and the work of normativity to create conventions of the personal” (Cruel Optimism 159). Seen in this light, Jenny’s repudiation of the impersonal becomes a reification of the normative or conventional standards of what it means to be a person. This denial is an attempt to shelter herself from affect, a relational force that respects no limit, nor no boundary, nor no carefully demarcated concept of personhood. What affect stimulates is the “impersonality of attachment” in general, which “circumvents the personal and the historical on the way to enumerating their relation” (Berlant, Cruel Optimism 128).28
By the end of the novel, Robin leaves Jenny, as she had left both Felix and Nora previously. Though Robin initially accompanies Jenny to New York, “[s]he would not listen to Jenny’s suggestion that they should make their home in the country. She said a hotel was ‘good enough’” (176). The buying of a home would, for Jenny, fulfill her desire to participate in the normative narrative of a “great love.” As an archetypal capitalistic act, this would also fulfill her own narrative of historical accumulation, for it would give her a permanent place to store her “second-hand” artifacts and fully privatize her
28 See the third chapter of this thesis for more on the impersonalities of Nightwood.
32 relation to Robin, turning her into nothing more than another commodity. Robin’s nomadic existence, however, defies this logic of accumulation. In rejecting Jenny’s appropriation of the marriage plot, Robin also refuses a logic that would restrain her to motivation or stabilization. Despite Jenny’s desperate pleas to the contrary, Robin “wander[s] without design” (176). Jenny’s last appearance within the text enacts her sudden immersion into the affective darkness of Robin’s absence: “[Jenny] did not understand anything Robin felt or did, which was more unendurable than her absence. Jenny walked up and down her darkened hotel room, crying and stumbling” (177). Thus, Jenny’s departure from the text is signaled by her kinesis, her irrepressible emotionality, and entrance into the “night” of the darkened hotel room. Like Nora and Felix before her, Jenny fails to elude the darkness of an affective historical relation, and becomes thrown into a state of confusion as a result.
Nightwood presents these three characters—Felix, Nora, and Jenny—and their feeble attempts to find (or escape) an embeddedness within the flux of historical emotionality, and in so doing, creates the conditions by which to see the ineluctable demands of the field of historical relations. Each character tries to reject the emergence of the past within the present, but each fails to successfully do so; yet, Nightwood urges nonetheless that this failure is the inexorable conclusion of the interaction between affect and history.
Sodom/Gomorrah: Affective History, Queer Relations
In the novel’s most perspicuous explication of the connection between degraded affect and historical relationality (i.e., the chapters entitled, “Watchman, What of the Night?” and “Go Down, Matthew”), Nora comes in desperation to Dr. O’Connor for enlightenment. What he instead delivers is quite the opposite, as he expounds upon the necessity of the night. Matthew inhales a large gasp of debris and smelling salts, and brazenly proclaims, “Take history at night; have you ever thought of that, now? Was it as night that Sodom became Gomorrah? It was at night, I swear! A city given over to the shades, and that’s why it has never been countenanced or understood to this day” (92; emphasis added). This “history at night” becomes synonymous, in Nightwood, for an “improper,” which in this context is to say a “genuine,” historical relation that
33 incorporates affects of degradation and negativity into a living relation with the past. It is here specifically connected with the Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah, where the terms of the night frustrate the predictability and stability of the day: “Every day is thought upon and calculated, but the night is not premeditated. The Bible lies the one way, but the night-gown the other. The night, ‘Beware of that dark door!’” (87). The day signifies knowledge, control, safety, all that can be alleviated; the night, on the other hand, figures the intensity that is asignifying, disobedient, precarious, all that portends the continued production of negative affect. The Bible, here, stands in as the representation of the day, while the “night-gown” stands in for the disruptive force that dismantles the illusory security that the day supposedly provides. “Sodom and Gomorrah” also indicates this disorderly force. Against the guaranteed narrative of Christian theology, in which each signifying element of the Old Testament attains its realization in the New Testament, the volatility of Sodom and Gomorrah embodies the uncontrollable asignifying rupture of affect.29 Sodom and Gomorrah not only must be expunged from the narrative trajectory of the Bible, but the two cities refuse to remain stable, identifiable locations as “Sodom [becomes] Gomorrah.” In the destruction of the two cities, the one becomes the other as the excessive waste of the wrath of God.30 They are abjected from the scene as a threat to the assured arrival of the insight and fulfillment of God’s will. The becoming-Gomorrah of Sodom, the becoming-night of the city, destabilizes the eschatological narrative of the full achievement of meaning in the excesses of its becoming. I will deal with the concept of “becoming” more extensively in the next chapter. For now, it must simply be noticed that being—or, more precisely, historical being—is disrupted and destabilized in the coming together of the cities.
Catherine Whitley argues that “history as an excremental production determines the construction of nation and personal identity. In [Nightwood], history itself is figured as a waste product, ejected by the peristalsis of a nation’s forward movement in time” (81). This argument, despite its appeal, reduces history to the past, to something “ejected” from the present. Though “history” in Nightwood is surely “excremental,” this
29 “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled” (Matthew 5:17-18). 30 “But the men of Sodom were wicked and sinners before the Lord exceedingly” (Genesis 3:13).
34 excrementality is the condition of its continued emergence within the present moment.31 The historical “nightworld” that Nightwood promotes can only be reached affectively, that is, by allowing bodies to touch and to respond to each other in intensive moments of feeling. In another of his distinctively abstruse monologues, Dr. O’Connor says, “[T]he tree of night is the hardest tree to mount, the dourest tree to scale, the most difficult of branch, the most febrile to the touch, and sweats a resin and drips a pitch against the palm that computation has not gambled” (90).32 Barnes characterizes the tree as “febrile to the touch,” as giving itself over to be touched, as dripping with a kind of sweaty adhesiveness. The image of the “tree of night” thus unites an affective materiality with the darkness of the nightworld; in fact, the terms of the “night” are tantamount to an indexing of this affective materiality—a materiality the can never quite be realized.
Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O’Connor is the figure who portrays this degraded and affective materiality most cogently in the text. He is repeatedly described as expressing a quality of degradation. When Felix meets Dr. O’Connor again after their first encounter, O’Connor’s movements are said to “recall, though in a degraded form, those of a late master. Even the doctor’s favorite gesture—plucking hairs out of his nostrils—seems the ‘vulgarization’ of what was once a thoughtful plucking of the beard” (33). Similarly, when Nora later comes to see the doctor, his room is described as possessing an equal state of depravity: “A swill-pail stood as the head of the bed, brimming with abominations. There was something appallingly degraded about the room, like the rooms in brothels, which give even the most innocent a sensation of having been accomplice” (85). Fecal excesses and sullied conditions abound in the doctor’s room. This dilapidation, however, is not simply a dereliction of order, but is
31 Fecal matter here, despite its conventional connotations, does not signify death, that which is permanently left behind; it is instead the point of productivity, of continual reemergence. We might say, then, that, in Nightwood, shit is necessary for life. 32 It is possible that Nightwood derives its name from this very image—“the tree of night.” Barnes has elsewhere suggested that the novel is named after her lover Thelma Wood: “Only later in October 1936 did Barnes write Coleman of her discovery that the title was Thelma’s name: ‘Night T. Wood—low, thought of it the other day. Very odd’” (Plumb ix). Despite the interest in this explanation, I find that the “tree of the night” provides a more compelling explanation of the esoteric title, as it seems to relate more intricately to the novel’s affective pulsations. In support of this reading, Barnes also later told Hank O’Neal that the title is (allegedly) an allusion to William Blake’s poem, “The Tyger” from Songs of Experience (1794) [“Tyger! Tyger! burning bright / In the forest of the night”] (O’Neal 104). Blake’s “forest of the night” very well could be Barnes’s “night-wood.”
35 also an opening up of himself to his surroundings, an affective self-expansion onto the world, an acceptance of living with and in degradation.33 This “appalling degradation” thus forces sensations into a correspondence with the world, into the feeling of “having been accomplice.” Nightwood thereby connects degraded affect with a fundamental predilection to form communal relations. By virtue of making oneself vulnerable to negative affect, the text suggests that one is also participating, consciously or otherwise, in a relational production of sensation. Similar to the night, however, the form that this “community” will take cannot be premeditated or calculated. As degraded affect brings us into a correspondence of complicity, recognizable social patterns may no longer be of use. The question then becomes: what exactly are we complicit in or of when we assemble in affectivity? Does complicity here even take a direct object, or does it require or challenge us to perhaps meet outside of the bounds of objectivity? Could these liaisons suggest ways of belonging and relating that need not conform to social forms that support systematic inequalities? Nightwood begins by suggesting that whatever new kinds of intimacies may be uncovered by affect, they will surely be more scatological than eschatological.
When the Doctor is described as “dragging time out of his bowels,” it is made clear that “cleanliness is a form of apprehension; our faulty racial memory is fathered by fear. Destiny and history are untidy; we fear memory of that disorder” (34, 126). It is the genuine untidiness of historical relationality that compels us to flee from the reality of memory. To be clean is to attempt to stave off the threatening presence of the past, to protect oneself from the affectivity that disrupts the boundaries of individuality. The anthropologist Mary Douglas argues in Purity and Danger (1966) that “ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience” (4). For Douglas, it is not that the effort to clean one’s surroundings is a function of an anxiety to avoid disease, but is instead a creative movement that unites form to function in experience. Thus, in this analysis, dirt “is essentially disorder” (2), or, matter out of place. In these terms, then, history as it is portrayed in Nightwood is fundamentally “dirty,” for it escapes both order and reason. Unlike in Douglas’s analysis, however, cleanliness—or, the ordering of experience—does not become a positive rendering of experience in
33 For more on this, see the third chapter of this thesis.
36
Nightwood. In fact, the text suggests that any attempt to impose order onto experience effectively distances the self from that very experience. The “bad feelings” of past and present cannot be mended or cleansed by a reparative gesture that seeks to ameliorate the pain of these feelings: “Suffering may be composed wickedly and of an inferior writhing. Rage and inaccuracy howl and blow the bone, for contrary to all opinion, all suffering does not purify—begging everybody’s pardon, which is called everybody’s know” (147). In contradistinction to what Leo Bersani has identified as an assumption of the modern period that “a certain type of repetition of experience in art repairs inherently damaged or valueless experience” in what he calls the “culture of redemption” (Culture 1), Nightwood asserts that, indeed, suffering does not, and in fact, should not, necessarily lead to purity. This kind of cleansing leads to the obfuscation of the self and its embeddedness within history. To Bersani’s claim that an imagined reparation of experience in art discounts the ethical demands of history, Nightwood responds that to have an ethical relation to history, it is imperative to acknowledge the fundamental negativity of experience. “To be utterly innocent,” the doctor says, “would be to be utterly unknown, particularly to oneself” (147). Instead, one should accept and make relations with and out of suffering, degradation, and negative affect.
This coming together must also incorporate the sexual, for in Nightwood, to meet in affectivity is always to also meet in sexuality. Robin figures this kind of emotional relationality as she literally touches the debased in an erotic affective encounter. Felix—who, as we have seen, figures an inability to meet the challenge that this encounter poses—is surprised that Robin’s “taste” would frequently embrace
the cheaper and debased, with an emotion as real. 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. When her hand finally came to rest, the palm closed; it was as if she had stopped a crying mouth. Her hand lay still and she would turn away. At such moments, Felix experienced an unaccountable apprehension. The sensuality in her hands frightened him. (45-46).
37
Robin’s “taste” turns to the debased, the degraded, the disgusting.34 As Robin’s touching affectivity, which renders “emotion[s] as real,” turns to incorporate the “cheaper and debased,” her hands become her eyes. This reaching out into the dark produces trembling and erotic sensations, as Robin’s eye-hands make contact. It is not primarily knowledge or organization that this affectivity seeks, for the more her fingers grasp, the more she “forgets in her mind”; it is rather simply to touch and to feel—the affective encounter is itself what is sought. Not only do her hands take the place of her eyes, but they also become a kind of sexual organ or appendage with which she can make relations in the night. Robin and her eroto-affective eye-hands prefigure what Carolyn Dinshaw calls a “queer historical touch” that would, in its acceptance of historical contingency, “[make] relations with the past, relations that form parts of our subjectivities and communities…making affective connections, that is, across time” (3, 11-12). In creating a relational assemblage out of affect with the faces in the dark, Robin forces Felix (unwillingly, yet no less powerfully) into this relational assemblage, as he “experience[s] an unaccountable apprehension.” Felix’s rational mind cannot “account” for the experience of affect, but is submersed within the experience nonetheless.
The sensual trepidation that Robin produces in Felix also generates a feeling of historicity. Nightwood, moreover, portrays her as a contaminating force, whereby historical embodiment becomes a form of contagion: “Such a woman is the infected carrier of the past: 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” (41). Negative affects such as shame, anger, and disgust luridly survive in the present as contaminations, as contagious transmissions from non-contemporaneous times; they infuse the historical present with a stubborn
34 In Kant’s aesthetics, a judgment of “taste” involves two things: subjectivity and universality. On the first of these, Kant writes, “Taste is the faculty for estimating an object or a mode of representation by means of a delight or aversion apart from any interest. The object of such a delight is called beautiful” (292). One can only judge an object as beautiful—that is, with taste—if one has no interest in the object itself. Secondly, the judgment of taste “must involve a claim to validity for all men, and must do so apart from universality attached to objects: i.e., there must be coupled with it a claim to subjective universality” (293). In order to say that something is “beautiful,” we must do so as if everyone in the world would agree to its quality of beauty—that is, we must imagine a world in which everyone must think that the object is beautiful. Against what Kant calls “beauty,” he opposes the “disgusting.” For Kant, it is impossible to represent the disgusting, for when we experience the sensation of disgust in an object, all aesthetic experience of that object is destroyed. If Robin’s “taste” turns toward the “debased” to find an “emotion as real,” she inverts the Kantian formula for beauty, for in Nightwood, it is only in experiencing the debased and disgusting that one can have a true aesthetic experience.
38 refusal to stop producing “bad” feelings. Robin is figured as this infecting intensity. In encountering her, “the structure of our head and jaws ache,” that is, her affective force surpasses and frustrates any structuration, especially of the body. As Robin vampirically transmits the blood that carries a feeling of historicity, she creates an unpredictable surge of relationality.35 Through Robin, Nightwood contends that a historical embodiment is always relational and always affective.
Similarly, Dr. O’Connor emphatically tells Felix that the affective is the only mode through which we may garner a historical relation:
“The almost fossilized state of our recollection is attested to by our murderers and those who read every detail of crime with a passionate and hot interest,” the doctor continued. “It is only by such extreme measures that the average man can remember something long ago; truly not that he remembers, but that crime itself is the door to an accumulation, a way to lay hands on the shudder of a past that is still vibrating.” (126)
Affect, seen as the door to an accumulation of “passionate and hot interest[s],” exhibits the potentiality of emotion: the body’s ability (in fact, its unavoidable compulsion) to affect and to be affected by other bodies. They here offer a way to sense the (often erotic) (often painful) intensities that flow between past and present, a way to probe the permeating relations that are both created and shattered in the gaps of history, a way to feel the “anterior” touch of former feeling that refuses to be buried in the quiescent tomb of any official or ordered historical account. Furthermore, this passage suggests that an “account” of history is never truly possible; history, that is, can be felt, somatized, and enacted, but never “accounted for.” Reading—or, to “read every detail of crime with a passionate and hot interest”—here becomes one particular and effective away to enact this affective relation. This reading, however, must be attuned to the depravity inherent in the historical act. It is thus “[i]n the acceptance of depravity [that] the sense of the past is most fully captured” (125).
35 In surprisingly similar terms, this passage formulates Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas about becoming in A Thousand Plateaus: “Propagation by epidemic, by contagion, has nothing to do with filiation by heredity, even if the two themes intermingle and require each other. The vampire does not filiate, it infects” (241- 42). I will return in more detail to Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas about becoming, specifically becoming- animal, in the next chapter.
39
Early in the narrative, Robin begins to think about historical figures of women—such as Louise de la Vallière, Catherine of Russia, Madame de Maintenon, and Catherine de’ Medici—whereby something commensurate is expressed in the “heavy body with the weight in her mind, where reason was inexact with lack of necessity. She wandered to thoughts of woman, women that she has come to connect with women. Strangely enough these were women in history…” (51). The meditation on the women of history becomes like an erotic daydream. Lacking the necessity of reason, the “heavy bodies” of these women form a connection across space and time, so that Robin becomes embedded in the past and the past embedded within Robin. Her historical relationality is thus remarkably (and queerly) promiscuous. This transhistorical—which in my analysis is purely coterminous with the historical insofar as a moment cannot be contained within its prescribed historical limits—queer connectivity proposes a different, more imaginative modality of relations than modern life has previously intimated, one that requires neither temporal contiguity nor self-realized social intelligibility. The eroto- affectivity of Robin’s historical relation refuses to abide by the restrictive social logics that demand that all forms of sexuality and emotion, especially such forms that register as painful or dark, be discarded upon admittance into the “historical” (as if history, as it is here understood, plays by the rules of the interior-exterior duality). As Robin extends her historical “being” beyond the limits of the present, her body fails to remain celibate, monogamous, or even tethered to the sex act as so thought in the erotic surge of this extension.36
Nora, looking out of her window into a garden, watches Robin engage in a sexual encounter with another woman, and she is “[u]nable to turn her eyes away, incapable of speech, experiencing a sensation of evil, complete and dismembering” (70). The affectivity of the scene so overwhelms her that she has lost sight of the recognizable functioning of her body—her eyes unmoving, her mouth silent. Not only
36 Queer theory has, since its foundational moments, been suspicious of relational categories such as “monogamy.” In a particularly compelling instance of such suspicion, Leo Bersani writes that monogamy is the “relational figure most congenial to what we might call the psychoanalytic fidelity of the self to the self, its indifference to signs of self that are not signs of interpretation, and, finally, its profoundly immoral rejection of our promiscuous humanity” (“Against Monogamy” 101). Insofar as Nightwood confirms the promiscuity of our humanity, that is, the incessant extension of being into other relational modes, Barnes seems to place a similar weight as Bersani on the ethical dubiousness of monogamy. No character in the novel can and/or desires to sustain a monogamous relationship to boot. For an elaboration of these claims, see the third chapter of this thesis.
40 that, to gaze at this scene, for Nora, is to be thrown into a “sensation of evil.” When this sensation produces in her body a disturbance of its normatively acknowledged utilities, it is as if her body falls apart. This leads, yet again, to another paradox: if the body eludes its own zones of intelligibility, how can it be both complete and dismembering? In this instance, though the affective forces of evil disarticulate the unity of her body, it attains wholeness insofar as it is connected in an assemblage, complete unto itself, in that affective field. The irony of this dismemberment is that although Nora in some sense feels betrayed by Robin’s promiscuity, this very process of disjointing allows her access to an erotic assemblage with Robin. Nora can become one of the dismembered arms that contact Robin across history. On some level, she is in touch with this reality, for “at that moment, she knew an awful happiness” (70). The erogenous sense of this cataleptic awareness instills in her a feeling that “if she turned away from what Robin was doing, the design would break and melt back into Robin alone” (70). Barnes displaces the emphasis from Robin the person onto the “doing” of the body individuated as Robin; she, otherwise said, values affective association over individual identity. If one moves outside of the affective field, the “design” breaks and an illusory separation into personality is restored. In the affective universe of Nightwood, the ambition is never to escape the relational field and find security in personality, but to deal with and touch the difficult emotionality, to become a part of the design.
If, as Barnes writes, Robin “did not explain where she had been: she was unable or unwilling to give an account of herself” (54), it is because her alchemical relations with herself and others in the erotics of historical affect deemphasize such an account.37 As Robin enters into new relations with other people and other objects, “subjective” forms of intelligibility or distinction are no longer the criterion for an analysis of self. When given over to erotic assemblages, these relations cannot be contained within an “account,” a reasoned report or narrative, but are individuated and given determination by their level of intensity or capacity to enter into other relations of affect. Knowledge and being, epistemology and ontology, as I have been saying, rejoin in a much more difficult and challenging relationship than reason dictates.
37 In her aptly titled Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), Judith Butler writes, “My account of myself is partial, haunted by that for which I can devise no definitive story. I cannot explain exactly why I have emerged in this way, and my efforts at narrative reconstruction are always undergoing revision” (40). I find a similar sentiment at work in Nightwood.
41
If we look again at the correspondence between Sodom (and Gomorrah), as it is used in Nightwood, and the creation of historical affect, we can begin to appreciate this challenge. “And do I know my Sodomites?” asks Dr. O’Connor, “and what the heart goes bang up against if it loves one of them, especially if it’s a woman loving one of them. What do they find then, that this lover has committed the unpardonable error of not being able to exist…” (100). If queers—those “Sodomitical” beings of the night—are precisely those who have enacted the “error of not being able to exist,” how can there possibly be a queer relation? If the queer marks the impossibility of such a relation within the similitudes of historical affectivity, can we articulate a community out of erroneous inexistence? Relationality and community are terms that are made problematic when considered within this framework. The next two chapters mark an extension of this problematic.
CHAPTER TWO
Love’s Becomings
But as the clock hands pointed twelve, Felix (with the abandon of what a mad man knows to be his one hope of escape, disproof of his own madness) could not keep his eyes away, and as they arose to go, his cheeks now drained of colour, the points of his beard bent sharply down with the stiffening of his chin, he turned and made a slight bow, his head in his confusion making a complete half-swing, as an animal will turn its head away from a human, as if in mortal shame. —Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
The shame of being a man—is there any better reason to write? —Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical
Introduction
In order to belong in (or to) history and experience a desubjectified, and thereby relational, embodiment of sexuality, it becomes necessary to leave behind the formal restraints of the human and sustain the virtual formlessness of the aesthetic. This is the burden with which Nightwood confronts its readers. The implications of this demand are most fully formed, yet reach their highest state of disorganization, in the enigmatic and much critically discussed final chapter of the novel, “The Possessed”—a short, but densely woven episode of movement and madness. Some unspecified time after the main events of the novel, Nora has returned to her home in America, and has taken to sleeping in the woods. She is awoken one night to the barking of her dog at a chapel in the distance, where, upon investigating, she discovers Robin standing “in her boy’s trousers” before a “contrived altar” to the Madonna (178). As Nora, startled and hysterical, enters the scene, she plunges into the jamb of the chapel door and is knocked unconscious. As the novel ends, Robin falls to her knees and begins to bark, crawl, cry, and fight with the dog (180).
Queerness in the text, as the previous chapter of this thesis demonstrated, names not an identity, but an affective force of historical becoming; not a recognized social position determined by mimetic replication, but a mode of life experienced within and as
44 an erotic assemblage of relations. Consequently, to follow such lines of attachment to their furthest intensity is to encounter a severe inhumanism—that is, not the lack of compassion or pity (though these certainly may be related), but the state of impossibility for maintaining the human as an aesthetic or ethical category—as the impetus towards relationality itself. In its consideration of the inhumanity of attachment, Nightwood figures, avant la lettre, the theory of affective becoming of philosopher Gilles Deleuze and radical (anti-)psychoanalyst Félix Guattari.38 According to Deleuze and Guattari, affect, or the augmentation or diminution of a body’s capacity to act, instigates a multiplicity of becomings. However, when the human subject enters into a becoming, both “humanity” and “subjectivity” no longer have the exclusive power to affect, for the becoming animates a relation of affect, whereby no term retains its original value and tends toward the non-human, toward the animal. In this chapter, I will explore how Nightwood both prefigures and rewrites Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming- animal.”39 In doing so, I will argue that the conjoint model proposed by Barnes and Deleuze and Guattari necessitates a flight from the human in order to become sexual, and, consequently, that a model of queer ethics emerges in which inhumanity is restored to human relations, where knowing “how to love” is no longer responsible for an account of the human. Finally, I will demonstrate that this mode of queer life—a mode not of individual identity, but of universal singularity—is inextricably bound to the act of writing. Thus, the shame that possesses Nightwood is the mortal shame of unchallenged human ontology; the shame of Nightwood is the motivation for a continually reconfigured configuration of love, sex, and community.
38 Criticism that engages both Nightwood and Deleuze has been sparse. For work that incorporates Deleuze into a significant reading of Nightwood (if only fleetingly), see: Dianne Chisholm, “Obscene Modernism,” American Literature 69.1 (1997): 167-206; Monika Kaup, “The Neobaroque in Djuna Barnes,” Modernism/modernity 12.1 (2005): 85-110; Carrie Rohman, “Revising the Human,” American Literature 79.1 (2007): 57-84; Dana Seitler, Atavistic Tendencies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 39 Carrie Rohman argues that “Robin represents the kind of polymorphous ‘perversity’ or multiplicity that Deleuze and Guattari describe in A Thousand Plateaus as ‘becoming-animal’” (74). She does not, however, develop the implications of this claim, instead preferring the interpretive model of cultural theorist and devout Lacanian, Slavoj Žižek.
45
The Possessed: Becoming-Animal as a Theory of Love
When Robin and the dog, in the novel’s last moment, finally lay down together in the obscurity of the night, something disconcerting has happened. Critics of Nightwood have struggled to place interpretive value on the enigma that is the novel’s final chapter. Many times, commentators will refuse to even mention the final chapter, as is the case with Victoria L. Smith, who dodges the issue of “The Possessed” altogether.40 Others see it as simply an excessive coda or a dramatic conclusion of the narrative. In his early, famous essay, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” Joseph Frank argues that the reader has not yet been dramatically presented with Robin’s fate, and thus the final chapter “fills this gap, and furnishes, with the inevitability of great tragedy, the only possible conclusion” (455). Though the importance of Frank’s effort cannot be underestimated, particularly due to its emergence as the first major study of Nightwood, he nonetheless reduces “The Possessed” to the status of a narrative supplement. Those who do attempt to come to terms with the shocking images of the chapter have still neglected its greatest significance. Louis F. Kannenstine argues that in her ultimate damnation, Robin finds a form of salvation insofar as “in becoming one with Nora’s dog there is a finality which fulfills O’Connor’s prophesy of her end…When she goes down with the frantic dog in Nora’s chapel, she is wholly possessed and the tragic equilibrium of her nature is finally shaken” (117-18). More recently, Georgette Fleischer identifies a “pure carnality” at the heart of “The Possessed.” In her analysis, “Robin embodies an engorged, rather phallic arousal that has its counterpart in Nora’s vagina dentata dog” (417). To that end, Dianne Warren contends that “Robin’s aggression towards Nora’s dog suggests that she has been implicated in the cultural processes that she challenged, and in particular that she has internalized the carnivorous cultural process of turning towards the other, in the attempt to access the self” (167). Finally, and most resonant with my own reading, AnnKatrin Jonsson notes that the last chapter, especially in its animality, “indicates the impossibility of being in full possession of meaning, as well as the impossibility of being able to assemble and assimilate ‘reality’ and the other into representations, images, and conceptions” (183).
40 See: Victoria L. Smith, “A Story Beside(s) Itself: The Language of Loss in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood.” PMLA 114.2 (1999): 194-206.
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Without discrediting the potential validity of these readings, I would nonetheless suggest that these readings pose a problem for an interaction with Nightwood. What “The Possessed” represents is nothing, not even the impossibility of representation itself, because “The Possessed” is not about representation. It is about forces, compulsions, movements, affects—in short, it is about becomings. Following the lines of representation—and this includes following them to their deconstruction—will here get the critic nowhere, as they lead, erratic and mad, in a multiplicity of directions. As the opening of the chapter announces, Robin “wander[s] without a design” (176).41 It is the carelessness with which Nightwood misplaces a design that must be attended to. This is not to say that “lacks” or “refuses” a design, but that it develops a different method of being that disregards such logics. Even after a consideration of the astute readings to which I have referred, “The Possessed” remains an enigma, an irreducible dilemma that fissures a hole in hermeneutic capability.
If we look, however, to a different model of affective embodiment, we will be able to find a way to, if not close the gap that the final chapter opens, experience this aperture as a productive sensation. This model of affective embodiment is that of Deleuze and Guattari, and their concept of “becoming-animal.” By turning to such a concept, we can see how Nightwood, though posing a threat to representational logics, does not incapacitate the critic to do something. Nonetheless, what will be discovered is that it is not primarily the uncovering of meanings which is sought, but a critical act that enables an affective becoming, whereby we become with the work of art and are drawn into its affective compound (Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 175).
As Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly maintain, “becoming” is not primarily about representation, imitation, or mimesis: “A becoming is not a correspondence between relations. But neither is it a resemblance, an imitation, or, at the limit, an identification…To become is not to progress or regress along a series” (Thousand 238).
41 This in itself recalls Deleuze and Guattari’s emphasis on the potential of the “nomad.” They explain that the nomad, as a “principle of life,” is a way of becoming in the middle of an assemblage, without regard for beginning, end, or the teleological orientation between them (Thousand 380). A transversal movement solely within the middle typifies a nomadic life—and by extension, a nomadic art—and does not conform to an organizational structure. The autonomy of the nomad is characterized and given consistency fully in terms of its experience of intermezzo ontology. Thus, to return to the problem of representation in Nightwood, to follow the points of representation is to mistake the determined for the determination of the path itself, of its continued unfolding. To seek representational logics, even if only to undermine those logics, is to no longer live a life of and as the intermezzo.
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For Deleuze and Guattari, becoming is never to become some determined thing, to stabilize into a prefigured form. In fact, a “becoming” and to “become something” are quite different. To become something, some determinate thing, is to attribute a teleology, whereby the destination is known and recognized in advance. On the other hand, becoming is a continual process, without end or aim, that eludes recognition insofar as it is not a process in which one term serves as a representation or stands in for another term. In becoming, one does not become the thing; one becomes so that both terms can be put into a process of becoming something else. Thus, becoming “is a verb with a consistency all its own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, ‘appearing,’ ‘being,’ ‘equaling,’ or producing’” (Thousand 239). For instance, in a becoming-orchid, a wasp does not become (imitate) the orchid, but is reterritorialized—that is, put into a circulation of intensities that makes the relations of a body virtual—in such a way that both the orchid and the wasp form an assemblage and become something else entirely. Becoming only takes place within an assemblage: a term is attracted to, is drawn into the intensive zone of another (an other) term, thereby reconstituting their values and creating a heterogeneous unity. Becoming is therefore not concerned with eminent forms, but with non-realizable forms of immanence. That is to say that while the features of individual constituencies within an assemblage cannot clarify or predict the relational constitution of that assemblage, the assemblage itself always pushes towards an expansion or a reduction of its dimensions; these affective transformations are inherent in every body. Therefore, Deleuze and Guattari write that a “multiplicity is defined not by its elements, nor by a center of unification or comprehension. It is defined by the number of dimensions it has; it is not divisible, it cannot lose or gain a dimension without changing its nature” (Thousand 249). This amounts to saying that becoming— insofar as “becoming and multiplicity are the same thing”—is an externality of relations. Becoming is then inseparable from affect; they “consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected” (Thousand 261). To affect something in a becoming is to transform the self in affect.
It is this affective dimension of becoming wherein Deleuze and Guattari move towards a concept of becoming-animal, for they elsewhere define affects as the “nonhuman becomings of man” (What is Philosophy? 169). As should be evident from the preceding discussion, becoming-animal, whatever the animal may be, does not entail an
48 imitation or identification with the animal; it is not to pretend to be the animal. Becoming-animal requires entering into a composition with, and moving in affective proximities to, the animal:
To become animal is to participate in movement, to stake out a path of escape in all its positivity, to cross a threshold, to reach a continuum of intensities that are valuable only in themselves, to find a world of pure intensities where all forms come undone, as do all the significations, signifiers, and signifieds, to the benefit of an unformed matter of deterritorialized flux, of nonsignifying signs. (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 13)
Becoming-animal is unconcerned with the process of semiotics. It is instead involved with relations of affect and intensities where “all forms come undone,” that is, where the functions of the body are disarticulated from the organs to which they are supposed to correspond. A new body, an autonomous body of affect, is created between animal and human. In so doing, neither the form of the animal nor the human is respected, but is disgraced, transformed, made monstrous. The classificatory integrity with which it is capable to categorize the human as a human (and, for that matter, the animal as an animal) collapses—which is to say, is unified—into a new procedure of being.
Yet, to say that semiotics does not control becoming-animal is not necessarily to cite its absolute irrelevance. Though becoming-animal cannot proceed by imitation in and of itself, imitational practices can and do lead to relations outside of signification, and this difference lies in a distinction between molecular compositions and molar species. Deleuze and Guattari take this distinction from physics where “molecular” designates “intra-atomic phenomena,” while “molar” names the “mass phenomena that operate through statistical accumulation, obeying the laws of aggregates” (Anti-Oedipus 283). Manuel DeLanda explains the distinction by reference to the thermodynamics of temperature: “Temperature, for example, is a molar property of a body of water or air composed of a large population of molecules. That is, temperature is simply the average result of the molecules’ kinetic energy, the energy they have by virtue of their movement” (165). Molarity thus names, for Deleuze and Guattari, the site of overdetermination, of a creation of a false equilibrium, whereby “man is the molar entity par excellence” (Thousand 292). Molecularity, on the other hand, is solely concerned with becoming, in which particles relate in zones of intensity. Molecules are invested
49 with energy, that is, with desire. This is what Deleuze and Guattari call the “microphysics of the unconscious” (Anti-Oedipus 183). In the case of a becoming-dog: “You become animal only molecularly. You do not become a barking molar dog, but by barking, if it is done with enough feeling, with enough necessity and composition, you emit a molecular dog” (Thousand 275; emphasis added). With affect, in affect, an assemblage of “molecules” is created without reference to any previous “molar” compound. Another way of saying this is that affective assemblages create unities through the relations of movement between decontextualized functions of a (non-temporally) previous body, decontextualized only insofar as form and function no longer can “make sense.” The molar—the human, the dog, the orchid—is dispersed into a force of atomicity between the components of a compound—the becoming-dog of the human, the becoming-orchid of the dog. In this atomicity, the parts of the body are unencumbered by and achieve autonomy from their internal relations: I use my ears to tie my shoes; I use my feet to hear; I use my tongue to write. This is what Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly call the “body without organs.” The body is here not the defining feature of the individual human; it is the indefinite featuring of an individuation within an assemblage. In a becoming-dog, the becoming consists not of barking as a dog, but barking in such a way that will make the body molecular, that will uncouple barking as a function of the dog. The becoming-dog of man, in other words, is an entering into “composition with something else in such a way that the particles emitted from the aggregate thus composed will be canine as a function of the relation of movement and rest, or of molecular proximity, into which they enter” (Thousand 274).
In “The Possessed” chapter of Nightwood, Robin does not imitate the dog, whereby “Robin” and “the dog” would maintain their discrete integrity. Both Robin and the dog become together, and the terms of their arrangement are altered in the process. As Robin “goes down,” the dog “claw[s] sideways at the wall, his forepaws lifted and sliding,” while she, “with her head turned completely sideways,” begins to “bark also, crawling after him—barking in a fit of laughter, obscene and touching” (179). Robin, though she in some ways “reproduces” the dog, does not do so by keeping every function tethered to its form, or even form to its function. She gets on her knees, but she does not walk like a dog; she crawls. She barks, but she does not bark as the dog would bark; she barks “in a fit of laughter.” This is similarly true for the dog. In becoming with
50
Robin, it slides sideways, confounding its “normal” movement. It is unsurprising that the scene is described as “obscene and touching,” for the chaos of this final moment monstrously (i.e., affectively) invents a merging or unification of bodies and movements.42 The space of the event itself becomes part of this material assemblage, as the madness of the movement here stupefies the intelligibility of spatial relations. In other words, the instantaneous way in which lines of movement are drawn in this scene collapses the space into a single plane. A catalogue of such movement bewilders: Robin’s hand “reached almost to the shoulder”; Nora’s body “struck the wood”; Robin’s hair “swing[s]” and her arms are “held out” as she goes “sliding down”; the dog “rear[s] back,” his “forelegs slanting” and his “tongue slung sideways”; and, as Robin’s head swings against that of the dog, her veins “stood out in her neck, under her ears, swelled in her arms, and wide and throbbing rose up on her fingers as she moved forward” (179). It becomes no longer possible, when reading the directionality or impulsion of this event, to make sense or to imagine a way for this to achieve intelligibility. To make this scene mean or signify “correctly” is to accept a form of schizophrenia.
At the end of this event, it becomes likewise impossible to discern bodies as discrete forms of being. The final words of Nightwood read:
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 (180).
Though the segmentation of bodies is attached to their respective pronouns (i.e., “his throat,” “her hands”), the fragmentation of linguistic ownership is effected through the syntactical and stylistic operation of the phrase. The paratactic construction of the words—that is, the way each term is connected with the force of an “and”— deemphasizes the relatedness of this part with that body, and instead unifies a relationality of a body with some parts, an affective field of relationality. In their introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari write, “The tree is filiation,
42 In this way, “The Possessed” also calls to mind Catherine’s recollection of the way that Heathcliff “gnashed at her” and “foamed like a mad dog” in the heat of his passion in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights: “I did not feel as if I were in the company of a creature of my own species; it appeared that he would not understand, though I spoke to him; so, I stood off, and held my tongue, in great perplexity” (168).
51 but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb ‘to be,’ but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and…and…and…’ This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb ‘to be’” (25). Parataxis, in other words, does not link two discrete entities, but creates a unified “alliance” into a single body, a single plane of consistency or immanence without opposition and upon which relations are solely related to affective becoming.43 “The AND is not even a specific relation or conjunction, it is that which subtends all relations, the path of all relations, which makes relations shoot outside their terms and outside the set of their terms…” Deleuze specifies in an interview with Claire Parnet. “…Thinking with AND, instead of thinking IS, instead of thinking for IS: empiricism has never had another secret” (Dialogues 57). Yet, in “uprooting the verb ‘to be,’” Deleuze is not suggesting a demolition of the conditions for ontology. He is instead creating ontology as multiplicity. In pushing towards a thinking transformed by the power of “and,” Deleuze invites, “Try it, it is a quite extraordinary thought, and yet it is life” (Dialogues 57; emphasis added). Deracination, far from disposing with “being” altogether, modifies “to be” as multiple unto itself. In other words, “to be” is not mere equivalence, but is pure metaphor in the Proustian sense. In a famous passage from the sixth volume of his À la recherche de temps perdu, Proust writes, “[T]ruth—and life too—can be attained by us only when, by comparing a quality common of two sensations, we succeed in extracting their common
43 In a peculiar way, Deleuze reformulates Erich Auerbach’s famous distinction between hypotaxis and parataxis in his Mimesis (1946). Auerbach identifies hypotaxis as the main stylistic strategy of the Homeric epic, which has an obsession with argumentation and rhetorical operation. The hypotaxis of Homer thus produces a style based upon “externalized, uniformly illuminated phenomena, at a definite time and in a definite place, connected together without lacunae in a perpetual foreground; thoughts and feeling completely expressed” (Auerbach 11). Parataxis, on the other hand, is associated with the Old Testament and the creation of a sermo humilis, or low style, relying on a “phenomenon of conflicting and united inner forces, the alternation of antithesis and synthesis in their relations and effects” (Auerbach 71). In God’s pronouncement to “let there be light,” Auerbach identifies a sublimity that results from the contrast between the brevity of the style and the immensity of the content. Thus, it is the “absence of causal connectives, the naked statement of what happens—the statement which replaces deduction and comprehension by an amazed beholding that does not even seek to comprehend—which gives the sentence its grandeur” (Auerbach 110). Deleuze replaces, in Auerbach’s idea of an “amazed beholding,” an emphasis on the sublime and the transcendent with an emphasis on the immanent. “The aim of art,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “is to wrest the percept from perceptions of objects and the states of a perceiving subject, to wrest the affect from affections as the transition from one state to another: to extract a bloc of sensations, a pure being of sensations” (What is Philosophy? 167). The paratactic production of the “naked statement of what happens,” unconnected from causality, is one such extraction of the “pure being of sensations.” Nonetheless, Auerbach, against the desire of Deleuze, highlights the “more human magic” of parataxis (Auerbach 70; emphasis added). Deleuze would insist that an amazed beholding that disrupts comprehension is precisely that which sends the human into a nonhuman becoming; the affective force of parataxis, in other words, is this nonhuman becoming of man.
52 essence and in reuniting them to each other, liberated from the contingencies of time, within a metaphor” (Time Regained 290). This Deleuzian “thinking with and” is thus a move towards a metaphorical modality of thought (and accordingly a form of living) that creates relational networks of desire among potentially diverse elements, which are then drawn into actuality as emergent properties that cannot be specified as belonging to any particular component of the network. That is to say, to situate the idea in a Proustian register, any image “brought to us by life brings with it, in a single moment, sensations which are in fact multiple and heterogeneous” (Time Regained 289).
Therefore, in the ultimate words of Nightwood, there is not “the body of the dog” and “the body of Robin” (and even “the body of Nora”), but a body of affect in which the dog and Robin have been transformed as components. For this reason, though Barnes writes that “his head was flat along her knees,” the conceptual weight of the possessive pronoun has been lost in doing so. “His” and “her” do not demarcate discrete entities here, but indicate transformational elements within an assemblage in the process of their becoming-animal. “Thinking with and,” and, perhaps more fittingly, “writing with and,” connects Robin and dog, text and reader, past and present into a field of affect, whereby Robin is caught up in becoming-animal so that the dog, as well as the reader, must engage with an affective becoming towards something else.
In this way, the theory of becoming entailed in the encounter between Nightwood and the writing of Deleuze and Guattari necessarily intimates a creative model of sociality, one that would, in its insistence upon its own becoming-animal, demand a reconsideration of the ways in which a public is constituted. Shortly before his departure from the narrative, that is, right before “The Possessed,” Dr. O’Connor retreats to a bar and drinks himself “drunk as a fiddler’s bitch” (173). As he gets in various verbal altercations with the clientele of the bar, the doctor fleetingly articulates a certain conception of community:
“Funny little man,” someone said. “Never stops talking—always getting everyone into trouble by excusing them because he can’t excuse himself—the Squatting Beast, coming out at night—” As he broke off, the voice of the doctor was heard: “And what am I? I’m damned, and carefully public!” (173; emphasis added)
53
A degraded affectivity, the concern of the previous chapter, now draws a connection to an affective animality, my present concern, in the figure of the “Squatting Beast.” This image weds the scatological preoccupation of the novel (“What an autopsy I’ll make, with everything all which ways in my bowels!” [107]) with its forceful insistence on becoming-animal. Barnes consistently cites the “beast” throughout Nightwood as the most deliberate instantiation of such a becoming. We can now see that what a degraded affectivity pushes towards, at its limit, is an escape from the human. To briefly return to that sad and lonely character (in the words of the doctor, that “poor bitch”) Jenny Petherbridge: I noted in the previous chapter that Jenny’s need to accumulate historical emotion implicitly equates her status as a “squatter” with a capitalistic appropriation of affect. In light of the current discussion, this must be slightly revised. The narration pronounces of Jenny, “She defiled the very meaning of personality in her passion to be a person; somewhere about her was the tension of the accident that made the beast the human endeavor” (74). This “tension” is a result of the conflict between Jenny’s drive towards humanity and the text’s creation of an affective field that intensifies a compulsion towards inhumanism. Already embedded within Jenny, because embedded within the text, is the “human endeavor” of what I will call beastiality.44 Jenny’s problem is that she cannot resolve this tension; she cannot, that is, partake in a nonhuman becoming. Her capitalistic appropriation of affect is thus a result of her inability to escape the category of her own humanity.
In calling himself the “Squatting Beast,” Dr. O’Connor is therefore proclaiming himself as caught up in the throws of a becoming, which degrades him past the point of the recognizably human, a crossing of the threshold into the erotic. This Squatting Beast inevitably implicates others into its gravitational pull, as it “always get[s]
44 I have chosen to employ the term “beastiality” due to its suggestion of, but non-equivalence with, the correctly spelled “bestiality,” also known as “zoophilia.” Beastiality implies a certain kind of erotic activity with animals, yet is not coterminous with the more familiar term. Beastiality relies on Nightwood’s insistence upon the power of the “beast,” a figure that is neither purely human, nor purely animal, but is the nonhuman becoming of both animal and human. Nonetheless, as scandalous as it may seem, beastiality does not wish to domesticate itself by euthanizing any of the contaminating pull of bestiality. Beastiality is unescapably erotic, but requires also a redrawing of the terms of eroticism and desire. It is therefore not an erotic synecdoche for bestiality, but radically transforms it. It responds to Foucault’s oft- cited rallying cry that the “counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures” (History of Sexuality, Vol. I 157), insofar as the exigency of a term such as beastiality is a remapping of the sexual embodiment and the relationality made possible not between people, but among a community of being(s).
54 everyone into trouble.” This implication, however, creates a form of community that must bypass the constraints and demands of the human community, of sociality as currently conceived, for the nonhuman arises as its condition of possibility. Yet upon initial assessment, the figure of the “Squatting Beast” would seem to present itself as the antithesis or hindrance to community formation. O’Connor nonetheless asserts that he is damned (degraded from humanity into beastiality) and thus carefully public. In a letter to Emily Coleman dated November 30, 1937, Barnes writes, “You see now why one must be secret? One must not betray that place, or it will heal up, and you’ll know nothing more of it clearly, only to so few, a John, you, and one’s secret book that one day becomes public, but still secret if written as it should be.” Barnes here articulates a vision of community in which the terms of belonging are decidedly not conditioned upon knowing a person’s humanity. A public, in these terms, is in fact constituted by secrecy, produced out of an enigma, and thus must be modified by an attention to the care of the self.45 In this way, the “public” envisioned by Barnes and Nightwood is closer to what Michael Warner calls a “counterpublic,” which both “maintains at some level, conscious or not, an awareness of its subordinate status” and “comes into being as an address to indefinite strangers” (“Publics” 86). A counterpublic need not necessarily be constituted by the known, and thereby, need not satisfy the unethical demands of the human.
Deleuze and Guattari also insist upon the way in which becoming-animal, or as I have been calling it, beastiality, eludes the individual human and pushes towards a new conceptual framing of the social, or what they call the “pack.” “What we are saying is that every animal is fundamentally a band, a pack,” they write. “That it has pack modes, rather than characteristics, even if further distinctions within these modes are called for. It is at this point that the human being encounters the animal. We do not become animal without a fascination for the pack, for multiplicity” (Thousand 239-40). Only in a pack does one become-animal. This pack, however, is immanent to the animal itself. Rather than defining a pack by the common characteristics of its components, Deleuze and Guattari maintain that the pack is a mode of living, a commitment to nonhuman becoming. The only way to live within or as a pack is to embrace the affect that tears
45 Foucault notes in the final volume of his History of Sexuality that “[a]round the care of the self, there developed an entire activity of speaking and writing in which the work of oneself on oneself and communication with others were linked together…[I]t constituted not an exercise in solitude, but a true social practice” (History of Sexuality, Vol. III 51).
55 one from the human form and attaches it to an aesthetic field of relationality that knows only assemblages. Within this field, persons cannot be individualized, and community cannot be defined as such. Yet this does not mean that there is no particularity to the communal relations of Deleuze and Guattari. They refer to “individuation” as this process of specification within an assemblage. An individuation is not a specification on the terms of the person, subject, thing, or substance, but consists entirely of “relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected” (Thousand 261). They reserve the name “haecceity” for this individuation. In a becoming, a haecceity names the happening of a “thisness” within an event prior to its cementation as a form or subject. An event is always in the process of transformation, of its own eventuality, and thus a haecceity designates an intensifying or lessening of affect within this transformation. Individuation is nothing more than a sensation of the emergent properties of becoming.
“Carefully Public” thus signals a community unconditioned from the individual and instead conditioned upon a process of individuation. Yet it signals something further: a queer specificity to individuation. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner write that queer culture has learned how to use counterpublic intimacies “as a context for witnessing intense and personal affect while elaborating a public world of belonging and transformation” (“Sex in Public” 558). Without accepting their distinction between “personal” affect and a “public” world of belonging, I argue that it is this queer modality of counterpublic, even counterintuitive, intimacy that Nightwood—and, in a more convoluted way, the writing of Deleuze and Guattari—sketches. It is to the always- fragile potential of queer culture’s “world-making project” that Nightwood attaches (“Sex in Public” 558). Barnes connects “carefully public” to another term in the above passage: “coming out at night.” While it is not unproductive to observe the semantic lushness of the phrase in relation to the modern narrative of the closet, my interest in it for the present purposes lies elsewhere: that is, in the tension between “coming out” and the condition of the “night.” George Chauncey argues that in the years prior to World War II, the primary spatial metaphor of gay life was not the “closet,” but a more expansive emphasis on a gay world. Relying on a campy embracing of feminine debutante practices, gay people during the prewar years “did not speak of coming out of what we call the ‘gay closet’ but rather of coming out into what they called ‘homosexual
56 society’ or the ‘gay world,’ a world neither so small, nor so isolated, nor, often, so hidden as ‘closet’ implies” (Gay New York 7). While the historically specific practices of gay men in early twentieth-century New York City cannot be mapped entirely onto the eventualities of Nightwood (a text primarily concerned with lesbian women in Paris before the rise of fascism), it remains nonetheless important to notice the way in which Nightwood’s proposed “coming out at night” resists the narrative teleology of the closet. Very much akin to the coming out into a gay world that Chauncey describes, Nightwood insists upon “coming out” not as a confessional disclosure of the “inner truth” of one’s sex (à la Foucault), but as an entrance into a queer world, an entrance predicated upon its immersion into, not a coming out of, secrecy and darkness. Individuation here, as in Deleuze and Guattari, rests neither on personality nor on humanity, but relies on a clandestine relationship with a counterpublic of (nonhuman) strangers. To reiterate, in this hybrid vision of communal relations, inhumanity and a certain form of privacy are not a hindrance to the formation of a public, but the very foundation upon which this queer public is constituted. One “comes out” into sociality, but what is then found is not the refreshing light of knowledge. Sociality poses an even more challenging relation of self to self, and self to others, a relation in which the obscurity of the defining features of humanity is its primary condition. To feel the utterly counterintuitive sensation of belonging to such a social field, it becomes necessary to become-animal, to embrace beastiality, to enter into a composition with the affectivity of the Squatting Beast.
If becoming-animal is palpably connected, in the terms outlined here, with a project of queer world-making—a project, that is, where the terms of a reconstituted community necessitate a different relationship between self and other, subject and world—then the conditions of the “sexual” must be redefined. Sexuality would no longer name either an erotic activity between human beings or a private encounter removed from a public. It would no longer be distinguishable by reference to the ownership, capacities, or functioning of the genitals, male or female. Nor would it be placed in the sole possession of either “acts” or “identities.” Sexuality would not be the inner truth, the personality, the nature, the essential characteristics of the subject. Nor could
57 sexuality be defined solely by reference to an imagined pure negativity.46 Sexuality, instead, would be: nonhuman, (counter)public, intimate, detached from a knowledge of the other, degraded, and an affective becoming.47 “Sexuality,” Deleuze and Guattari emphasize in A Thousand Plateaus, “proceeds by way of the becoming-woman of the man and the becoming-animal of the human: an emission of particles” (278-79). Sexuality is a procedure, an unfolding away from the human. In Nightwood, the narrator describes Robin, even prior to her manifest becoming-animal in “The Possessed,” as a “beast turning human,” which “is neither man nor beast deprived, but human hunger pressing its breast to its prey” (41). Nightwood, therefore, performs the sexual operation of indiscernibility: that is, a deterritorialization of humanity into the proximity of the inhuman. In so doing, it extracts what Deleuze and Guattari call, as if adopting the Barnesean lexicon, “a shared element from the animal far more effectively than any domestication, utilization, or imitation could: ‘the Beast’” (Thousand 279). In sexuality, a beastial force of becoming unseats the human as the automatic locality of autonomy.
46 Though I remain indebted, and in some ways committed, to a politics of queer negativity, I do not see this as the most, let alone the only, viable option. I am convinced that a politics of negativity can, oddly enough, work productively with a politics of becoming; yet the intricate mapping of such is outside the framework of this thesis. I, therefore, disagree with the position taken by Lee Edelman, in many ways the front-most figure of the theorizing of queer negativity, that “[q]ueerness…is never a matter of being or becoming but, rather, of embodying the remainder of the Real internal to the Symbolic order” (No Future 25). Queerness is decidedly “a matter of” becoming, of becoming-animal, of nonhuman becoming. Yet, perhaps Edelman’s queer force of the death drive is one such a becoming. For interesting discussions of the politics of queer negativity, see: Lee Edelman, No Future (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); Heather Love, Feeling Backward (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Robert Caserio, et al. “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory.” PMLA 121.3 (2006): 819-828; Carolyn Dinshaw, et al. “Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion.” GLQ 13.2-3 (2007): 177-195. For further responses to queer negativity, see: José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia (New York: New York University Press, 2009); Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Michael Snediker, Queer Optimism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 47 This conception of sexuality, particularly of a queer sexuality, may sound glibly utopic. Though I would not necessarily disagree with such an assertion, we would have to qualify what can constitute a “utopia.” If what is meant by this designation is a place or configuration of idealistic perfection, then I would reject that my formulation is utopic. If, however, utopia can name nothing more than a geography of impossibility, a space that, by definition, cannot come into being, then sexuality, as here conceived, is surely utopic. Sexuality is utopic only insofar as it names a virtual process of becoming, a force that is forever coming-to-be. The utopics of sexuality conditions an erotic relationality that is material but unrealizable. Thus, this version of sexuality may look more like Michel Foucault’s concept of a heterotopia. For Foucault, heterotopias are “places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society- which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (“Of Other Spaces” 24). Though heterotopias exist outside of all spaces, they may nonetheless have an indicative space in reality. Insofar as it is both real and unrealized, “heterotopia” might name the (counter-)utopic force of sexuality. However, as we shall see in the next chapter, we might more properly call this a “homotopia.”
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Queerness would then name such a force, which ethically moves the human subject, by means of its own desire, away from itself. As Deleuze clarifies, “[N]o gay can ever definitely say ‘I’m gay.’ It’s not a question of being this or that sort of human, but of becoming inhuman, of a universal animal becoming…” (Negotiations 11).48
From this perspective, the queerness of Nightwood lies not in the author’s “lesbian” identification (as if it is but a simple case of art imitating life—it is not a question of imitation), nor in the characters, plot, themes, etc., nor even in the history of its reception within lesbian and gay contexts.49 I do not mean to imply that these qualities will necessarily be disconnected from its queer status. What I am suggesting is that the queerness of Nightwood lies in the way in which it draws its readers into its affective composition of nonhuman becoming. In other words, Nightwood is queer insofar as it compels its audience to discount and discard their own humanity and enter its aesthetic field.
It would seem rather fitting, then, that a “powerful lioness” mediates the inauguration of Robin and Nora’s relationship (60). However, what I wish to call attention to is the very next moment in which a temporal leap has occurred. The narration informs the reader that “[Robin] stayed with Nora until the mid-winter. Two spirits were working in her, love and anonymity. Yet they were so ‘haunted’ of each other that separation was impossible” (60). The animality that animates this queer relationship, that beastial presence of the lioness whose eyes “flowed in tears that never reached the surface” (60), is the conditionality in which love may materialize. Nonetheless, this is not love as the stuff of romance, as the private and eternal substance shared between two individuals; this is love as the breaking of the individual, as the emergence of an animal assemblage. Love, in Nightwood, is impossible without the animal. Becoming-animal thus becomes a queer theory of love. Within this paradigm, however, “love” itself becomes transformed beyond the confines of its conventional usage. Love would name not the emotional phenomenon supporting the sentimental
48 Again recall Foucault’s claim that “we have to work at becoming homosexuals and not be obstinate in recognizing that we are” (“Friendship” 136; emphasis added). 49 It must be noted, and this has had discomforting effects on critics eager to claim Djuna as “part of the family,” that Barnes did not strictly identify, at least not for the duration of her life, as a lesbian. She is infamously quoted as saying near her death, “I am not a lesbian. I just loved Thelma” (qtd. in Michel, “‘I just loved Thelma’” 53).
59 narratives of romance espoused by our culture, but a new way of relating between the human and the nonhuman.
In the aforementioned passage, love and anonymity are inseparable, interchangeable: true love is a kind of pure anonymity, while the only true anonymity is within the expression of love. In love, that most extreme and intimate form of attachment, personality and humanity are not, or more accurately, cannot be respected. Deleuze and Guattari quite staunchly assert this point: “Knowing how to love does not mean remaining a man or a woman; it means extracting from one’s sex the particles, the speeds and slownesses, the flows, the n sexes that constitute the girl of that sexuality” (Thousand 277). And elsewhere: “Making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand. Desiring-machines or the nonhuman sex: not one or even two sexes, but n sexes” (Anti-Oedipus 296). To love is to forget the ontology of gender, to affectively disconnect from that which leashes the subject to the human.50 Human beings can know nothing of love, for it is precisely a commitment to humanity that bars the emergence of a loving attachment. To love is to enter into an assemblage of affect in which the particularity of bodies becomes disengaged and unwedded from the form of any intelligible social unity; love is absolutely inimical to engagement and wedlock. If affective attachment, as I have been developing, necessarily places one outside of the possibility of maintaining the human as an aesthetic category, then there has never been a “human” love; it is, by definition, inhuman. Love, to put it simply, is a process of becoming-animal.
“I tell you, Madame,” Dr. O’Connor utters to Frau Mann, a lesbian trapeze artist, “if one gave birth to a heart on a plate, it would say ‘Love’ and twitch like the lopped leg of a frog” (30).51 Love itself here twitches with the affective gesticulations of
50 “One wants to be loved in the fluid,” Barnes writes in a letter to Emily Coleman, “not on a vow, the vow is for the church, not for a lover, the church requires dedication and no swerving, it is one reason its so hard for women to be saints, because they know emotionally that fast-bound dedications to the un- human are not the woman’s arena…” (5 Jan. 1939). The tension between the fluidity of that which escapes convention and the unswerving dedication required by the conventions of the church, here registers at the level of the human, whether remaining to or escaping from it. Barnes’s assertion that “dedications to the un-human are not the woman’s arena” could be taken in two ways: (1) woman cannot become in the way I have been describing; or (2) to remain a woman is precisely not to partake in a becoming. Due to the emphasis on the fluidity of love, I gravitate toward the latter interpretation. 51 Framing this idea slightly differently, Deleuze and Guattari write, “[T]hought itself is sometimes closer to an animal that dies than to a living, even democratic, human being” (What is Philosophy? 108).
60 the severed appendage of an animal.52 O’Connor later describes the potent alchemy of beastial love analogously: “And the lining of my belly, flocked with the locks cut off love in odd places that I’ve come on, a bird’s nest to lay my lost eggs in, and my people as good as they come, as long as they have been coming, down the grim path of ‘We know not’ to ‘We can’t guess why’” (108). As previously noted, T. S. Eliot had cut out the original phrasing of a “bird’s nest of pubic hairs” (Nightwood: The Original Version 85). The anxiety over these lines can now be reinterpreted as related to the discernment of a queerly eroticized resistance to the human. The orgasmic potential of animality notwithstanding, it is important to comment on the reinforcement of the connection between love, animal embodiment, and an unintelligibility or anonymity. “We know not” because the promiscuity implied in these lines entails an indifference to human contact. That is, it is unimportant for O’Connor that he knows his loves as people or understands their motivation for action. A body without organs emerges in which, in his love, the lining of the stomach inside him, the places that he comes on, and the nest he lays his eggs in all occur at the same site, reduced to a single plane of consistency in the process of becoming.
The most comprehensive and profound description of love as a becoming-animal, however, occurs in “Watchman, What of the Night?” In response to Nora’s inquiry into the “life of the night,” the doctor says:
We swoon with the thickness of our own tongue when we say, ‘I love you,’ as in the eye of a child lost a long while will be found the contraction of that distance—a child going small in the claws of a beast, coming furiously up the furlongs of the iris. We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality…We were created that the earth might be made sensible of her inhuman taste; and love that the body might be so dear that even the earth should roar with it. (89-90; emphasis added)
Love, analogous to falling into the “claws of the beast,” invents us as, makes us become but “skin about a wind.” In other words, the affective intensity of attachment reduces the human body to a material surface—a skin or membrane—upon which only movements, forces, and flows—winds or directionalities—can be discerned. The most
52 Note the resonances here with the passage discussed in the previous chapter of this thesis in which Nora’s desire and feelings of loss after Robin’s departure are compared to an amputated hand (Nightwood 64-65).
61 remarkable thing about this passage, however, is the way it radically rewrites, in but two short clauses, the genesis of humanity itself. In this terse, palimpsestic transformation of Genesis, God still makes man in his image, but here the creation of man is a bringing order to, a making sense of the “inhuman taste” of the world. God’s addition of human being to an otherwise inhuman state, then, is a perversion of creation itself, insofar as nonhuman becoming is the necessary condition of creation. The original sin, in this recasting of the narrative, was therefore not committed by woman, but by God himself, the creator of man, the molar form of molarity itself. The sin from which all other sin derives is not the plucking of the fruit from the tree of knowledge, but the devaluation of a pure state of inhuman flux. In the biblical narrative, as Adam and Eve regard each other for the first time, they are naked and unaware of their own humanity, and therefore unashamed of themselves (Genesis 2:25). After eating from the tree of knowledge, humanity becomes aware of its human being, and, for the first time, feels the sensation of mortal shame (Genesis 3:7). The shame associated with the eating of the fruit is thus connected to the inhuman taste of the world before sin.53 It would be insincere, given this, to speak of God’s eternal love, for if the “love of man” is oxymoronic in Nightwood, God never showed love to man; God’s love is a false love. His creation is precisely the severing of love. Nightwood thus transforms the sinful fate of man into a feeling of shame at his own humanity. The love that the modern subject might be said to feel, a “love that the body might be so dear that even the earth should roar with it,” is an attempt to return to a supreme oneness with the world, with the original state of inhumanity. The love of a becoming-animal produces anew the inhuman assemblage wherein the person is not categorically separated from nature, but a unity within a single body, a becoming that would let out a beastial “roar.” In affect, we rediscover a love without knowledge of human ontology. Nightwood, even in title, can be interpreted as trying to produce this affective transformation back into the love of inhumanity. It renounces the disingenuous morality of the light, and along with it, the word of God and its claim of eternal love. In the beginning, there may have been light, but it was certainly not good. Nightwood recovers the ethical status of darkness as a force of love; its project is to vault the subject back into the genetic composition of a world without form and to make humanity feel the shame of our being.
53 Again, this plays with or inverts Kant’s aesthetic paradigm of taste.
62
Is Writing Inhuman?: An Emerging Love
A great deal has been written in recent queer theory about shame.54 “How does the possibility of reclaiming gay shame enable us to create forms of community as well as new opportunities for inquiry into lesbian-gay-queer history and culture?” David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub ask in their introduction to the edited volume of the published version of the “Gay Shame” conference held at the University of Michigan in 2003 (“Beyond Gay Pride” 4-5).55 Shame, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues in “Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel,” is not (just) a personal, subjective sensation of repression or inhibition, but is always the experience of playing the part for or with someone else; it erupts into being as an intractable moment of interpersonal connection. Shame is thus performatively transformational insofar as its performance becomes more than a result or aversion technique, and insofar as it “is the affect that mantles the threshold between introversion and extroversion, between absorption and theatricality, between performativity and—performativity” (Touching Feeling 38). In Sedgwick’s analysis, a queer performativity emerges as a “strategy for the production of meaning and being, in relation to the affect shame and to the later and related fact of stigma” (Touching Feeling 61). In The Trouble with Normal (1999), Michael Warner argues that shame constitutes an ethic of queer life. Gay, lesbian, and queer people, he maintains, know all too well the stigmatizing effects of a heteronormative project of sexual shame. In their mutual abjection, queers find ways to “communicate through such camaraderie a moving and unexpected form of generosity” (Trouble 35). In this social ethic, hierarchies based on sexual moralizing are made democratic, whereby we understand each other in the mutuality of indignant sex. The paradoxical result of such an ethic is thus that “only
54 The interest in shame, however, can be plausibly traced back to one of queer theory’s foundational moments: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s highly influential Epistemology of the Closet (1990). In an interview with Sina Najafi and David Serlin, Lauren Berlant suggests that Sedgwick’s landmark study might be the beginning of a modern genealogy of critical interventions into the category of shame, insofar as it probed the relationship between social identity and affective subjectivity. “What Sedgwick was saying,” she notes, “was that a structural social relation—enacted by stipulated and administrative laws and norms— was shaming…At the same time, the shame of being deemed a member of that population was said to produce a shamed subjectivity, which meant a subjectivity that felt a lot of shame” (“Broken Circuit” 81). See: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 55 See: Gay Shame, ed. Halperin and Traub (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009) for full discussions on the meaning, value, and productive potential of “gay” or “queer” shame.
63 when this indignity of sex is spread around the room, leaving no one out, and in fact binding people together, that it begins to resemble the dignity of the human” (Trouble 36). Shame is how we remember our own humanity.
Yet can shame be conceived as drawing us closer to the feeling of our human bodies? Shame—insofar as it “enables the creation of community,” insofar as it is an “affective performance of a queer relationality,” insofar as it is an “ethic of queer modes of living”—names that which compels us toward something beyond human being. In the DeleuzoGuattarian framework, shame is the experience of our all-too-human bodies. There is no other way, they write in What is Philosophy?, to escape the “shame of being human” but to “play the part of the animal (to growl, burrow, snigger, distort ourselves)” (108). Deleuze later goes on to specify that this shame is the reason that the mind is both ashamed of and ashamed for the body. In thinking that the body is tethered to the mind, and not an assemblage of “autonomous external reactions,” humanity keeps itself from becoming imperceptible, or, as Deleuze says here, from reaching its final state of “molecular sludge” (Essays 123). “It is as if [the mind] were saying to the body,” Deleuze writes, “You make me ashamed, You ought to be ashamed… ‘A bodily weakness which made my animal self crawl away and hide until the shame was passed’” (Essays 123). Becoming-animal is a way of reclaiming the autonomy of the body, of establishing an ontology of imperceptibility. Again, the body is here not the morphology of the human, but “is an animal” (Essays 123). In light of this reframing of shame, a queer politics grounded in the affective dimensions of shame would thus constitute an ethos of inhumanity. The animal attains a queer ethicality, in other words, insofar as it will distinctively “turn its head away from a human, as if in mortal shame,” and compel others to do so as well (Nightwood 131).56
Nightwood has yet something else to say about shame. If, as we have just seen, shame is the experience of a desire to escape the human, and if, as the last section demonstrated, love is the name of this process of becoming inhuman, then shame is inextricably bound to love. In fact, shame is the conduit through which love surfaces— one cannot love, that is, unless one has first been filled with shame. “Those who love
56 As Barnes writes in a letter to Emily Coleman, the “sexually abnormal” are a “sort of obscene impossible beautiful fungus or Manna (which fed the prophets) fallen upon our heads in the desert, and manna if you ask me, is my idea of a heavenly fall of the abnormal lichen known as (beastly) beauty” (30 Oct. 1938).
64 everything are despised by everything, as those who love a city, in its profoundest sense, become the shame of that city, the détraqués, the paupers,” the narration relates to the reader, “their good is incommunicable, outwitted, being the rudiment of a life that has developed, as in a man’s body are found evidences of lost needs” (Nightwood 57). It is not just that shame and love intermingle with each other, but that shame, insofar as it becomes an embodiment of desire, is an ethical and unspeakable necessity for love. The most profound sense of love is a product of shame; the purest expression of love by “those who love everything” has a fundamental relation to the affective intensities of shame. As Leonard Lawlor notes in his exegesis of the concept of becoming-animal, desubjectification “opens one up to be affected by the abominable sufferings of others, with the result that the affects of love and shame motivate one to become other than man” (178). The shameful conditions for love, the loving provenance of shame, becomes a discovery of that desire of the human body: to escape itself.
Deleuze, to that end, asks, “The shame of being a man—is there any better reason to write?” (Essays 1). As a result of the desire to move beyond humanity into imperceptibility, writing itself becomes an instance, perhaps the instance, of becoming- animal, and by logical conclusion, of love. In describing the fruitless attempts of those who try to discern what, in their mutual work, “belongs” to Deleuze and what “belongs” to Guattari, Deleuze shares an uncharacteristically autobiographical reflection: “And then, there was my meeting with Félix Guattari, the way we got along and completed, depersonalized, singularized each other—in short how we loved. That resulted in Anti- Oedipus, which marked a new progression…” (“I Have Nothing to Admit” 114; emphasis added). It is substantial not only that Deleuze (rather beautifully) describes his relationship with Guattari as a “depersonalized,” and yet “singularizing” love, but also that he regards the production of writing as the result of that love. The text of Anti- Oedipus emerged, in other words, out of Deleuze and Guattari’s inhuman love for each other. Djuna Barnes, in a letter to Emily Coleman, conveys a similar sentiment: “I want to turn myself aside from human love, from men and women; a person with my powers acting as I have done for years should have had enough of worrying over lovers by now, particularly when, as Peggy [Guggenheim] says, they are not Shakespeare!” (5 Jan. 1939; emphasis added). Barnes expresses a desire not to forsake love altogether, but to leave behind, or “turn aside from,” the mode of love that requires a human relation. Instead,
65 she values the utterly inhuman love that comes from art and from writing. Barnes, that is, seeks the “love of Shakepeare.” In both of these instances, love is not, as the popular imagination would have it, the utmost expression of human connection in which each person is emboldened and enriched as a personality. Love is both depersonalizing and enacted in and through art. Writing, in other words, is the purest moment of love’s shameful emergence.
The logical precondition of such a statement, therefore, is that in order to write, one must become. Otherwise said, becoming, particularly becoming-animal, is the purpose and aim of art. “I began to think that what the artist craves is the beautiful untruthy [sic], that might be made reality,” writes Barnes in another letter to Coleman, “and then, were it so made, would discharge, like the ink-fish, his venom against that, and make another” (30 Oct. 1938). The desire of the artist, in this inimitably Barnesean image, is to create a “beautiful untruthy” that might be made real—that is, to create a virtual reality of affect, which, though incorporeal, is nonetheless a material reality. This “beautiful untruthy” is a leap into a world-making project of aesthetics, a material process of creation that nonetheless remains ever abstract. However, this aesthetic endeavor is not content to construct a form of or for reality. In Barnes’s vision, as soon as reality begins to coalesce into a recognizable arrangement, the artist would begin to create anew. Artistic creation is a process of continual unfolding, an emerging invention of the world. It is striking that Barnes here compares the artist to the “ink-fish,” whose “ink” becomes the venom by which a new world begins to come into being. The ink-fish is the figure of the writer in the thralls of a becoming-animal, whereby the becoming is an excretion of venomous ink, an emergence of writing that exceeds the literal instant of its literary composition.
In the work of Deleuze and Guattari, one cannot enter into the compositional proximity of a becoming unless a work of art, especially a piece of writing, is composed. As they write in A Thousand Plateaus:
The plane of consistency is the intersection of all concrete dimensions. Therefore all becomings are written like sorcerers’ drawings on this plane of consistency, which is the ultimate Door providing a way out for them. This is the only criterion to prevent them from bogging down, or veering into the void. (251; emphasis added)
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The only way to effectively enact a becoming, in other words, is to write. Without a written composition, a becoming can easily return to formation or fall out of abstraction. Writing is thus a process of deterritorializing oneself so that one can expand onto the plane of consistency, so that one can escape the human form. Therefore, “[i]f the writer is a sorcerer, it is because writing is a becoming, writing is traversed by strange becomings that are not becomings-writer, but becomings-rat, becomings-insect, becomings-wolf, etc.” (Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand 240). For Deleuze and Guattari, to write is not to create a form, but to create a composition in which formlessness arises as a possibility, in which experience is not formed, but is in the process of forming and of becoming-imperceptible. This is why “[t]o write is also to become something other than a writer” (Deleuze, Essays 6).
Art thus begins, as they say, with the animal (Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy 183). The function of literature is therefore not to accurately convey the inner truth of a character in accordance with a social category or position and the individual characteristics of that character. Instead, literature functions by way of a counterpoint relationality, in which compounds of sensations are felt in the becoming of characters and in the style of the novel itself. “Counterpoint serves not to report real or fictional conversations but to bring out the madness of all conversation and of all dialogue, even interior dialogue,” Deleuze and Guattari contend, “Everything that novelists must extract from the perceptions, affections, and opinions of their psychosocial ‘models’ passes entirely into the percepts and affects to which the character must be raised without holding on to any other life” (What is Philosophy? 188). Artists, especially novelists, are presenters and creators of affect; the greatness of a novelist can be judged as a function of her ability to invent “unknown or unrecognized affects and brin[g] them to light as the becoming of [her] characters” (What is Philosophy? 174). If a becoming must be written, that is, made aesthetic, in order to successfully emerge as a becoming, then aesthetic composition is what forever ties becoming to art, and what remains their mutually defining feature. The only way, it can be inferred, for matter to express itself, the only condition upon which literature can function as literature, becomes a matter of aesthetics: “[E]ither the compound of sensations is realized in the material, or the material passes into the compound, but always in such a way as to be situated on a specifically aesthetic plane of composition” (Deleuze and Guattari, What is
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Philosophy? 196). The literary is a speaking of a new language, a way to realize affective, nonhuman becoming. To reframe this somewhat differently: literature pulls us into a proximity with the aesthetic, making us become with the aesthetic, and forcing us to experiment with the ways in which we can aesthetically constitute ourselves.
Deleuze and Guattari persistently refer to Virginia Woolf as one model for this aesthetic, nonhuman becoming of writing: “Virginia Woolf experiences herself not as a monkey or a fish but as a troop of monkeys, a school of fish, according to her variable relations of becoming with the people she approaches” (Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand 239); “To those who ask what literature is, Virginia Woolf responds: To whom are you speaking of writing? The writer does not speak about it, but is concerned with something else” (Deleuze, Essays 6); “In this sense, the literary or musical work has an architecture: ‘Saturate every atom,’ as Virginia Woolf said” (Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand 329). Virginia Woolf, in her highly influential essay “Modern Fiction” (1919), writes of the purpose of the novelist as a mission of exposing the enveloping consciousness of the mind:
The mind receives myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evan- escent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms…Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? (106)
This “incessant shower of innumerable atoms” which composes the impressions of experience inevitably informs Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the molecular. In recognizing this, it is also fundamental to realize not only the way in which the aesthetic project of modernism corresponds with the DeleuzoGuattarian politics of becoming, but also, the insight that the concept of writing as becoming-animal can inform and transform our literary understanding of what modernism can do. Primarily, the aesthetic field that modernist works create strips the persons from personalities, and characters from characteristics. In so doing, we are forced into a becoming with modernist affect.
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Djuna Barnes’s contribution to the aesthetic of modernism is to suggest that writing is a loving act of inhumanity. In one of her last published texts before her death, the three-line poem, “Rite of Spring” (1982), which she reportedly spent twenty years trying to finish, Barnes articulates an idea of inhuman writing: “Man cannot purge his body of its theme / As can the silkworm on a running thread / Spin a shroud to re- consider in” (Collected Poems 145). The “theme” of man’s body names its bondage to the form of the human and its inability to enter into a becoming. The silkworm, like the ink- fish previously, figures the writer as in the process of a becoming-animal. Barnes connects the thread of the silkworm and its ability to “spin a shroud” to the writer and her ability to create a work that escapes the conditions of the human. Only in writing, that is, can we “re-consider” who we are. In order to become inhuman, the subject must become as the silkworm and write.
Nightwood displays this kind of commitment to the imperceptibility of writing. Dr. O’Connor asks, “And must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?” (101). The goal of the writer is to ward off the ability for readers to make conclusions about the text; to do so would be to negate a becoming, to disallow their coming into its aesthetic fold. The doctor will thus demurely state a few pages later, “I have a narrative, but you will be put to it to find it” (104). In rupturing the seams of a coherent narrative from itself, Nightwood forces the reader to deal with affect, to become in its intensity. Robin is not to be understood as a “human” with a distinct morphology and a recognizable psychology, for the text creates Robin as “disfigured and eternalized by the hieroglyphics of sleep and pain” (69). Baudelaire, one of the progenitors of literary modernism, claims that existence itself is composed of hieroglyphics: “[W]e arrive at this truth that everything is hieroglyphic, and we know that symbols are only obscure in a relative manner, that is to say, according to the purity, the good will, or the native clairvoyance of the soul,” he writes in an essay on Victor Hugo. “And yet, what is a poet (I use the word in its widest sense), if not a translator, a decipherer?” (Œuvres complètes 471).57 Baudelaire’s claim is not that poet
57 “Réflexions sur quelques-uns de mes contemporains.” The translation is my own: “…[N]ous arrivons à cette vérité que tout est hiéroglyphique, et nous savons que les symboles ne sont obscurs que d’une manière relative, c’est-à-dire selon la pureté, la bonne volonté ou la clairvoyance native des âmes. Or qu’est-ce qu’un poète (je prends le mot dans son acception la plus large), si ce n’est un traducteur, un déchiffreur?”
69 translates the hieroglyphics of life into a recognizable or easily understood representation, but that the decoding performed by the artist transforms the symbolic realities of existence and presents it to the soul in a literary language that retains the mystery of the hieroglyphic itself. Thus, in disfiguring Robin by hieroglyphics, in allowing access to her only within an aesthetic field of affect, Nightwood prohibits a becoming outside of its own textuality. That is, Nightwood incites a becoming that retains the enigma by which Robin cannot be forced into immobility; it excites a becoming that presents her as eternally “possessed,” as in constant communication with forever new forms of being.
Let us return to a familiar image: “And the tree of the night is the hardest tree to mount, the dourest tree to scale, the most difficult of branch, the most febrile to the touch, and sweats a resin and drips a pitch against the palm that computation has not gambled” (Nightwood 90; emphasis added). In the previous chapter, I noted that this image both indexes an affective materiality and stands in as a figure for the text itself. Insofar as the “tree of the night”—that is the “night-wood”—points to textuality itself, writing becomes one of its central concentrations. In other words, insofar as Nightwood names itself as a written text, it challenges its readers to confront the exigencies of writing, namely an inhuman becoming. Nightwood is the “hardest tree to mount” because its aesthetic field, as a consequence of the novel’s demanding style, necessitates an ethical flight from the human form. Yet insofar as the “tree of the night” inverts the image of that Edenic tree of knowledge, Nightwood also promises a love, which, in the affective dynamics of shame, will transform us all in its inhuman becoming. To write: nothing could be more queerly inhuman, nor more queerly loving. In order to fully grasp the implications of this loving form of queer community however, we must turn to face a (seemingly) different paradigm: psychoanalysis. Deleuze and Guattari are quite hostile towards psychoanalytic modes of thinking; in fact, much of their work is an explicit counter-discourse to such modes (as is evident in the title of Anti-Oedipus). Nonetheless, to touch on the most radical aspects of both the work of Barnes and the work of Deleuze and Guattari, we must engage in an extreme contiguity of thought, reaching beyond the limit of our prejudices and predispositions. To understand communities of affect might mean to critically extend ourselves past the established parameters of “affect theory.” In moving to the next chapter, I am doing just
70 that: incorporating psychoanalysis into an affective paradigm. We will find that, despite their overwhelming differences, the schizoanalytic theory of Deleuze and Guattari can indeed speak to psychoanalysis. In short, Nightwood demands that we, in order to understand queer community at all, leave ourselves; this includes the categories of our thought. It is in this way—out of the oblique of the eye, with a turn of the head—that we can find a space of possibility.
CHAPTER THREE
Narcissistic Aesthetics (Reflections on Subjectivity & Art)
If among itself it go, (As the Peacock’s said to do), With all its thousand eyes ajar, Is it itself it’s looking for? —Djuna Barnes, Creatures in an Alphabet
Introduction
In this chapter, I turn away from a version of affect theory informed by Deleuze to face a significantly different paradigm: psychoanalysis. The psychoanalytic critic of sexuality, Leo Bersani, shall be the figure through which I will parse the remaining problematic of this thesis, a problematic which necessitates a turn of the head. Barnes’s Nightwood compels this kind of move precisely because it demands that we move aside from static or dualistic constructions of the world. This chapter is an attempt to meet that challenge, to think with unexpected contradictions, to move to a place in-between schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis. In so doing, it shall find a critical space in the middle of things that allows us to consider and respond to the complex aesthetic project of Nightwood in novel ways. I will argue that a certain form of narcissism, though one not necessarily recognizable to conventional psychoanalysis, is one name for this intermediate critical space. I shall first, however, offer a brief (if vulgar) psychoanalytic reading of narcissism in Nightwood in order to distinguish where psychoanalysis has previously gone and offer a suggestion of where it can go.58 It will then be the goal of this chapter to follow that suggestion.
58 With this vulgar reading, one which shall be based on a Lacanian paradigm, I realize that I will be diminishing some of the complexities and nuances which psychoanalysis has to offer, especially in its poststructuralist reformulations. I will, however, be doing so in order to suggest wider analytic expansions into realms that conventional psychoanalysis cannot see.
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At the beginning of his relationship with Robin, the enigma of Nightwood, Baron Felix sees her figure “reflected in a door mirror of a back room, dressed in a heavy brocaded gown which time had stained in places, in others split, yet which was so voluminous that there were yards enough to refashion” (46). Certain psychoanalytic orthodoxies have trained us to understand the appearance of a mirror as the figuration of a fantasmatically constituted narcissistic relation between self and other. In the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, to be specific, this imaginary relation derives from the infantile experience of what he calls the “mirror stage.” According to Lacan, the infant, while still in a state of fragmented and inept bodily mobility, anticipates an illusory mastery of corporeal unity in an imaginary relation to its mirror image. The form (Gestalt) of the mirror image (“imago”) appears to the infant as of a higher plane of unification than the perception of its own morphology, and thus the imago is misrecognized as a perfected form of a developing sense of self. The infant, that is, introjects this misrecognized mirror image as an ideal ego that it will always strive towards, but never achieve. Insofar as the lack which organizes the ego precipitates the subject in primordial form, the infantile relation of imaginary narcissism “constitutes its objects in an abstract equivalence due to competition from other people, and turns the I into an apparatus to which every instinctual pressure constitutes a danger, even if it corresponds to a natural maturation process” (Lacan 79). Due to the alienating experience of the mirror stage, every subjective relation is mediated by the other’s desire in such a way as to produce an antagonistic objectification of the self to itself. As Laplanche and Pontalis note, “in so far as the intersubjective relationship bears the mark of the mirror phase, it is an imaginary, dual relationship inevitably characterized by an aggressive tension in which the ego is constituted as another and the other as an alter ego” (251). The mirror stage establishes intersubjectivity as narcissism, an inevitable self-relation that also entails a destructive relationship between the self and the world. Even in the actions of philanthropists and idealists, we find not an outpouring of altruism, but an underlying aggressiveness exhibited as an attempt to master a constitutive lack (Lacan 80-81).
In this reading, Felix introjects Robin as an ideal ego upon seeing her image in the mirror. Though he thinks he has “learned the secret” of Robin, Lacan teaches us that this is a misrecognition of the other’s desire as one’s own in a narcissistically enacted
73 imaginary relation (Nightwood 46). The “split” that time has put in Robin’s gown can thus be read as an inscription of the “temporal dialectic that decisively projects the individual’s formation into history,” in which the mirror stage produces what Lacan calls a split subjectivity (Lacan 78). In Felix’s narcissistic gaze, Robin wears “feathers of the kind his mother had worn” (46). Thus, in his aggressive and ambivalent desire to move towards a version of himself without lack, Felix attempts to destructively return to a union with the maternal body prior to the traumatic alienation instigated in the dialectic of the Other. As he perceives his own violent separation from the mother in the splits of Robin’s gown, Felix nonetheless notices that the fabric is so “voluminous there were yards enough to refashion” (46). In other words, Robin confronts Felix with his own castration anxiety. In seeing Robin’s image in the mirror, he remembers the lack which constitutes him; he encounters Robin as the phallic signifier, as the “voluminous yards” that he does not contain and which he can never attain. The narcissistic intersubjective relation between Felix and Robin, thus, can be read as a violent aggressivity.
Is this aggressivity, however, an inevitability? Must the self always approach the other with the vengeful wrath of a fantasmatically lost unity? Are there other ways of reading narcissism that do not reproduce the violent intersubjective relations of the imaginary order? Nightwood wants and sees something else for narcissism, refusing the idea that it is necessarily connected to aggressivity. The novel intimates that narcissism can be the vehicle for a radical consideration of nonviolent intimacies. Though Lacan may provide an insightful (if masterful) hermeneutic model, Nightwood seems to suggest that such a model, in its very attempt to master any interpretive enterprise, is an incitement for violence. To move away from a violent intersubjectivity may mean a dramatic reconsideration of the ways in which intersubjectivity itself can be read. In the same passage that we have been considering, the narration tells us that Robin’s skirts “were moulded to her hips and fell downward and out, wider and longer than those of other women, heavy silks that made her seem newly ancient” (46). Robin is uncannily original in both senses of the term; her garments make her both new and old, both found and remembered. Freud famously suggests that a “child sucking at his mother’s breast has become the prototype for every relation of love. The finding of an object is in fact a re-finding of it” (SE, VII 222). Nightwood would seem to confirm this view. At the
74 same time, however, the passive extensibility of Robin’s clothing complicates this initial reading. Her skirt extends “downward and out” onto the world, whereby she becomes “wider and longer” than other women. In this sense, then, her status as “newly ancient” seems to be less about the rediscovery of a lost object of love (though this is surely involved), but rather about an extension of being into time and space.
In the work of queer critic and literary theorist Leo Bersani, extensibility names the movement of narcissism, not the exemption from it. Bersani is a key figure for the foundation of queer theory and for the psychoanalytic rethinking of sexuality and its complicated relation to art.59 I turn to him in this chapter because he offers a way to think about a narcissistic relationality that is not wedded to the integrity of the self and the violence that comes with the attempt to ensure that integrity. Insofar as Bersani widens the analytic scope of how narcissism can be read, reading him alongside Nightwood will allow us to discover the ways in which Barnes complicates the relationship between the subject and art, between the self and the aesthetic relations that force it outside of or beside itself. In other words, I turn to Bersani because I find him to be an especially sensitive and sophisticated psychoanalytic critic of literature who has explored, at prodigious length and for the greater part of his career, the intricacies of narcissism as the site at which sexuality and community convene; he does so, moreover, in a way that particularly and profoundly resonates with Barnes’s exploration of affect, community, and queerness. Furthermore, we shall see various unanticipated resonances with the paradigm of becoming set forth by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (as detailed in the previous chapter of this thesis). Turning to Bersani after Deleuze allows us to expand upon the notion that affect can make us inhuman and that this nonhuman passage can become the basis for a challenging form of community. Bersani, though he never explicitly deals with affect as an analytic category, provides ways to think with theories of affect, ways which incorporate psychoanalysis into a project of affective transformation.
In Bersani’s work, following Freud, to go outside oneself is always to find the self again. For Bersani, however, this does not reinforce the violence of self-constitution,
59 Both Bersani’s chapter, “Sexuality and Esthetics,” in The Freudian Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 29-50, and his infamous essay, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” in Is the Rectum a Grave? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 3-30, are often cited as canonical theoretical texts for queer theory.
75 as he promotes a theory of impersonal narcissism, which, in the very movements to expand the limits of the self, shatters it in a coterminous movement of self- dissemination. The only way to pleasurably experience difference, Bersani suggests, is to accept the monstrous burden of an ascetic retreat from any relation except in relation to oneself. In even other words, to love—to be in and to open onto the world nonviolently—is to find oneself imperfected everywhere in the interstices beyond the self. An impersonal form of narcissism, that is, would pursue the unrestrained extensibility of a self indifferent to anything recognizable as the self. Against (or at least alongside) the dialectic of narcissistic violence outlined in Lacan’s mirror stage, Bersani insists that desire itself might be configured as depending “on the narcissistic subject’s erotic aim of shattering the very totality it seeks to appropriate in the object. The self- protective and self-preservative ego of the Lacanian Imaginary is not intrinsically distinct from…the self-shattering ego of primary narcissism” (Arts of Impoverishment 156). What if a new form of relationality could be conceived of in which the violent dialectic of self and Other instituted by the mirror stage could be rethought? What if what the self finds in others is not a misidentification, nor perhaps even an identification (though the two are always coterminous in the work of Lacan), but rather a formless self-extension that disengages from the integrity of self-intelligibility?
In providing one way to articulate these questions, Bersani suggests a model of relationality that does not promote violence as the certainty of our connectedness with others, and thereby offers a way to read narcissistic sexuality in Nightwood as a communal pleasure. This means, however, doing a strategic kind of disservice to the authority of psychoanalytic discourse itself. In order for psychoanalysis (and for the concept of narcissism in particular) to emerge as a useful model for theorizing relationality, psychoanalysis has to be made unrecognizable to itself; it must, that is, itself be put into the circuitous mobility of desire that it inconsistently promotes. “In fact psychoanalysis is hyperbolically aware of the world as different from the self— which is why it can so brilliantly describe all our techniques for erasing the difference,” Bersani writes, “and why it is of so little help in constructing an epistemology and an ethics grounded in perceptions of sameness, an epistemology and an ethics that might allow us to build a nonviolent relation to the real” (“Against” 99). It may then be possible to sacrifice the fidelity of psychoanalysis in favor of promoting its most
76 formidable impulses. In other words, some of psychoanalysis’s most radical claims—the threatening nature of sexuality to a vision of the secure self, the impersonality that attends all attachment, the narcissism that brings the ego into being—must be followed, even if it means collapsing psychoanalysis as an authoritative critical discourse. This is the productive potential of Leo Bersani’s criticism. In fact, one of the centralities of his work has been the celebration of a certain type of failure, both in and beyond the Freudian text: as he puts it, “[T]he psychoanalytic authenticity in Freud’s work depends on a process of theoretical collapse” (Bersani, Freudian Body 3). The only true psychoanalytic gesture, by implication, is the one that deforms psychoanalysis itself and makes it speak to other discourses of desire and relationality.
The correspondence between impersonality and narcissism, dissolutely followed, produces, or perhaps adheres to, the importance of such a failure. Seeing the compulsion toward a modality of impersonal narcissism in Nightwood will allow us to acknowledge the profoundly transformative potential of Djuna Barnes’s art. Nonetheless, in reading a queer ethos of impersonal narcissism as central to the aesthetic project of Nightwood, a flawless overlapping of terms decidedly does not emerge. Nothing, in fact, could be more antithetical to such a project. In the place of a perfect projection of ideas, I am suggesting something of a correspondence (a concept integral to Bersani’s work) between the Bersanian ethos and the aesthetic of Nightwood. In this chapter, I will attend to the ways in which Nightwood radically formulates a mode of impersonal narcissism. In so doing, Nightwood not only instructs us how to love and how to be; it also, and more originally, teaches us to see ontological loving as the key to community formation itself. At its most radical, Nightwood suggests, as we will soon see, that queer relationality is a mode of incest. The next two sections of this chapter put Bersani in dialogue with Nightwood, allowing them to correspond. They are meant to inaccurately replicate, to imperfectly mirror one another. The first section, devoted to sketching out Bersani’s framework of narcissism, will informally find itself repeated in the second section, devoted to reading Nightwood. In this way, Nightwood and queer thought find themselves already implicated in one another, already speaking to and transforming with a shared desire.
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Impersonal Narcissism and the Aesthetic Subject (Reflection 1)
At least as early as A Future For Astyanax (1976), the animating problematic for Leo Bersani has been: “To what extent can repetition be enacted in a non-derivative mode? Or, in other terms, can repetition be separated from repression and sublimation?” (Future 11). Djuna Barnes, albeit in an otherwise expressed register, poses a similar question through the juxtaposition of Robin Vote and her erstwhile lover, Felix Volkbein. On the one hand, Robin seems to listen “to the echo of some foray in the blood that had no known setting” (48). Felix, on the other, mystified by the impenetrable enigma of his wife, performs a pathetic spectacle in relation to her, “reiterating the tragedy of his father” (48). The difference between a non-derivative and a derivative repetition is here translated into a contrast between an echo without origin and a reiteration without originality. Must repetition be a tragic or paranoid reiteration of a personal past? Or is there a mode of imaginative replication in which the exact replicability of terms is neither attained nor desired? Can thinking repetition differently enable us to configure a mode of relations in which difference itself would no longer be a structuring principle of how we come together (as in typical Freudian notions of understanding difference)?
Repetition, for psychoanalytic theory, is inseparable from narcissism; and yet, the way psychoanalysis conceives of the forms that narcissism takes is far from unambiguous. In “Instincts and their Vicissitudes” (1915), Freud notes that during the beginning stages of narcissism, the infant experiences the world as a hated object: “[T]he object is brought to the ego from the external world in the first instance by the instincts of self-preservation; and it cannot be denied that hating, too, originally characterized the relation of the ego to the alien external world with the stimuli it introduces” (SE, XIV 136). In response to the painful stimuli that the child perceives as coming from the external world, it creates that world as something to be feared and hated, attempting to eject any trace of it within the developing ego. The constitution of the self thus becomes a repetition of this violent attempt at expulsion. In this framework, the self is incompatible with nonviolence. In “Is the Rectum a Grave?”
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(1987), Bersani insists upon the connection between the ego and violence: “The self is a practical convenience; promoted to the status of an ethical ideal, it is a sanction for violence” (30). To attribute the highest moral authority to the person and its personalities is to affirm a violent response to the world, for “as soon as persons are posited, the war begins” (Bersani, “Rectum” 25). This vision of narcissism leaves our murderous ego-instincts intact as we repeat the vicious exclusion of otherness. Is this, however, the only way narcissism and repetition can meet? Or, as Bersani writes to British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in their dialogue on both the limits and the possibilities of psychoanalysis, “Might the ego also be an agent of impersonal narcissism?” (Intimacies 77).
In the now canonical paper “On Narcissism” (1914), Freud made the distinction between a “primary” and a “secondary” narcissism. The latter is the superimposition of an object-cathexis upon the structure of a more “primitive” form of narcissism found in the infant (SE, XIV 75). In this former state of original, or “primary,” narcissism, however, it is impossible “to discriminate a sexual energy—the libido—from an energy of the ego-instincts” (SE, XIV 76). A developmental structure exists in every human individual in which the sexual object is indistinct from the movement of libidinal energy towards that object. In other words, in primary narcissism, there is a completely undifferentiated relationship to the world, where the self that is adored in self-love cannot be distinguished from any external object. Given this, Freud writes that “a unity comparable to the ego cannot exist in the individual from the start; the ego has to be developed. The auto-erotic instincts, however, are there from the very first; so there must be something added to auto-eroticism—a new psychical action—in order to bring about narcissism” (SE, XIV 77; emphasis added). Bersani reformulates this passage as: “the ego itself comes into being as the result of a certain development of autoeroticism” (Culture 36). Self- love, in other words, has ontological priority to the elaboration of any particular self; the nonfixated energy of an objectless state of primary narcissism is the general condition of possibility for selfhood. This nonfixated sexual energy, an unalloyed sexuality, becomes the process by which every individual repeatedly attempts to return to a state prior to its individuation by specific object-cathexis. The formation of the ego at once both structures and shatters that ego.
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Bersani most fully explores the motivation for this type of self-shattering in The Freudian Body (1986). He here attempts to elaborate upon the Freudian problematic (articulated in Three Essays on Sexuality) of why the ego would seek to preserve the pleasurable-unpleasurable tension of sexuality by replicating the painful increase of exciting stimuli. Borrowing the concept of an ébranlement—a shattering—from French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, Bersani argues that the defining feature of infantile experience is its vulnerability to the shattering intensities of sexuality, determined as that which is unbearable to a structured sense of self.60 The origin of sexuality itself, then, depends upon a gap between the infantile exposure to intolerable sexual stimuli and the expansion of ego configurations capable of warding off those stimuli. Bersani affirms, “The mystery of sexuality is that we seek not only to get rid of this shattering tension but also to repeat, even to increase it…[S]exuality—at least in the mode in which it is constituted—could be thought of as a tautology for masochism” (Freudian Body 38-39). The sexual aim of self-shattering integral to masochistic pleasure is endemic to the sexual itself. To put this in another way: sexuality has no ontological status apart from the desire to replicate self-shattering; the constitution of a libidinal ego is inseparable from a disarticulation (and thereby, a separation from the libido) of that ego.
Insofar as narcissism originally echoes the self-shattering of this objectless state of an unalloyed sexuality grounded in the experience of pure excitement, we can plausibly posit a notion of narcissism as an extension of the sexual tautology. Primary narcissism, in Bersani’s reformulation, “replays the shattering stimulations of that [infantile] environment in the paradoxical form of a structuralizing self-shattering” (Culture 41). Narcissism would then not be the adoration of the self as perfect, but the love for the self as liable to be shattered, broken, or dispersed; narcissism would be the self’s desiring appreciation of the value of not being—that is, the value of not being without being shattered. If narcissism, by definition, always contains a certain type of self- interest, this interest “is not a desire for something; it is a desire to be with an intensity that cannot be contained—held in or defined—by a self” (Bersani, Culture 100-01). The relationship between the subject and the narcissistic movements of self-love would need
60 Cf. Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
80 a radically transformed theory, one in which the self desired in narcissism is utterly unlike itself. We need, that is, in Bersani’s words, a “cartography of the subject” or a “tracing of spatial connectedness,” in which narcissism traverses masochism “not as pleasure in pain so much as the pleasure of at once losing the self and discovering it elsewhere, inaccurately replicated” (“Conversation” 177, 174; emphasis added).
One way to discover this mode of replication is to find it in gay desire, for homosexuality necessarily engages various desiring positions. The privileging of sameness in homosexual desire has, “as its condition of possibility, an indeterminate identity. Homosexual desire is desire for the same from the perspective of a self already identified as different from itself” (Bersani, Homos 59). It is therefore possible to imagine a modality of sexual preference without psychic content of any kind, which is only as “the chaste promiscuity of a body repeatedly reaching out to find itself beyond itself” (Bersani, Homos 125). On account of this extensibility of the body, Bersani urges us to recognize the “homo”-ness that, though visibly essential to homosexuality, would be intrinsic to all desire. The “homo” in homo-ness would not designate an object choice, but would instead characterize the desire to replicate a universally undifferentiated sameness as the condition of any desiring energy whatsoever. Insofar as an acknowledgement of homo-ness also entails an acceptance of an extensible sameness, “homo-ness is an anti-identitarian identity” (Homos 101). If gay men are, as Freud has argued, “plainly seeking themselves as love objects” (SE, XIV 88), the self-repeating gesture characteristic of a gay object-choice is nonetheless—and all the more so—a repetition without perfection. In other words, if homo-sexuality is born of a certain self- dismissal seen as a self-pursuing motion, the objects found as a result of self-replication would necessarily be imperfect versions of a self already loved for its imperfection. We exist, Bersani claims, both spatially and temporally, in a “vast network of near-sameness, a network characterized by relations of inaccurate replication” (Homos 146).61 The
61 In a longer study, it would be productive to explore the relations between Bersani’s notion of inaccurate replication and what Derrida calls “iteration.” On the one hand, Bersani writes, “What the world finds in the subject (in addition to physical correspondences) is a certain activity of consciousness, which partially reinvents the world as it repeats it” (“Psychoanalysis” 147; emphasis added). The Derridean notion of “iteration,” on the other hand, is the “logic that ties repetition to alterity,” in which the inscription of any mark entails the nonpresent remainder in the form of a “dehiscence and a cleft [brisure] which are essential,” and in which “the intention animating the utterance will never be through and through present to itself and to its content” (Derrida, Limited Inc 7, 18). The metaphysical condition of consciousness itself relies on the necessary alteration of any mark as it is grafted into a context. Both
81 repetition of the self-same cannot reduce this profound relationality to a process of accurate replication, for the perfect identity of terms is “an attempted human correction to these correspondences, a fantasy of specularity in the place of correspondence” (Homos 146). The world, in other words, is made out of imperfect relations; perfection is a notion that resides solely in the minds of men.
The model of narcissism that Bersani moves toward is one that disposes with the concept of the person altogether, where the integrity of the ego is in fact seen as a limitation to the production of narcissistic relations. As the narcissistic self moves out into the world, it becomes nothing but its contact with that world, a contact at once emboldening and reductive. “The narcissistic expansion of a desiring skin” is therefore severely coextensive with a flamboyant “renunciation of narcissistic self-containment” (Bersani, Homos 120). This newly narcissistic engagement with the world would be contingent upon a renunciation of alterity altogether, reducing the other to the same. Relationality would then become not an elimination of the other in the violent fantasy of the idealized ego, but instead (and more ethically) the elaboration of otherness as a “nonthreatening supplement to sameness” (Bersani, Homos 7).
The project of recognizing this relational mode then requires what Bersani calls a mode of impersonal narcissism. In a reading of Plato’s Phaedrus, Bersani outlines what an impersonal narcissism divorced from the specularity of personality would look like. According to Bersani, the Socratic model of love presented in Phaedrus illustrates that once a soul has been imprisoned within a body (that is, born into humanity by being separated from spiritual Beauty), a relation to other bodies must be created in order to rediscover a version of the lost relation to the pure Forms. Since the gods alone have access to these Forms, we may only find that purity imperfectly transformed in others. This is the case in the love between the man of intellect and the boy of youth. The boy that the lover falls in love with, however, “does not only remind us of the Beauty we saw before being imprisoned in a body” (Intimacies 81). Every soul followed a particular god, singing in his heavenly chorus prior to a soul’s corporeal incarnation. Therefore, we seek, in love, the boy whose nature is like the god we both followed. In other words, “we seek, through love, not only to relive, albeit imperfectly, the ‘ultimate vision’ of pure
Bersani and Derrida assign reinvention as the condition of repetition, but what needs to be tended to is whether a relational ontology can be negotiated between the two. I shall leave this for further inquiry.
82 ideas some of us may have shared with the gods; we also wish to revive the memory of the god in whose company we pursued that vision” (Intimacies 81). The particular nature of the loved boy corresponds to the being purely realized in the being of a particular god. In finding a boy to love, the lover aspires to make the boy more like himself so that they may both become closer to their mutual being (as originally found in their god). This narcissistic movement that has nothing at all to do with a narcissism based on a singular person, and everything to do with shared being: “The lover narcissistically loves the image of his own universal individuation that he implants in the boy he loves, but he is implanting more of what his beloved is, more of the type of being they already share” (Intimacies 82). The narcissism of the Socratic lover, far-removed from an elimination of otherness, “suppresses accidents of personality so that the loved one may more adequately mirror the universal singularity mythified in the figure of the god they both served” (Intimacies 82). Thus, an impersonal narcissism arises when the subject sees a self reflected in the loved one that is essentially indifferent to the personality of a unique individual. Impersonal narcissism would instead register as a spatial orientation towards finding oneself inaccurately replicated in the world.
“The narcissistic pleasure of reaching toward our own ‘form’ elsewhere,” Bersani clarifies, “has little to do with the flood of an oceanic, limitless narcissism intent on eliminating the world’s difference” (“Against” 100).62 There is a subtle but nonetheless important distinction between a projection of the self onto the world (i.e., the world entirely reformulated as the self), and the natural extensibility of all being in which the self is found already in the world, without the need or desire to impose upon it. In the latter, more ethical model, the emphasis remains on the dissemination of a “superficial view of human relations,” in which “the other, no longer respected or violated as a person, would merely be cruised as another opportunity, at once insignificant and precious, for narcissistic pleasures” (Homos 129). For Bersani, an impersonal narcissism is inseparable from an abandoned cruising in pursuit of an emboldening relationality. In his reading of Jean Genet’s novel Funeral Rites, Bersani finds that homosexuality (as a modality of desire) is unconditionally available to an “ascetic pursuit of evil,” in which sexual objects “are reduced, or elevated, to a kind of objectless or generalized
62 Cf. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, in Standard Edition, Vol. XXI, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 64-65,72.
83 ejaculation, a fucking of the world rather than each other” (Homos 159, 166). In relational “cruising,” the casual or unintentional extensibility of the self is found to adhere pleasurably to the world and to others. Bersani thus defines cruising as “sexual sociability” (“Sociability” 57). The dangerous risk connected with this form of relationality is not that it “reduces relations to promiscuous sex, but rather that the promiscuity may stop. Few things are more difficult than to block our interest in others, to prevent our connection to them from degenerating into a ‘relationship’” (“Sociability” 57). If our “interest in others” (i.e., our paranoid interest in otherness) leads to the promotion of interpersonal violence, and if the cruising of impersonal narcissism is one way to avoid such interest, then perhaps nothing could be more dangerous than to allow our promiscuous connection to the world to end.
This connectedness would be our ascetic cultivation of selfhood in which we willingly and passively accept our failure to be ourselves perfectly. If we can learn to consent to the condition of being less than we are and cruise the world without asking its name, we may also learn to experience the world with and in the impersonal pleasure of a “rhythmed being” (“Sociability” 47-48). The strength of such a formulation, one which Bersani has spent his career re-articulating, is that it allows us to find ways of being implicated in each other without reference to the perils of personhood. In other words, it allows us to correspond and connect to one another in ways that discard the self as the integral term of connectedness, and thereby remove ourselves, at least temporarily, from sociality as such. To do so is essentially to let the self fail to live up to social standards of an acceptable life. Ascesis—the withdrawal from the social in order to enrich a new configuration of relationality—is the acknowledgment of a failure of the self. The French theorist Jean Allouch, an important figure in the radical transformation of psychoanalysis away from a series of normative stories of self-development, thus crafts the formula: “Fucking is a defeat in the sense that it is a defeat of the subjective as such” (“Pour introduire” 58-59).63 If ascetic cultivation requires a failure of subjectivity as such, is there a form of being which insists beyond or beside this modification? In other words, is the sexual impersonality of narcissism incompatible with any and all forms of subjectivity?
63 My translation. “Baiser est une défaite en ce sens qu'il s'agit d'une défaite du subjectif comme tel.”
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Bersani, especially in his collaborative work with Ulysse Dutoit, proposes a productive answer to these questions, one that heaves us into a realm of aesthetics. The extensibility formed in the inaccurate replications of an impersonal narcissism necessitates a diminution of the subjective as such, in order to explore the potential of an aesthetic subject. Bersani and Dutoit write, “The multiplication of being depends on a lessening of psychic subject-hood. More exactly, our reappearances as (mere) appearances depend on a certain type of withdrawal from realized being, a withdrawal we will associate with an aesthetic (rather than a psychological) subject” (Being 6). In this passage, an aesthetic subjectivity has three features: (1) a devaluation of psychological essence as the defining feature of subject-hood; (2) an emphasis, thereby, of the formal (rather than psychic or personal) relations that the subject can make; and, relatedly, (3) an ascetic withdrawal from realizable being (i.e., a subjectivity that can fully be itself at all times). If the subject is, at least momentarily or heuristically, deprived of a psychological depth—loses, that is, a vertical symbolism between the psychic essence or inner being of the self and a paradigm of psychological intelligibility—that loss can become a vast analogical expansion. In other words, an aesthetic subjectivity disregards the ways in which the subject can fit into a psychological profile. Instead, it places value on the ways in which the subject can extend into the world, the ways in which it can find its being formally repeated elsewhere (as with the repeated being of the Socratic lovers). The point is not to deny that psychological motivation exists (for it obviously does), but rather to reject the idea that it is only by reference to psychological affinities that we can meaningfully connect to one another. A paradigm of aesthetic subjectivity shifts the focus instead to the transitory affinities that the subject can make as it extends beyond itself. Though these types of affinities may only exist momentarily or accidentally, they nonetheless assume more ontological value than any psychic mass, insofar as they establish more ethical and more momentous modes of connectedness.
It is these passing or chance relations in the universe to which Bersani and Dutoit call our attention: “Mere juxtaposition creates formal relations,” they write, “and in a sense the world is nothing but juxtaposed forms” (Violence 57). Uninterested, fortuitous communication between forms stresses nothing more serious or substantial than an indefinite economy of formal circulation. This economy can point us towards
85 the greatest joke of nature itself, the punch line of which is the recurrent ill fit between form and identity (Violence 59). In other words, insofar as the self can move beside itself in both space and time, it can accordingly find connections to both human and nonhuman forms of life (i.e., in the natural world, the world of art, etc.). We cannot, then, consider the subject to be bounded by the identity of the “person” or “human.” As the subject moves beside itself, it no longer “fits” into its previously intelligible identity. The subject, considered aesthetically, can thus “laugh” and find pleasure in the ill fit between its disciplined identity (necessitated by social order) and its extension beyond such, celebrating its own failure to make accordance with social ascription; it finds pleasure in being only an impermanent appearance of a mode of being.
The chance relations of the aesthetic subject “testify simultaneously to a boundless diversity in nature as well as to a certain degree of reliable familiarity in any form we may encounter. Material traces or inscriptions are always finally repeated” (Violence 59). Again, nature here names the “natural” (i.e., non-intended and casual) circulation of relations between not only humans, but between the human and the nonhuman as well. And yet, it is never strictly an issue of identity; formal comparisons intimate nothing about either the essence of contacting terms or the ability to substitute one term for another (Violence 59). In other words, the aesthetic subject only exists within its relations; as it breaks or moves away from those relations, it transforms itself, or falls back into a subjective mode based on the psychological person. The connecting terms speak not of what the other is, but of how they can connect, exploring and experimenting with different aesthetic elaborations. Therefore, even in a mode of aesthetic replication, relationality is not coterminous with resemblance or any other kind of mimetic relationship. In the production of a formal connection, then, we must pass through an “interesting space which diverts us from the connection,” whereby the relating terms may not resemble each other at all (Violence 64); the forms “touch, ultimately, through the mediation of other forms” (Violence 64).
The dualistic paradigm upon which mimesis relies—a hierarchy of representation against reality, subject against nature, ego against external other—could not then yield a certainty as to the formal stability of the terms which it is said to have produced. Instead, to think the subject as an aesthetic subject is to be forced to think outside of the categories entailed by humanity; aesthetics is necessarily incompatible
86 with the self-authorizing determination of anthropomorphic thought (Bersani, “Conversation” 178). In other words, the aesthetic subject collapses the difference between itself and others, and between itself and the world, in order to explore other kinds of connections that have nothing to do with personality. To think aesthetically is to, as a result of a certain mobility of formal relations, be more than human ontology allows. In other words, a conceptually different ontology might not only, or even principally, include such relational groupings such as mother, father, child, lover, or friend, but also, and in a more consequential way, composition, syntax, space, line, color—in short, all those affairs which we more readily (and willingly) associate with art. This aesthetic ontology requires only that the world be made intelligible within imaginative or stylistic relations.
Taking into account a different, aesthetic constitution of subjectivity that is based on an exchange of sameness with the world, forces us (as I said before) to empty the subject of its psychological depths, of the internal density that impedes the subject’s extension into the world. In the place of that lost density, a volume, at once more vain and more momentous, can be established. As Bersani suggests:
[T]he very language of “inside” and “outside” obscures the nature of our presence in the world. For on the one hand every human subject is only outside in the sense that he or she is nothing but a certain volume in the spaces of the real; and on the other, the world in which we are lost is imprisoned within those representations by which we recognize ourselves. (Culture 78)
The subject, considered aesthetically, can be seen as one undifferentiated term among a plethora of formal elaborations. Only our anthropomorphic piety designates the human as the supreme expression of the formal relations of being. To acknowledge this is to accept that interiority/exteriority is not the only, or even primary, threshold of being in the world. A sensuality of forms, as a consequence, can compose an emblazoned, less formalized (and thus less violent) series of formal relations. I would like to call this a formal ontology without formality. By this I mean a mode of being that is composed only of aesthetic relations, but nonetheless disposes with the “formalities” of permanent likeness; relations are stylistic, but temporary. The result of a “compressed assemblage of forms is intensified by the absence of any depth of field,” and, therefore, the
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“unavoidable connectedness of forms in space” would be unconcerned with the ensured fidelity of its own formal stability or longevity (Bersani and Dutoit, Caravaggio 59).
This gives rise to a new relatedness in which terms appear only as an appearance (i.e., a transitory connection within in impermanent network of being). An ecstatic passivity can thus be read as a newfound “receptiveness to the austere sensuality of a universal connectedness of forms” (Caravaggio 61). In Caravaggio’s Secrets (1998), Bersani and Dutoit read St. John the Baptist (Young with Ram) (1602), a painting that depicts John as in a sensual communication with nature, as saying:
Join me, although where I am is somewhere between two realms of being, between my physical, individuated existence and my being as a disseminated connectedness throughout the universe—a between- ness concretely figured in the painting by a casual, poignant and haunting intimacy between two species. (Caravaggio 82)
In this case, we are in a “realm of being” that is between human and animal, a between- ness that nonetheless produces a “poignant and haunting intimacy” in the ambivalent fact of its intermediacy. Bersani and Dutoit (akin to Deleuze and Guattari before them) perceive the formal category of the human to be the burden of a more profound connectedness to the world, to a more ethical and desirable relationality. To accept a designation as an aesthetic subject, one must also accept the inhumanity of this gesture. To elaborate, that is, one’s being outside of oneself is to no longer be contained within such formal restrictions. Something like a becoming-animal happens (perhaps much to Deleuze’s chagrin) in the Bersanian model of inaccurate replication.
The narcissistic pleasure of witnessing objects “glow into their own being” is a function of the subject impersonally placing her being on the surface of another “being,” whereby the subject “corresponds” with and to that which is both different from and identical to herself—that is, a portion of the world’s appearance (Caravaggio 71). The ontology of impersonal narcissism is thus nothing but aesthetic correspondence:
Thus the subject is—touchingly but erroneously—made the agent of its reoccurrences outside of itself. If, as I have been proposing here and elsewhere, we are in the world before we are born into it, this is not because we once—historically or mythically—possessed ourselves, but rather because it is impossible to take on a form—a being—to which the world does not have a response, with which it is not already in correspondence. (Bersani, “Sociability” 57)
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Correspondence is a crucial category for Bersani, and one that demands a few remarks. In the passage cited above from “Sociability and Cruising” (2002), the being of the subject is inseparable from its relation to the formal responses of the world to that being; a being-in-the-world is a meeting of bodies (though not necessarily human bodies) for promiscuous contact. One way to understand “correspondence,” then, is in a strictly etymological sense. According to the O.E.D., correspond comes from both the Middle French correspondre, meaning, “to be in agreement or harmony with,” and from the Medieval Latin correspondere, from cor- (“together, with each other”) and respondere (“to answer”). Correspondence would be a harmonious call-and-response between the self and the world. We can, however, understand “correspond” in a more homo-phonic sense as well; that is, we can choose to hear corps- (or “body”) instead of cor-. In that case, correspondence would be bodies responding to one another—correspondence can be defined as “body talk” (though if we also understand “correspondence” as a “communication through letters,” we may be forced to accept that bodies can only truly talk in writing). The condition of harmony between different bodies is an unfettered channel of communication in which they are united in the formal sameness of the channel itself.
An unconditional openness to communication with the world could simply be another way of describing what is more commonly known as love. Love, for Bersani, is an “absolutizing of correspondences between the moi and the non-moi” (Culture 70). Taking Baudelaire as his model, Bersani argues that love is the phenomenon of the self as it is possessed by the external world. In the aesthetic subjectivity that I have been exploring, the self is penetrated by the self-less nature of its own networks. The self’s unreserved availability, that is, to a multiplicity of non-selves “repeats the move toward self-completion…as the jouissance of being penetrated and possessed by otherness” (Culture 73). The love of the aesthetic subject appears as the uncontainable failure of the subject’s (now abandoned) boundaries—which is to say, as an immense expansion of a self without self-respect.64 This is what Bersani calls an “ascetic erotics,” or the
64 In A Lover’s Discourse (1977), Roland Barthes writes, “Throughout life, all of loves ‘failures’ resemble one another (and with reason: they all proceed from the same flaw). X and Y have not been able (have not wanted) to answer my ‘demand,’ to adhere to my ‘truth’; […] for me, the former has merely repeated the latter. And yet X and Y are incomparable…” (103). For Barthes, love is the necessary failure of terms
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“celebration of the self-as-world, in short a narcissistic jouissance” (Culture 73, 74). The condition for all love is a pleasurable withdrawal from the selfhood, but a withdrawal that nonetheless emerges as a receptive self-expansion. We love inaccurate replications of ourselves; we experience difference only by desiring an unqualified state of sameness. This is why all love is, as Bersani notes, homo-erotic: “Even in the love between a man and a woman, each partner rejoices in finding himself, or herself, in the other...[Love is] an expression of the security humans can feel when they embrace difference as the supplemental benefit of a universal replication and solidarity of being” (“Genital” 365). We cannot conceive of love as an intimate (per se) connection between persons based on the recognition of personhood; such a conception is a call for violence. Instead, love is purely about formal coincidence—it approximates the ways in which we ask, “What relation can I have with myself that allows me to disparage my self?” Or, as Lauren Berlant succinctly expresses it: “love’s function is to be formally brilliant” (“Love” 433).65 That formal brilliance connects us to the world as if to ourselves. If this is true, difference not only could, but would be abandoned as a primary structuring category of relations. “Love is nothing personal,” Adam Phillips writes in Intimacies, “difference always is” (99).
This is not to say that the narcissistic absolution of an aesthetic subjectivity permanently dislodges us from the exigencies of more recognizable forms of the subject; we cannot make ourselves into permanent works of art. After all, we can never completely overcome our status as humans within history.66 To suggest otherwise is to
“merely” and “incomparably” repeating one another. The iridescence of an intractable nuance between the subject and the world animates them both. 65 Berlant, however, remains critical of the Bersanian model. She writes, “Queer thought must take [the separation of form and love] on when it enters the political, the pedagogical—not by teaching that we are all alike and compelled to repeat our alikeness intelligibly, but by teaching some of what we’ve learned about love, under the surface, across the lines, around the scene, informally” ("Love" 448). Berlant’s critique relies on a subtle misreading of Bersani, for it is not simply that we are “all alike” and that we “repeat our alikeness intelligibly.” An aesthetic subjectivity asserts that we are ontologically similar, that form is the constitution of ontology in general, but that any formal relation is only momentary, that an ascetic abandon of formality is requisite for formal relationality. For Bersani, though Berlant reads him as suggesting otherwise, form itself is necessarily informal. 66 Though I do not have space to fully develop this important point, it might be necessary to explore the connections between Bersani (and by extension, Deleuze and Guattari) and a Marxist-inspired historical materialist approach. Though this connection would be riddled with complications, I do not think it is impossible. “Identity-politics is far from dead. Indeed, with the collapse of communism it practically defines our entire political life. We know that, in practice, communism was inseparable from nationalist ambitions;” Bersani writes in an aside at the beginning of “Against Monogamy,” “in its universal revolutionary aspirations, however, it was an anti-identitarian ideology, a global social project
90 authorize a violence akin to the kind I have been trying to think away from. Against the naïve assumption that aesthetic being implies a resolvable permanence, we must embrace formal irresolution as a complement to our impossible inhumanity. Bersani and Dutoit confirm this: “The aesthetic subject is not a monumentalizing of the self, but rather should be thought of as a renewable retreat from the seriousness of stable identities and stable being” (Being 9). If this alternative ontology is both an ontological expansion and a psychic impediment, an aesthetic ascesis is then the “precondition for a lessness that allows us to reoccur, differently, everywhere” (Being 9). It is an ascetic cultivation, however, that demands an ethical response to and availability for the world, not as an indissoluble guarantee of nonviolence, but rather as a committed detachment from the relational modes that support this violence. It requires, that is, a “belated recognition that there are life-sustaining and even self-expansive modes of losing your head” (Caravaggio 99). The ethical is thus inseparable from the aesthetic: to “aestheticize” our relation to the world is not to abdicate ourselves carelessly from it, but instead to exist as a proximity to it (Being 67); or, in other words, we have the responsibility, not to or for others, but a responsibility before others.
This brings us to an important clarification: all aesthetic being is virtual being. We must work, Bersani and Dutoit insist, on “potentializing” our relations while we are in them, in order to give each other the “freedom to reappear, always, as subjects too inconclusive, too multiple, too unfinished, ever to be totally loved” (Being 68). Beside Bersani’s pithy formulation that “sexuality is a tautology for masochism,” we might add another: “the aesthetic is a tautology for the virtual.” In this case, the aesthetic subject would be a subject “for whom a relationality that includes the real world (and not merely our fantasy-inscriptions on the world) is born not from a dismissal of the real but rather from an elaboration of the real as always in the process of being real-ized” independent of substantive local identities” (86). In some, if only oblique, way, a Marxist critique of social relations may be compatible with the formulation of an aesthetic subjectivity. In articulating this connection, I believe it would be necessary to incorporate an idea, proposed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, of “affective labor,” defined as a kind of “immaterial production” that produces “social networks, forms of community, biopower” (Empire 293). “Here one might recognize,” they write, “once again that the instrumental action of economic production has been united with the communicative action of human relations; in this case, however, communication has not been impoverished, but production has been enriched to the level of complexity of human interaction” (Empire 293; emphasis added). Affective labor, in short, is labor towards the production of relationality. We should then ask ourselves: What modes of work are necessary for the production of an aesthetic subjectivity? Or, in other words, how do aesthetics and capital affect each other? See also: Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
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(Being 116-17). What Bersani, again echoing Deleuze and Guattari, elsewhere calls the “proliferative nature of unripe, virtual being” is a relationality in which no relation is conclusive or categorical (“Will” 167). The virtuality inherent to art (and thus to the aesthetic subject), even as it represents particular figures, detaches those figures from the field of “actual” designation. Even when forms appear, that is, they are always already disappearing, and thus are not fixed. Every representational occurrence in art (even in painting), no matter how methodically or realistically figured, is, essentially, an unidentifiable and unindicative event (Intimacies 26). To exist as an aesthetic subject is therefore to transform one’s only ontological distinction into a stylized suspenseful- ness, at once vainly empty and interminably expanded, without any individuality whatsoever. Realizing (again, the present progressive is fundamental) an extensible objectivity at the shallow heart of subjectivity—or as Bersani playfully calls it, the “It” in the “I”—can transform “subjecthood from psychic density into pure potentiality” (Intimacies 25).
Art alone, however, can announce and maintain the visibility of pure—which is to say, purely virtual—relationality; indeed, it can happen only in art (Caravaggio 58). In the work of Bersani and Dutoit, however, though they are here specifically talking about painting, “visibility” does not exclusively name the experience of graphic perception, but, instead, designates the phenomenology of a more general perception of aesthetic luminosity. All form, whether graphic, acoustic, linguistic, or what have you, shines with the light of being; aesthetic extensibility constitutes (is coextensive with) form. The glowing of being’s visibility, in other words, expressly is the move outward from the subject or object, whereby such a distinction becomes meaningless. Within the paradigm of aesthetic subjectivity, art, though still claiming some particular cultural work, is a universal activity. Though isolating this movement to the territory of aesthetic creation may have the downside of possibly divorcing this queer (insofar as it engages the erotics of the virtual) form of relationality from the quotidian, this nonetheless has the certain benefit of proposing a participatory ontology that is unbeholden to the constraints of human circumstantiality. Aesthetic mobility, in short, allows us to sidestep the violence of our own humanity. Bersani explains, reflecting on his work with Dutoit, “Our fundamental claim has been that the aesthetic subject, while it both produces and is produced by works of art, is a mode of relational being that
92 exceeds the cultural province of art and embodies truths of being. Art diagrams universal relationality” (“Psychoanalysis” 142). Art teaches us, though indeterminately as aesthetic subjects, how to diagram our bodies with the universe—that is, how to empty ourselves of any density, flatten our bodies to a beautiful surface, and become with the formal being of the world as an immanently universal relation.67
Admittedly, suggesting that the aesthetic relations of impersonal narcissism are a universal activity will strike many readers, especially those attuned to feminist, queer, and postcolonial modes of thinking, as highly dubious. These readers have good reason to be suspicious of such a proposition, for claims to universality often instantiate the wills of the majoritarian. Universality, as it is here employed, however, is not an appropriative or imperialist gesture, but is simply akin to acknowledging, with the pleasure of narcissistic expansion, “I am only in the world. I move within my repeated, disseminated being” (Bersani and Dutoit, Being 169). I am here purposely evoking Stanley Cavell’s notion of “acknowledgment” to extricate universality from an appropriation of the other. In The Claim of Reason (1979), Cavell says that an acknowledgment of another “calls for recognition of the other’s specific relation to oneself, and that this entails the revelation of oneself as having denied or distorted that relation” (428; emphasis added).68 To avoid acknowledging the other is to avoid acknowledging something unbearable about the self. A genuine acknowledgment, on the other hand, is the creation of a relation between oneself and the other as a relationship to oneself. The self (itself) denies the revelation of the self-relation. Acknowledgment is primarily about a shared ontological disposition. Thus, to acknowledge a universal ontology, as Bersani
67 It is here where Bersani and Dutoit undeniably, though almost certainly unintentionally, correspond to Deleuze and Guattari; in making ourselves as aesthetic subjects, we are making ourselves as a body without organs, as a becoming-animal. For Bersani and Dutoit, as well as for Deleuze and Guattari, aesthetic relations are universally immanent to every subject, and this immanent relationality is the basis of a universal impersonality. Deleuze writes, “The life of the individual gives way to an impersonal and yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from the accidents of internal and external life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens: a ‘Homo tantum’ with whom everyone empathizes and who attains a sort of beatitude” (Pure Immanence 28-29). To Deleuze’s impersonal state of “Homo tantum,” Bersani would emphasize the sameness of homo-relations. Thus, in the aesthetic universality of impersonal narcissism, there is but a singular type of life: “a life of pure immanence” (Deleuze, Pure Immanence 29). 68 Cf. Stanley Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love,” in Disowning Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 39-123.
93 and Dutoit maintain, is to accept that ontology as a self-relation.69 Universality is then the condition of an “ontology of universal immanence” in which “the surfaces of all things ‘quiver’ from the presence within them of all the other things to which they relate” (Being 169). With the appearance of this ontological universality, there would also appear a “vast reservoir of correspondences, of surfaces always ready to ‘open’ in order to acknowledge, to welcome, to receive that which is at once their outer and their immanent being” (Being 169; emphasis added). In (or, more accurately, on) every subject, considered aesthetically, is an immanent capacity to uniformly and informally relate with other formal similitudes. This aesthetic relationality illuminates the spatial or temporal correspondences of the aesthetic subject, forming visible traces of any form’s inexhaustibly immanent extensibility into the world, beyond itself.
The homo-aesthetic project of impersonal narcissism would necessarily entail an extensive rethinking of not simply the queer community, but community itself as queer. As Bersani writes, “Our [i.e., we queers] implicit and involuntary message might be that we aren’t sure of how we want to be social, and that we therefore invite straights to redefine with us the notions of community and sociality” (“Gay Betrayals” 38). The rethinking of community formation along the guidelines of homo-aesthetics would not exclude anyone on the basis of sexual orientation, for along with the reorganizing of community goes the reconsideration of what constitutes an “orientation” within or to the sexual. What would it mean, in other words, if we are oriented not primarily towards a gender or a sexuality, or even a person, but rather towards an impersonal and formal relationality? What if what we desire in homosexuality (in any sexuality) is to create ourselves anew in light of our finding ourselves in the world? Bersani approached this subject as early as Baudelaire and Freud (1977), where he claimed, “Desire is excessively available to the world; that is, its appetites, generated in fantasy, exceed those which would presumably ‘belong’ to a definite sexual identity” (66). Homo-aesthetic subjectivities describe a style of correspondence with the world of which sexual orientation is only a part, and not even the most significant part at that. If we wish for
69 However, Cavell sees the drive toward inhumanity as an impediment to acknowledging this shared ontology. “Nothing could be more human,” he insists, than “the power of the motive to reject the human” (Claim of Reason 207). To this, Bersani and Dutoit would respond that the ascetic retreat from the human form appears as a passive acceptance—in fact, an acknowledgment—of being possessed and penetrated by the world. Against Cavell, they would insist that an “inhuman aesthetics” is somewhat redundant; aesthetics is necessarily inhuman, regardless of any human “motive” or “power.”
94 more than a banal assimilationist ethic in queer thought, we must explore this mode of narcissistic connectedness, in which we come together impersonally and aesthetically.70 “That,” Bersani asserts, “and not assimilation into already constituted communities, should be the goal of any adventure in bringing out, and celebrating, ‘the homo’ in all of us” (Homos 10). We must now explore, if aesthetic relations are always unspecifiable happening, what kinds of formal relations we can ethically sustain, if only for an impersonal moment, between each other and the world. And, as we learn to devalue ourselves, we must risk this evaluation nevertheless, even if what we discover is that only in art do we genuinely find ourselves in relation to one another.
The Great (Aesthetic) Bed: Communities of Incest (Reflection 2)
Throughout Nightwood, Dr. O’Connor posits various models of queer desire and belonging. The most frequently employed of these models is one that is often “looked back” on with shameful disdain.71 This is the inversion model of the third sex. The category of the “third sex” and an inversion model of sexual identity come from late nineteenth-century sexological discourse. The German psychologist and sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing talks of inversion as, in the case of the woman, the “masculine soul, heaving in the female bosom” (264). Critics have read Barnes’s use of the inversion model as a parody of the medico-sexological aim of establishing and defining a “nature” of sexuality, whereby the quest for sexual truth becomes its own undoing (Harris 233-
70 As I write the manuscript for this chapter, the United States Supreme Court is currently hearing oral arguments in relation to two cases: Hollingsworth v. Perry, which contests California’s voter-affirmed ban on same-sex marriage (also known as “Proposition 8”), and United States v. Windsor, which challenges the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Given the recent eagerness, in large portions of the gay community, to recognize our right to marry, a homo-aesthetic project of extensible narcissism seems all the more urgent. This is not to say that gay marriage should be legally prohibited, nor that I support its prohibition; it should not and I do not. Rather, I am suggesting that with a certain dearth of thinking relationality outside of marriage and marriage alone, comes the need for us to experiment with new ways of queerly corresponding. 71 “Looking back,” however, becomes a problematic gesture in the terms of this analysis, if what is meant by the term is a dissociated relationship with the past. Walter Bejamin, however, has proposed another image of “looking back:” the “angel of history,” whose “face is turned toward the past,” seeing “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet” (257). As the angel of history is blown into the future by the storm of progress, he keeps an orientation towards the past. This “looking back” is not dissociative, but instead is engaged with the problematic which the past itself poses.
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34; Gilmour 614). This, however, is not the only allusion in Barnes’s topos of the third sex. Claire L. Taylor also reads the use of the inversion model, in conjunction with Barnes’s Ladies Almanack (1928), as, in part, a satire of Radclyffe Hall’s rather serious use of it in The Well of Loneliness (1928), as well as a “critique of the existing theories of lesbian sexuality” (156). In The Well of Loneliness, the “inverted” main character of the novel, Stephen Gordon, upon reading Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, desperately proclaims, “[T]here are so many of us—thousands of miserable, unwanted people, who have no right to love, no right to compassion because they’re maimed, hideously maimed and ugly—God’s cruel; He let us get flawed in the making” (204; emphasis added). It is a certain type of “flaw” in the third sex that interests me here, yet one in which The Well of Loneliness (in all its melodrama) is unable to fully articulate.72 Nightwood takes up Hall’s formulation of flawed sexuality, but transposes it into a condition of being in general. In Nightwood, the third sex, also likened to a doll, is “the girl who should have been a boy, and the boy who should have been a girl!” (157). However, it is also the case that “[t]he doll and the immature have something right about them, the doll because it resembles but does not contain life, and the third sex because it contains life but resembles the doll” (157). If the third sex is, by its very nature, a flawed form of being, this flaw is not something to be mourned, for it is that very flaw which makes them “right.” In this passage, the doll is a flawed representation of being, for it appears like, yet lacks, life. On the other hand, the third sex imperfectly replicates the doll; it, in other words, imperfectly replicates that which replicates life itself. If the third sex contains life, yet resembles the doll, then the invert’s being must be flawed. Being itself here appears as the replication, flawed and imperfect, of other forms of being. The repetition of the invert’s flawed being becomes the condition of life itself. One line later, Dr. O’Connor remarks of the invert, “The blessed face! It should be seen only in profile, otherwise it is observed to be the conjunction of the identical cleaved halves of sexless misgiving!” (157). The body of the third sex is here portrayed as two “halves” that have been severed apart from one another. Insofar as inversion becomes a model of ontological cleavage, Nightwood intertextually connects to
72 For an interesting interpretation of The Well of Loneliness from an affectively queer perspective, see: Heather Love, Feeling Backward (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 100-28. Love argues that the novel’s use of negative affectivity, including its adherence to a model of inversion, creates a “representation of loneliness as a queer structure of feeling,” in which stigma emanates from the body and “becomes part of the intimate landscape of the self” (104, 108).
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Aristophanes’s explanation of human nature in The Symposium of Plato. Aristophanes describes how there were originally three sexes: men, women, and a third sex that was a combination of the two. Each human being “was a rounded whole, with back and sides forming a circle. Each one had four hands and the same number of legs, and two identical faces on a circular neck” (26-27). These beings were “terrible in their strength and vigour” and, as their ambitions had grown too high, they “tried to climb up to heaven to attack the gods” (27). Zeus and the other gods of Olympus, not wanting to lose the honors and sacrifices they received from humanity, decided to cut each being into two. Today, Aristophanes explains, we attempt to find our “other half” and reunite our being. Human desire, then, is that which “draws the two halves of our original nature back together and tries to make one out of two and to heal the wound in human nature” (29). Gay men would be those who were an all-male being split in two; lesbians, those who were all-female; and heterosexual men and women were once part of the androgynous being that combined masculinity and femininity. In each case, we love those who echo that which we already are—that is, those who imperfectly replicate our being. If desire in The Symposium is predicated upon a loss, it is a loss of the self-same. We do not attempt to grasp for what we eternally lack, but instead move towards a reiterative substantiation of the being we already are. Being is inherently flawed, but this flaw is the movement of desire itself.
In Nightwood, the doctor says, “And the pretty lad who is a girl, what but the prince-princess in point lace—neither one and half the other, the painting on the fan! We love them for that reason” (145). It is because the objects of our love are “neither one and half the other” that we love them. That is, our self-sameness cannot be described with the criterion of identity, for we are not “one,” individuated as individuals, and yet still half something more. Our sameness can be found differently in others, whereby otherness merely becomes another articulation of the same as manifold. Being here is an inaccurate replication of the self; the self is nothing but its inaccurate replications in others. Desire, therefore, is essentially narcissistic, for it is predicated upon the extension of sameness. In this sense, the third sex is not necessarily a third term with which to complicate a restrictive (and by extension, violently unethical) dualism of sex-desire. Inversion becomes, in Nightwood, a vast shape of being
97 unconnected from the formalities of formalization—that is, an ontology which, in its formations, is unconcerned with the fidelity of form itself.
Robin informally figures the narcissistic attachment to the world that Nightwood advocates. She moves passively among the world, seeking herself without needing to validate or confirm the security of her self-integrity. As Robin nomadically (though nomadism and monadism become somewhat confused here) moves about the world, she finds herself everywhere. Her nomadic movement—that is, her unmoored and itinerant subjectivity—is coextensive with a movement towards the self. The doctor gives the clearest explication of this form of narcissism:
Robin was outside the ‘human type’—a wild thing caught in a woman’s skin, monstrously alone, monstrously vain; like the paralysed man in Coney Island (take away a man’s conformity and you take away his remedy) who had to lie on his back in a box, but the box was lined with velvet, his fingers jeweled with stones, and suspended over him where he could never take his eyes off, a sky- blue mounted mirror, for he wanted to enjoy his own ‘difference.’ Robin is not in your life, you are in her dream, you’ll never get out of it. And why does Robin feel innocent? Every bed she leaves, without caring, fills her heart with peace and happiness. She has made her ‘escape’ again. That’s why she can’t ‘put herself in another’s place,’ she herself is the only ‘position’; so she resents it when you reproach her with what she had done. She knows she is innocent because she can’t do anything in relation to anyone but herself. (155)
In this characteristically rich passage, Barnes provides a framework for a narcissistic replication that disposes with the formality of the self: the inhuman vanity of desire, the pleasurable phenomenon of finding the self in a state of difference-as-sameness everywhere, the multi-positionality of the desiring subject, the extensible movement away from the subject as an ascetic movement of isolation. If Robin does not fit into the human “type,” it is because her monstrous vanity inevitably extends her beyond the form of the human. This is not, however, a vanity that requires a recognizable self to adore. She is compared to a man who cannot take his the eyes off of a mirror suspended over him—an inverted Narcissus. Yet this ultimate act of narcissism is committed in order to enjoy his own difference. What he sees in the mirror is the endless proliferation of the self-same as different; that is, what he sees is not difference itself, but the self as always otherwise elaborated. This is not the narcissistic structure of the mirror stage in
98 which the self is inserted into a dialectic of violence in relation to others. Here, the self finds pleasure in the imperfect substitutions for itself; difference is merely a supplement to an inaccurate self-resemblance. Robin’s mirror image fills her with vanity only insofar as it corrupts the reliability of self-recognition (this would register as the difference between a solipsistic human vanity and her own monstrous conceit). Narcissism thus appears as a positionality in space and time that repudiates the human demand for a stable location.
Robin constantly leaves whatever bed she is in, without caring—without, that is, a human psychology—only to fill her with “peace and happiness.” As we have previously seen, Robin’s nomadic extension, her “wandering without design,” analogically extends her being into the world. Though “she herself is the only position,” this is a position that is found everywhere, anytime. The position itself speaks nothing to her identity, characteristics, or personality, but only to the roaming movement of positionality itself—point of view as endlessly empty. Robin is nothing but a transitory position, always-already in the process of drifting away from itself. The “innocence” of her self- relation is made possible by this instantaneous multi-positionality. She “can’t do anything in relation to anyone but herself,” and thus her narcissistic relations with the world become a finding of herself “with a difference” in those relations. The self cannot help but be inaccurately replicated. This is a narcissism of a lateral magnitude.
The lateral orientation of inaccurate replication becomes clear in a passage narrationally focalized through Felix. As he looks at Robin, he feels as if she, though static, “seemed yet to be going against the wind; as if this girl were the converging halves of a broken fate, setting face, in sleep, toward itself in time, as an image and its reflection in a lake seem parted only by the hesitation in the hour” (41). Recalling the myth of Narcissus falling in love with his own reflection in a pool, Felix’s perception of Robin conveys her extensible, lateral movement. The comparison of her being to an image and its reflection in a lake suggests a ripple effect extending outward from the reflection itself. If the image and its reflection are “parted only by the hesitation in the hour,” it is because Robin also appears as the “converging halves of a broken fate.” The extensible ripple-effect of replicated being is coextensive with an ascetic convergence. The move to reduce everything to a narcissistic relation with the self is thus an extension in space and time. The ripples and the rhythms of flawed being, in some
99 sense, inaccurately produce the subject. In her correspondences, Barnes later likens these analogical associations to the coming into self-similitude with age: “Old age makes you more and more like yourself, in those parts you put aside, as a young creature, in the practise [sic] of being ‘in the company,’ in sport, - retiring, private, silent, and quite occasionally, cheerfully morose” (Letter to Coleman, 20 Sept. 1966). The ascetic extensibility of the self, in other words, makes one “more and more like yourself.”
We have previously seen how the model of Socratic love positions the lover in an extimate relation with himself. The Socratic lover loves the boy who repeats his being. To this end, Socrates says that, when souls find images of their heavenly being, they are suddenly “beside themselves, and their experience is beyond their comprehension because they cannot fully grasp what it is that they are seeing” (Phaedrus 250b). The narcissistic apprehension of the imperfected self produces the sensation of the subject as being outside of, as beside, itself. In Nightwood, a similar phenomenon appears: “As the wrist longs, so [Nora’s] heart longed, and dressing she would go out into the night that she might be ‘beside herself,’ skirting the café in which she could catch a glimpse of Robin” (65). Like Socratic lovers, Nora’s being is repeated in Robin. When she momentarily discovers a partial image of her own being—that is, when she catches a glimpse of Robin—she instantly feels “beside herself.” In fact, her desire is to generate this feeling. As Nora hopes to find an image of Robin, her becoming beside-herself is no less than a gesture to find an image of herself. In the lateral phenomenology of narcissism, the subject constantly makes itself to the side of its own being, in hopes of thereby finding its own image elsewhere. It is this imaginatively persistent adjacency that constitutes the subject’s being. Likewise, Nora, upon entering Matthew’s depraved boudoir and catching him in his negligée, asks herself, “Is not the gown the natural raiment of extremity?…[W]hy should not the doctor, in the grave dilemma of his alchemy, wear his dress?” (86). Matthew’s nightgown is not something which conceals his body, which hides his being from the world, but is precisely that “raiment of extremity” which produces the “dilemma of his alchemy.” The nightgown, far from a bodily shroud, puts the doctor into alchemical relations with—opens him to—the world. Nora goes on to say, “He dresses to lie beside himself, who is so constructed that love, for him, can be only something special” (86). A lateral relation to oneself, again, constitutes being, for it is in positioning himself beside himself that Matthew is so
100 constructed. The refusal to contain the self to the self, which appears as a limitless narcissism, produces, as its effect, the subject everywhere besides where it stands.
This lateral relationality, in its complete association with same-ness, would dissociate from the self as such. Matthew comments, “While living we knew [Robin] too well, and never understood, for then our next gesture permitted our next misunderstanding” (137). A defensive loyalty to “knowledge” leads to a misapprehension of others, and of otherness itself. Worshipping at the altar (alter) of alterity leaves no alternatives. “So I, Doctor O’Connor, say, creep by, softly, softly, and don’t learn anything because it’s always learned of another person’s body,” Matthew says (156). The soft creeping of the doctor suggests a much different kind of presence in the world; instead of an active orientation towards an other, which can only lead to a self bent upon destroying the world’s difference, it proposes an anonymous or impersonal passivity. In another letter to Coleman, Barnes comments that she has become “apathetic” to personality and needs to be engaged without the demands of personal characteristics: “I can no longer react to your fury against me; I am apathetic to that now. If you’ll just give me time to recover by writing to me impersonally…or that is, about anything you like but my personal soul, I shall be most glad, and try my best to respond” (6 June 1941). Barnes’ desperate need to find impersonal modes of relating to others is reflected in her near hermitic withdrawal from sociality altogether in the later part of her life. The apathy with which she regards personality in general demands a different kind of response to the world.
Dr. O’Connor, in the middle of his explication of the night, says, “Ask Dr. Mighty O’Connor; the reason the doctor knows everything is because he’s been everywhere at the wrong time and has now become anonymous” (89). The dislocation of the doctor in both space and time creates a condition whereby he can never be in the right place at the right time; thus, he becomes anonymous. To put this somewhat differently, if the doctor is nowhere in particular, if he disbands himself beyond the confines of his own “person,” he can be everywhere at once, albeit anonymously and indeterminately. Anonymity, seen as the evacuation of personality from the self, becomes the key to lateral relationality. Once the self has become anonymous, an imaginative narcissism can engage that “empty” self much more meaningfully with others and with the world. In a similar way, Robin cannot make herself anything more
101 than anonymous. At the end of her relationship with Jenny, this becomes especially pronounced: “Because Robin’s engagements were with something unseen, because in her speech and in her gestures there was a desperate anonymity, Jenny became hysterical. She accused Robin of a ‘sensuous communion with unclean spirits’” (177). A “desperate anonymity” touches every movement Robin makes. Insofar as this prohibits Jenny from knowing her as a person, their relationship cannot be sustained. Robin, instead, substitutes this personalized relationship with a less expressive, but nonetheless more consequential, form of relationality—that is, she analogically develops a “sensuous communion with unclean spirits.” For Robin, relations cannot be limited to one person at one time; in her relentlessly expansive narcissism, she weds herself to the entire world, promiscuously and ubiquitously communicating with herself as simply an undifferentiated part of a sensuous intimacy.
If Robin’s narcissism is based on an extensive impersonality, one that acquiesces to a passive promiscuity, her relations with others become nothing more than a disinterested cruising of the world. In a dream, Nora imagines that Robin was “like something dormant, was protected, moved out of death’s way by the successive arms of women” (70). The affective promiscuity of this image presents a seeming contradiction: Robin is, on the one hand, “like something dormant,” while on the other, in a process of continual movement from one—presumably sexual—encounter to the next; she is simultaneously stationary and dynamic. Yet despite the apparent paradoxical nature of its movement, this image disrupts the narrative sequentiality that it, if only provisionally, offers. In an obvious way, the dormancy of her body resists the stability of succession. More significantly, however, the linear chain implied by the “successive arms of women” frustrates its own secure arrangement in time. Though these arms initially suggest an identifiable series of segmented events (i.e., one pair of arms passes Robin on to the next pair), in fact, nothing, aside from convention, stipulates that these arms come in pairs or that these women come alone.73 Instead of imagining a forward movement in time and space, these arms can also reach out, beside, next to, in-between, and beneath, creating a multitude of potential somatic connections. Against a relentless drive forward, a drive often associated with progress, conquest, and enlightenment—in short, with modernity—the arms of women, these queer connections, pull back and push
73 And I write this phrase with the intention of importing all of its semantic richness.
102 aside.74 This potential for connectivity would also include the referred to “women” as more than just a string of isolated individuals. “The arms of women” leaves space for an unquantifiable assemblage of bodies. In other words, the arms are individuated but not individual. Though they not strictly objectified, Barnes has no interest in assigning individuality to these intersecting bodies. An arm is simply an arm, an appendage, a materiality embedded with a potential to affect when attached to other potentials.75 The connection of constant, if dormant, movement is here the passive extensibility of narcissism, which “does” nothing except connect to the world in forever new ways. The erotic eventuality of this encounter enables, even provokes, a pleasurable intimacy in the interstices of time, which, though not eternal, need not respond to the exigencies of historical sequentiality. It is the connection itself that motivates these counters, and this need not appear as anything more significant than an utterly passive experiencing of the world.
This passive relation to the world is perhaps no more clear than the scene in which Felix tells Robin that he needs a child. Robin “prepares” herself for a child in the only way she knows how—that is, “a stubborn cataleptic calm, conceiving herself pregnant before she was; and, strangely aware of some lost land in herself, she took to going out; wandering the countryside; to train travel, to other cities, alone and engrossed” (49). Catalepsy here figures narcissistic passivity. As Robin prepares herself for an unwanted child, she goes into an extreme sort of ascetic state, one which seems to be a withdrawal from the world. However, Robin’s perception of a “lost land in herself,”
74 Nightwood is almost uniformly skeptical, even disdainful, of the principles of the Enlightenment: namely, methodological reasoning and the willed application of knowledge. The doctor bluntly states, “There is no truth, and you have set it between you; you have been unwise enough to make a formula; you have dressed the unknowable in the garments of the known” (145). Knowledge, far from the ideal place it has within Enlightenment ideology, is here a bane, an obfuscation of an unknowable reality. In response to Kant’s imperative in “What is Enlightenment?” (1784), “Sapere Aude! Have the courage to use your own intelligence!” (132), Barnes not so implicitly proclaims, “Dare to be unknown!” or, in the words of the doctor himself, “To think is to be sick” (168). Cf. Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader, trans. and ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 32-50. 75 Deleuze and Guattari explain this principle as discharging from the non-form of the indefinite article, which lacks a determination only insofar as it is applied to a form that is itself indeterminate, or to a determinable subject: “[T]hey lack nothing when they introduce haecceities, events, the individuation of which does not pass into a form and is not effected by a subject. The indefinite then has maximum determination” (Thousand Plateaus 264). The assemblage alone provides a forever-momentary individuation without reference to a particular, individual form. What might be called the intensity of the indefinite article is purely the non-descriptive individuation of the individual; the indefinite article, in this view, has a particularity without personality. It nonetheless reaches a “maximum determination,” insofar as it enters into an assemblage in a communal becoming without reference to its “original” form.
103 which emerges as a result of her pregnancy, is negated by her subsequent expansion into the world. Her cataleptic calm, rather than drawing her into herself, forces her into the world as she wanders the countryside, “alone and engrossed.” Here, cataleptic ascesis appears as passive extension; ascesis signaling not the retreat from the external world, but a retreat from Robin as a mothering self. Catalepsy is Robin’s escape from herself as such. In this way, Nightwood makes forms—especially recognizable selves— appear, only to have them dissipate into an inexorable narcissistic movement.
In describing the visual relation between Guido Volkbein and his counterfeit family portrait (which serves as the “alibi” for his blood), the narration notes that the fake father and Guido have a “remarkable resemblance”—“the same weeping Cabalistic line of nose, the features seasoned and warm save where the virgin blue of the eyeballs curved out the lids as if another medium than that of sight had taken its stand beneath that flesh” (9). This resemblance, however, is quickly qualified: “The likeness was accidental” (9). There are, similar to the resemblance between Guido and the portrait of his “father,” only accidental or chance aesthetic relations in Nightwood. Forms never perfectly overlap or appear, but have only passing associations with one another. The “night” or “darkness” of Nightwood must thus be read in reference to John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost (1667), which gives, as the first description of Hell, light-less flames: “A dungeon horrible, on all sides round / As one great furnace flamed, yet from those flames / No light, but rather darkness visible / Serve only to discover sights of woe” (I.61-64; emphasis added). Barnes takes on the catachrestic paradox of “making darkness visible,” of making visible that which, by definition, is invisible. Darkness, in Nightwood, names the appearance of the imperceptible.
That “darkness,” or imperceptibility itself, can somehow, even in the face of impossibility, be made visible, is clear in the character of Robin Vote. Just after Felix meets Robin for the first time, he notices:
She was gracious and yet fading, like an old statue in a garden, that symbolizes the weather through which it has endured, and is not so much the work of man as the work of wind and rain and the herd of the seasons, and though formed in man’s image is a figure of doom. Because of this, Felix found her presence painful, and yet a happiness. Thinking of her, visualizing her, was an extreme act of the will; to recall her after she had gone, however, was as easy as the recollection of a sensation of beauty without its details. When she
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smiled the smile was only in the mouth and a little bigger: the face of an incurable yet to be stricken with its malady. (45; emphasis added)
This image portrays how Robin does not symbolize a stable set of attributes, so much as she serves as an index for the process of transformation itself. The importance of the “old statue” is here not just the statue itself, but what the weather has done to the statue, how the statue has interacted with the environment around it. Barnes does not construct a set of internal features by which the reader can identify the essential nature of Robin, using her instead to show the impossibility of such an identification. Her presence is painful, for her overwhelming ability to give this feeling of change unsettles firm convictions in the stability of identity. “Thinking” or “visualizing” Robin herself is here figured as an “extreme act of will,” showing the inability to bring Robin into the space of her own presence where she can be easily identified as a character both in and out of the diegesis. Thinking and visualization in certain ways rely on established and secure physical or psychical qualities that are attributable to a character. Momentary recollection, a process to which neither the present nor the past rightfully belong, on the other hand, requires only the associative connections of emotion and feeling, where irrepressible and aimless affects can give rise to a whole variety of meaning disconnected from comprehensive identity positions. Robin is thus “the recollection of a sensation of beauty without its details,” or, in other words, the production of an aesthetic without a personality, an impersonal aesthetic.76 This is then an aesthetic of transformation where any moment of signification would appear only to write its own disappearance.
Robin, even though she may be “formed in man’s image,” becomes a “figure of doom.” She is a statue modeled after humanity, yet escapes the form into something just inhuman enough to suggest the form’s instability.77 Elsewhere, Nora feels that “if she turned away from what Robin was doing, the design would break and melt back into
76 Joseph Allen Boone argues that Nightwood displays a “fascination with text-as-surface” which is a consequence of its “coupling of aestheticizing impulse and representations of the homosexual outcast” (239). In other words, Barnes cultivates an “inorganicity of style, which in its baroque play of surfaces privileges the artificial, the ornamental” (23). This inorganic use of language, for Boone, has a direct correlation to Barnes’s queer literary experiments. For interpretations of Nightwood as “baroque,” see: Monika Kaup, “The Neobaroque in Djuna Barnes,” Modernism/modernity 12.1 (2005): 85-110; Kate Armond, “Allegory and Dismemberment,” Textual Practice 26.5 (2012): 851-70. 77 As we saw in the last chapter, Nightwood insists upon the ethical instability of the human form.
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Robin alone” (70). The focus must remain on “what she does,” on her movements, rather than on her “design,” because an emphasis on the latter necessarily frustrates its own efforts. When the text focuses on Robin, it suggests when, where, or what Robin is not, of something other than Robin; her absence leaves the trace of her beauty but not its characteristics, suggesting an affective mode of relating to her absence, for it creates “sensations” without assigning “sense.”
That the subject, especially Robin, is constituted aesthetically is perhaps nowhere more clear than in Robin’s introduction to the text. Barnes first presents Robin unconscious in an unfamiliar hotel room—here, the conditions of psychological identification have been obscured. She is then compared to Henri Rousseau’s famous painting The Dream (1910):
Like a painting by the douanier Rousseau, she seemed to lie in a jungle trapped in a drawing room (in the apprehension of which the walls have made their escape), thrown in among the carnivorous flowers as their ration; the set, the property of an unseen dompteur, half lord, half promoter, over which one expects to hear the strains of an orchestra of wood-winds render a serenade which will popularize the wilderness. (38)
Robin, as an impersonally constituted aesthetic subject, is nothing more than a replication of a painting; she exists only as an artistic relation. Furthermore, this relation seems to decompose itself: “Her flesh was the texture of plant life, and beneath it one sensed a frame, broad, porous and sleep-worn, as if sleep were a decay fishing her beneath the visible surface” (38; emphasis added). Robin does not here have personal qualities with which he would normally identify a person. Instead, Barnes characterizes her with reference to “texture” and to her “frame.” Nonetheless, these artistic or stylistic qualities seem to move, dissolve, or exude past their fixed forms. Robin, then, is nothing other than a surface, but a surface that is constantly in the process of becoming de-formed, of collapsing itself.
The impersonal aesthetic relations of the narcissistic subject, then, force that subject outside of the definitional security of form itself; they require different kinds of correspondences with the world. In a letter to Coleman, Barnes notes that “even tho [sic] I built up such a correspondence,” writing “intimately to a person is something that is so against my nature” (19 April 1941). Correspondence, for Barnes, can thus be
106 divested from intimacy as such. This is why contact with Robin, “would require contact with persons exonerated of their earthly condition, by some strong spiritual bias, someone of that old régime, some old lady of the past courts, who only remembered others when trying to think of herself” (48). Robin demands more than personal, “earthly” contacts; she remembers others only “when trying to think of herself.” Corresponding to her requires a more challenging response to the world and to the self dissociated from its personal substance.
In the brief interlude that Nora and Robin are together, Nora hears Robin singing songs—often “debased and haunting”—that she had never heard before:
When the cadence changed, when it was repeated on a lower key, she knew that Robin was singing of a life that she herself had no part in; snatches of the harmony as tell-tale as the possessions of a traveller from a foreign land; songs like a practiced whore who turns away from no one but the one who loves her. (62)
Having already pointed out the significance of repetition in Nightwood, I will not do so again. It is, however, essential to note how Robin’s song highlights her licentious relation with the world, for it is the song of a “practiced whore.” It would seem as if this passage creates “love” and “prostitution” as mutually exclusive. Nonetheless, it is the practices of the whore that give rise to “love,” though love radically transformed. In the last chapter, we saw how love, in Nightwood, is an artistic process of becoming-inhuman. Here, in light of an aesthetic of impersonal narcissism, that process is translated slightly differently. In Mon cœur mis à nu, Baudelaire writes, “What is love? / The need to leave the self / […] To adore is to sacrifice and to prostitute oneself. / As all love is prostitution” (Œuvres complètes 365).78 In Baudelaire, the prostitute is the figure for the self which desires to leave itself as a self. Furthermore, prostitution is the movement of desire itself. Insofar as love necessitates an escape from the self, it requires an unconditional availability to the world without reference to a person. Robin’s song is the song of the whore insofar as it sings of a life without personality, of a love without condition. If she “turns away from no one but the one who loves her,” it is “love” solely in its conventional sense. Nightwood, as we have previously seen, demands a radical revision of love. Thus, Robin’s song gives back an “echo of her unknown life more
78 My translation. “Qu'est-ce que l’amour? / Le besoin de sortir de soi. / […] Adorer, c'est se sacrifier et se prostituer. / Aussi tout amour est-il prostitution.”
107 nearly”—though, and this is essential, not perfectly—“tuned to its origin” (63).79 Nora notices that Robin would abruptly, and seemingly without intention (perhaps purposively but without a purpose), stop her song, only to “break out again in anticipation, changing the sound from a reminiscence to an expectation” (63; emphasis added). Robin’s experience of the world, as can be heard in her song of an “unknown life,” is only as a pure expectancy. In other words, Robin is purely virtual, only ever in the process of self- becoming.
“Life is not to be told,” Matthew says, “call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself” (137). Life, no less than narrative, cannot be told. In other words, life and art, insofar as they figure experience as virtual, cannot be expressed with the finality of a finished story. Art itself, that is, becomes the primary vehicle for an aesthetic and impersonal narcissism. Caroline Rupprecht notes the narcissistic structure of Nightwood itself, whereby the second half of the novel, as if to embody Narcissus looking at himself in a pool, reflects on the action of the first half: “Nightwood turns out to be less about the telling of the actual story itself than about the reflection it generates” (93-94). Carolyn Allen remarks that the style of the novel, in its mode of narration, creates both an impersonal distance from and a “personal” communal voice with its readers (“Dressing” 110)—what she elsewhere calls the “doubled subjectivity of resemblance” (Following Djuna 23). What is important about these readings of Nightwood is that they see narcissism as fundamentally related to the style of the novel—writing and narcissism are here inseparable. In her desire for Robin, Nora claims, “She is myself” (136). Later, she translates this as, “A man is another person—a woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own” (152).80 And again, Nora asks the doctor, “[H]ave you ever loved someone and it became yourself?” (161). Not only do these utterances propose that desire, specifically lesbian desire, appears as narcissistic
79 This in itself “echoes” the myth of Narcissus and Echo. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Echo, a talkative mountain nymph, fools Juno, detaining her with “idle chatter” from apprehending Jove “in his dalliance with a mountain nymph” (III.472, 469). Juno, in her rage, curses Echo to skip “to the end / of any speech she hears and then repea[t] it” (III.476-77). Echo then falls madly in love with the beautiful youth Narcissus. He scorns her love, and she, in grief, retreats to a cave to live alone from that time on. “And yet her love endured, / increased even, by feeding on her sorrow” (III.508-09). Echo wastes away to nothing more than a “dried out skin and bones” (III.511). It is only in sound that she now lives on, “on wooded mountainsides, / unseen by any, although heard by all” (III.514-15). 80 Bersani and Dutoit suggest that within a translation, there is a relation of neither identity nor betrayal, but of inaccurate resemblance: “In translations—but also in quotations, as well as in criticism—texts enter time, a time in which they can be diversely repeated without ever being wholly realized” (Being 64).
108 attachment, they also, and more significantly, perform that attachment. In other words, as these remarks comment upon narcissistic connection, they also textually appear as such. “She is myself,” “woman is yourself,” and “it became yourself” all inaccurately replicate one another. Nightwood spreads self-relationality throughout its pages, its very style becoming a kind of syntax of narcissism. Only within its aesthetic realm does Nightwood suggest that we, as readers, can truly experience this syntactical relationality.
If Barnes’ style is itself a complex form of narcissism, impersonally and inaccurately replicated, then her frequent allusions to other texts, a trait often associated with modernism in general, must be reread within this paradigm. If Nightwood, that is, continually reaches to find itself elsewhere, if it inaccurately replicates its own textuality, then intertextuality here cannot be read as an authoritative gesture of modernist aesthetic control.81 Intertextuality, in Nightwood, appears as a certain kind of failure: the failure to perform a self-authorizing act of aesthetic integrity, whereby its claim to authority, cultural or otherwise, is dispersed in the movement of narcissistically reaching beyond itself. The intertextual referents of Nightwood are merely imperfect resemblances of the text itself; in finding “itself” already present in other aesthetic works, Nightwood confirms the self-replicative nature of consciousness. Neither the text nor its referents claim superiority over each other, but simply communicate and correspond, pleasurably finding itself “put otherwise” in other texts. The intertextual aesthetic of modernism could then be critically reclaimed and re- cultivated, not as the ultimate act of authority, but as an ethical aesthetic failure. Modernist intertextuality could be read, though this would surely entail a vast reappraisal of the very value of the Western literary canon, as an ethically motivated
81 Bersani argues that within modernist texts, intertextuality is often used as a way to appropriate cultural sources in order to authorize those texts’ own legitimacy. In his reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Bersani argues that instead of creating a recognizably “personal” discourse out of his textual referents, Joyce “scrupulously maintains the distinctness of innumerable other styles in order to legitimize misquoting them” (Culture 170). Thus, for Bersani, we must first recognize all of Joyce’s intertextual connections in order to recognize his complete superiority to them. Ulysses rewrites history in order to assert its inevitable irrelevance when reading Ulysses. “Far from contesting the authority of culture,” Bersani writes, “Ulysses reinvents our relation to Western culture in terms of exegetical devotion, that is, as the exegesis of Ulysses itself” (Culture 170). Instead of losing himself within the movements of the text, instead of, that is, misquoting in order to ethically efface himself from the text, Joyce misquotes in order to redeem the coherence of his own consciousness.
109 gesture of narcissistic self-dispersal.82 A modernist intertextual aesthetic, in other words, would be an impersonal project that would work towards the cultivation of a community based on the immeasurable aesthetic same-ness of being.
It is this kind of aesthetic community which Nightwood attempts—and perhaps essentially fails—to bring into being. If we are to accept our communal implication in Barnes’s novel (and to read the novel is to be forced to do just that), we must also accept the consequence that this community might seem absolutely anticommunitarian. Returning momentarily to the figure of the invert with which I began the current discussion, I would like to suggest that we have, until now, neglected to take due note of another important intertext of Nightwood: namely, the Proust of Sodom and Gomorrah. In this, the fourth volume of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, the narrator, Marcel, secretly watches as M. de Charlus and his young lover, Jupien, cruise each other. Observing this scene sends Marcel into a twisting rumination on the nature of inversion, in which he concludes that homosexual inverts, those with an “ephebe” “engraved on the surface of the pupil,” find love only as arising from an “incurable disease” (Sodom 20, 22). Though there is certainly a loathsome homophobia behind Proust’s analysis of homosexuality as inversion here, it remains nonetheless important to notice the way in which he rewrites the sociality of inversion. Marcel notes that within the community of inverts, there are only “friends without friendships,” for they are “not so much in relation to others as to themselves” (Sodom 20, 24). Though inverts display a certain abhorrence towards other inverts, there nonetheless subsists, paradoxically and intriguingly, a community—or, in the Proustian register, a “race”—of inversion.83 As Marcel comments:
82 If, as Bersani and Dutoit argue, “narcissistic concentration” in the work of artists such as Beckett, Rothko, and Resnais registers as their stylistic difficulty, this aesthetic challenge manifests “as self- dispersal, as the simultaneous confirmation and loss of identity in a potentially endless process of inaccurate self-replications” (Arts 6-7). In these artists, narcissistic self-concentration is necessarily and fundamentally coupled with impersonal self-explosion. In the “radical modernity” of figures such as Beckett and Genet, artists “ defy us to take them seriously, they won’t let us believe that they have been successful artists or told us some important truths” (Bersani, Homos 181). To Bersani’s archive of radical modernists, we must add Djuna Barnes. 83 Bersani suggests, in his reading of Sodom and Gomorrah, that “the aversion of inverts to the society of inverts may be the necessary basis for a new community of inversion. The self-loathing implicit in the invert’s reluctance to settle for the company of, and sex with, his fellow inverts could lead to a redefinition of community itself…” (Homos 131).
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[S]hunning one another, seeking out those who are most directly their opposite, who do not want their company, forgiving their rebuffs, enraptured by their condescensions; but also brought into the company of their own kind by the ostracism to which they are subjected, the opprobrium into which they have fallen, having finally been invested…the physical and moral characteristics of a race, sometimes beautiful, often hideous, finding…a relief in frequenting the society of their kind, and even some support in their existence, so much so that, while steadfastly denying that they are a race (the name of which is the vilest of insults), they readily unmake those who succeed in concealing the fact that they belong to it… (Sodom 22)
The community of inversion is therefore constituted by a double movement: both by the invert’s dislike of, but also condemned attraction towards other inverts. If the homosexual invert seeks those who are most opposite (seeks those with the nymph inscribed on their irises) to himself, he does so with the “beautiful” and “hideous” consequence of establishing a counterintuitive relation with a society of impossible existence. Though for Proust (and this is Proust at his most venomous), this society of inversion will always be based on an abominable “vice,” it nonetheless forms an extensive “freemasonry” based on more than simple object-choice, in which “even members who do not wish to know one another recognize one another immediately by natural or conventional, involuntary or deliberate signs which indicate one of his kind…” (Sodom 23). Inversion is a community formation that challenges the terms of the communal itself. In so doing, a model of inversion can become a privileged vehicle for the redescription of community that abandons the tacit assumptions of what can or should be desired of communal values (i.e., compassion, empathy, kindness, etc.).
Barnes, whose admiration of Proust is no secret, responds to this anticommunal community of inversion, emphasizing the Proustian notion that relationality “rests upon an identity of tastes, needs, habits, dangers, apprenticeship, knowledge, traffic, vocabulary” (Sodom 23). Dr. O’Connor exclaims,
Let a man lay himself down in the Great Bed and his ‘identity’ is no longer his own, his ‘trust’ is not with him, his ‘willingness’ is turned over and is of another permission. His distress is wild and anonymous. He sleeps in a Town of Darkness, member of a secret brotherhood. He neither knows himself nor his outriders; he berserks a fearful dimension and dismounts, miraculously, in bed! (87)
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Instead of a “freemasonry” of inversion, we here have a “secret brotherhood” of Darkness. Even more explicitly than in Proust, entrance into this community formation requires the renunciation of identity as singular and, accordingly, the acceptance of total anonymity. If a genuinely narcissistic relation to the self entails the impersonal ontology of an aesthetic subject, our ascension (or, perhaps more accurately, our expansive diminution) to the “fearful dimension” of that anonymous brotherhood requires a reassessment of what can constitute a community. Once we give up our authority and fidelity, and commit ourselves to exploring each other narcissistically— which is to say, impersonally and aesthetically—identity no longer has a categorical importance in community formation. The “gay community” would not be a formidable way of describing the communal forms of our desire. We must, then, conceive of a communion without community, an intimation without intimacy, a unity without units; in short, we need to cultivate a relation without a relationship. If we lay ourselves down in that “Great Bed,” we will surely lose our selves, but we may also find that our willingness is miraculously of another permission. What could give form to this relation of aesthetic formlessness? Nora, in the self-description of her love, declares,
For Robin is incest too; that is one of her powers. In her past time records, and past time is relative to us all. Yet not being the family she is more present than the family. A relative is in the foreground only when it is born, when it suffers and when it dies, unless it becomes one’s lover, then it must be everything, as Robin was; yet not as much as she, for she was like a relative found in another generation. (166)
Incest, then, is the relation of love that narcissistically disconnects itself from the form of the person. Loving Robin is incest without a familial relation; the (failed) relation between her and Nora might serve as a guide to our own investments in the constitution of relations, in which, though the failure may be necessary, it can be seen as productive and pleasurable. As we continually fail to develop relations with each other, we will produce a virtual community of aesthetic associations, and we will do so with the brevity of an impersonal encounter. The incestuous narcissism by which we discover ourselves beyond the confines of the self will not only pledge us ethically to an impersonal implication in each other, but in our past and future as well. In our queer communities of incest, past time is relative to us all.
CONCLUSION
An Appealing Community
I would imagine myself approaching the author from behind, and making him a child, who would indeed be his and would, nevertheless, be monstrous. That the child would be his was very important because the author had to say, in effect, everything I made him say. But that the child should be monstrous was also a requisite because it was necessary to go through all kinds of decenterings, slidings, splittings, secret discharges which have given me much pleasure. —Gilles Deleuze, “I have nothing to admit”
The most profound fidelity to the work of art is to imitate it: the critic follows his writer so closely that he begins to duplicate the latter’s achievement. Or, to put it in another way, critical discourse begins to resemble the literature which is its object by drawing attention to itself. —Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax
Intercede for me now, while yet I explain what I’m coming to! —Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
In the first two epigraphs given above—one by Deleuze, one by Bersani—we find two conceptions of what happens in the act of criticism. In other words, both statements provide a possible answer to the question, “What do we do when we think critically, when we perform criticism, literary or otherwise?” In Deleuze’s account (and he is here talking about the history of philosophy), the critic approaches an author “from behind” and produces a “monstrous” child (i.e., the critical text) out of their encounter.84 Criticism, in engaging with art, is here precisely an “enculage” (or, in English, a “sodomizing”) (“I have nothing to admit” 112). The erotics of criticism, Deleuze suggests, entail all sorts of “secret discharges” which cannot be contained by reference to the explicit aim of either critic or text; the very act of the critic is a gesture of rupturing and intensifying. If the critical text is the offspring of critic and art, it is
84 For those quick to accuse Deleuze of establishing a sexual hierarchy of domination, it is important to note that in the next passage Deleuze reverses the scenario. In this instance, it is Nietzsche who approaches Deleuze, for it is Nietzsche who “screws you behind your back” (“I have nothing to admit” 113).
114 nonetheless “monstrous,” vulgar, obscene—in short, this child is horrifically inhuman. In Bersani’s account, on the other hand, the job of the critic is to “follow alongside” the work of art in such close proximity that the critic begins to impossibly “imitate” the work of art itself.85 In the narcissistic performance of criticism (in which critical discourse “begins to resemble the literature which is its object by drawing attention to itself”), both critic and art lose themselves through expansive association with each other. As criticism moves further closer in proximity to art, what appears is not diametrically opposed discourses, a call and response of subject and object, but an aesthetic realm of being in which criticism is made aesthetic and art made critical. This is why “the difference between art and criticism is one of interpretive modes rather than one of ontological status” (Bersani, Future 311; emphasis added).86 As narcissism fuses with
85 Bersani elsewhere clearly rearticulates the critical ideal of following alongside the work of art in the self-characterization of his writing on Foucault: “There’s always something funny in sort of walking along with someone—and it’s slightly affectionate and slightly mocking at the same time…of being sort of laughing a little at that with which you’re walking along, whether it’s Foucault or your own ideas, seems to me to be very good” (“Beyond Redemption” 197). Recall here the discussion of being “beside” the self in the third chapter of this thesis. Furthermore, in a remarkable formulation on the process of his own writing, Bersani says that his work begins with the “first sentence” (“Beyond” 192). His work is infamous for its bombastic openings: “There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it” (“Is the Rectum a Grave?” 3); “Homosexuals do not have anal characters” (The Culture of Redemption 29); “Betrayal is an ethical necessity” (Homos 151); “Psychoanalytically speaking, monogamy is cognitively inconceivable and morally indefensible” (“Against Monogamy”); etc. Bersani describes the creation of that first sentence, the self-professed genesis of all his writing, as “extremely painful” (“Beyond” 192); it is akin to “lightning,” the “first shock” of the essay (“Beyond” 193). Whether unconsciously or not, Bersani has here reproduced his famous theorization of sexuality as an ébranlement, or “shattering” (see the discussion of this in chapter three of this thesis). If to develop an ego, it is necessary to be shattered into sexuality, then, given the preceding description, to develop a written work is to be shattered into the sexuality of writing. To write (especially as a critic) is to impersonally repeat the self-shattering inherent in art and in sexuality. “I get this terrible feeling of fidelity to that sentence,” Bersani says (“Beyond” 192; emphasis added). He goes on, however, to specify, “But at the same time I don’t really want the essay to be entirely faithful to its first sentence, at least not in a very literal way” (“Beyond” 193; emphasis added). What does it mean to both feel fidelity towards and be unfaithful to one’s work? Bersani is (perhaps unwittingly) articulating the framework for a theory of what I will here tentatively call the licentious fidelity of writing and of criticism. Similar to the analysis of an impersonal narcissism in the third chapter, this licentious fidelity of writing both ascetically cultivates a radically different sense of self, while at the same time expanding the self pleasurably beyond its intelligible limits. When Bersani notes that writing is “really one of these rare moments in existence where there is this extraordinary ease of a kind of steady, expansive going out,” he gets at this aspect of writing—its ascetic extensibility (“Beyond” 193). I shall leave the numerous implications of this conjectural framework for a future study. 86 Reframing this in other words, Bersani later writes, here echoing Deleuze, “The identity of art is in part to be criticism, just as the very identity of criticism subverts any secure identifications of criticism and allows for the unpredictable ‘sliding’ of critical discourse into the grooves or modes of artistic discourse” (Future 311).
115 aesthetics, we are left with homo-aesthetics.87 Which mode—the inhumanism of Deleuze or the homo-aestheticism of Bersani—is most valuable or rich for criticism? Which of these forms, that is, should queer thought embrace in its political mobilizations of literature?
“Neither one and half the other”—this is the response of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (145). The power, the particular quality of Barnes’s novel is that it allows us to avoid choosing between the two models; in fact, part of its strength lies in its ability to move to the side of any dualistic construction whatsoever. It provides a way for us to answer neither “Yes” nor “No,” but to speak, “Betwixt,” to ask, “And what besides?” “Have you ever thought of the night?” the Dr. O’Connor asks Nora with “a little irony” (86). He continues, “The very constitution of twilight is a fabulous reconstruction of fear, fear bottom-out and wrong side up” (87). We are reminded of that “Great Enigma” wherein we “come upon thinking with the eye that you fear” with which I began this thesis. Thinking of the night, a kind of nightmare as thought, burdens us with the fabulous reconstruction of our fear, or, that space which is beside ourselves. Barnes relentlessly insists that thinking can only be done once we have rid ourselves of our need to determine analytic classifications; we should instead desire to think without determination. In short, Nightwood allows us to take a critical pause and find ways to think in, of, and with the impossible between-ness of things. We need not choose between inhuman thought and homo-aesthetic thought. We need not choose between Deleuze and Bersani. We need not choose between schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis. Each side of these pairings is already implicated in the other; they have met, inexplicably and diversely, somewhere in-between each other (regardless of whether or not we formally recognize the traces of that meeting). The inescapable lesson of Nightwood is that thought is both inhuman and queerly aesthetic.
87 The “homo-” of homo-aesthetics names both the narcissistic expansion of the aesthetic subject—“homo-” and not “auto-” because we are here concerned with a self that always appears different from itself—and, correspondingly, a queer specificity to such a project. This specificity is not the reification of a “gay identity,” but the recognition of our implication in the affective dynamics of sexuality as it appears in art. I find a loving affinity between Katrin Pahl’s term “homo-referentiality” and my own “homo-aesthetics.” Pahl defines homo-referentiality as a queer mode of language in which the “subject of enunciation is drawn into its enunciation, persists in it, and thus doubles itself without the doubles being neatly separable” (677). In so doing, homo-referentiality “steers language and emotion on a collision course,” thereby staging “their adjacency and their similarity to the point of exchange or confusion” (676). Homo- aesthetics, however, is not limited to language, for though we can only experience it in its purest form in art, it is a larger dynamic of relational being in general, including those not so recognizably aesthetic realms of life. For elaborations on these claims, see the definition of “queer” in the introduction and the third chapter of this thesis.
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And thus we finally arrive at the title of this thesis: Homo-aesthetic Inhumanities. Here homo-aesthetics, or the narcissistic extensibility of the aesthetic subject as queer, meets inhumanism, or the force of a becoming that sweeps us past human ontology. To reiterate, “homo-” names both a self-relation without the integrity of a self and a queer desire (“homo-sexuality”) that explicitly attempts to expand this self-relation. “Homo” is tied to “aesthetics” insofar as, as we have previously seen in third chapter of this thesis, the movement of art is the inaccurate replication of formal relations, and insofar as this aesthetic repetition emerges only within the erotic dynamics of affect. “Inhumanities,” on the other hand, names not only the affective and nonhuman becomings of man, but also a movement away from the strict delineations of a discipline, namely the humanities. This is the refusal not of academic inquiry or of a specific discipline, but of the normative categories which often pervade academic thought. If the “human” is no longer understood to be (or even desired as) the starting point of thought, then homo-aesthetic inhumanities envisions a larger set of possibilities for (queer) thinking.
In the merging of these two paradigms, however, I admit to a certain failure. This is not failure in the sense of “bad” criticism or of a failure to “make sense.” Rather, it is the proclamation of failure as the condition of possibility for criticism itself. Critics can never say it all; there is always something else, beside(s) us, that is waiting to be said. Homo-aesthetic inhumanities sees failure as productive, as necessary for finding spaces of impossibility. In this paradigm, the historical orientation of the humanities must be rewritten, or, at least informally re-motivated. In other words, homo-aesthetic inhumanities allows history to be not a given, but an assemblage of unfolding potentialities and chance relations that infuses the present with the intensity to go on, even in the face of impossibility. History, that is, can only fail to provide a historical narrative. In a way analogous to Robin Vote, that nomadic somnambulist who can do nothing but just fail to realize herself, history here is “unable or unwilling to give an account of herself” (Nightwood 54). I would briefly like to take one last detour through the twisted annals of Nightwood. “Intercede for me now, while yet I explain what I’m coming to!” Matthew pleads ecstatically in the middle of his telling of the life of the night (88). The imperative here is to interject, to mediate, to intervene in Matthew’s address. Throughout Nightwood, Matthew’s discourse usually functions as the commanding explication of
117 events and their circuitous meanings. It is at this moment, however, that Barnes makes clear that authority is not the goal. Though Matthew has more to say (this is spoken, after all, near the midpoint of the novel), he implores not only Nora, but also his readers to implicate themselves in the midst of his monologue, to break the address, to sever his control. The implication is that Matthew will still go on talking, but that he will never quite get at what he is “coming to.” His remark expresses a bold acceptance of imperfection and an ethical openness to an association with others. This is reflected in the solecistic construction of “while yet I explain what I’m coming to.” The slightly imperfect grammar, the awkward hinge of its style performs the critical gesture of opening to world, of relinquishing discursive control in order to allow others to mediate the poles of address. As Nightwood compels us to adopt a mode of homo-aesthetic inhumanities, it does so by imploring us, as critics, to perform the public call of, “Intercede for me now, while yet I explain what I’m coming to!” It is with this appeal that we invent in each other, as well as in art, a truly appealing community that can tether our inhuman desires to our aesthetic aspirations.
APPENDIX
Plot Summary of Nightwood
Nightwood (1936) is divided into eight unnumbered parts, each of which introduces a new character or focuses on a certain thematic. The first four sections outline the action of the novel, while the final four reflect on the action that occurred in the first half. The temporal construction is thus far from linear, as it frequently twists back upon itself. The novel, accordingly, is sparse on narrative action; most of the narrative is told through the lengthy discourse of its characters.
Part one is titled “Bow Down.” It introduces “Baron” Guido Volkbein, a Jewish man of Italian descent with no true claim to nobility, and his wife Hedvig Volkbein, a Viennese woman born of the aristocracy. As the novel opens, in the year 1880, Hedvig is giving birth to a son, only to die in labor. Though the Baron attempts to escape his Jewish belonging into the façade of his contrived aristocratic title, he never quite succeeds in doing so. At this point, Guido and Hedvig’s son Felix, who adopts his father’s name and pretense of nobility, determines to continue the Volkbein legacy. In 1920, the young Felix moves to Paris and attempts to insinuate himself into the societies he finds there. At the circus, Felix meets an “aristocratic” trapeze artist, the Duchess of Broadback, also known as Frau Mann, who takes him to Berlin to the party of Count Onatorio Altamonte. Here, he meets Dr. Matthew O’Connor (whose monologues comprise the majority of Nightwood), a fake gynecologist and gay transvestite, and a young woman, Nora Flood. Matthew and Felix talk for a while, until the Count suddenly appears, ordering the whole party to leave immediately. Felix departs as Matthew and Frau Mann go to a “favored” café. After Frau Mann gets drunk, Matthew leaves, walking into the night, alone and quiet.
Part two, “La Somnambule,” introduces Robin Vote, the empty center of Nightwood. Dr. O’Connor brings Felix to his favorite haunt, the Café de la Mairie du VIe, the center of the Parisian gay underworld. Felix listens to the doctor, noting that his “fabrications seemed to be the framework of a forgotten but imposing plan; some
120 condition of life of which he was the sole surviving retainer” (33). The bellhop of a nearby hotel beckons Matthew to the room of a woman who has fainted. Matthew, bringing Felix with him, goes to the hotel to revive the unconscious woman, stealing some money and makeup off of her night table. As the woman comes to, the doctor introduces her as Robin Vote, a somnambulist who cruises the same nightworld as Matthew. Felix becomes instantly infatuated with Robin and endeavors to pursue her. The two spend time together in Paris. Felix eventually marries Robin and takes her to Vienna, so that he may instill his notions of aristocratic grandeur in her and prepare her for a son. Robin becomes pregnant and delivers the boy that Felix desires. Rejecting her role as a mother, she wanders Paris. One night, Felix comes home to find Robin by a window. Proclaiming her animosity toward her child, she strikes Felix across the face. Soon after, she abandons Felix and her son (who remains, at this point, unnamed) and travels to America.
“Night Watch,” the third section of the novel, introduces Nora Flood, a young American woman, and her artistic salon. Nora meets Robin in New York at the Denckman circus in the fall of 1923. Gazing at each other through the cage of a lioness, they decide to leave together. They remain in the United States for a short time, but soon journey to the metropolises of Europe, ultimately landing in Paris. They buy an apartment there on the rue de Cherche-Midi, but their relationship is soon plagued by an unmaintainable, intensely violent connection. Robin spends her time wandering the streets and bars of Paris, while Nora is tormented by her absence. One night, she unwittingly sees Robin in the arms of another woman. Devastated, Nora realizes that she has lost Robin, yet continues, in vain, to search for “traces” of her among the interminable nightworld of Paris.
Part three, “The Squatter,” begins with the introduction of the novel’s most detestable character, Jenny Petherbridge. Jenny is desperate and wealthy widow, hopelessly arrogant and knowing herself only by appropriating the people and objects around her. Jenny holds a party at her estate, to which Dr. O’Connor brings Robin. Attempting to impress Robin, with whom she has become miserably obsessed, Jenny commands her carriages to take her and her guests to the Champs Elysées. While in the carriage, Jenny attempts to woo Robin by blathering on about the sacred quality of her love. Robin, finally hearing enough, shrieks at Jenny, forcing her to cease her idiotic
121 rambling. Jenny hysterically strikes Robin, scratching her across the cheek. It is noted that soon after this incident, Robin leaves Nora, and sails to America with Jenny.
Part five—“Watchman, What of the Night?”—instigates the lengthy, lingering reflections of the former sections. Nora comes to Matthew’s apartment, seeking advice on her feelings of loss. Upon entering his apartment, she sees the appalling degradation of his apartment and O’Connor, in a woman’s flannel nightgown, makeup, and a blonde wig. The doctor spends the greater part of the chapter detailing the meaning, importance, and influence of the “night.” The doctor’s extended monologues span many pages and are constructed in an extravagantly poetic prose. Though he is unable to calm Nora’s misery, he indirectly reveals to her many fragments of experience: history, memory, identity, uncertainty, emotionality, knowledge, and indecency. Finally, Matthew tells Nora of the incident in the carriage with Robin and Jenny, saying, “Nora will leave that girl some day; but though those two are buried at the opposite ends of the earth, one dog with find them both” (113).
The sixth part of Nightwood, “Where the Tree Falls,” abruptly finds Baron Felix seeking Matthew at the Café de la Mairie du VIe. Felix is with his son, now named “Guido” after Felix’s father. Young Guido, however, is “mentally deficient and emotionally excessive” (114). Felix also seems to have adopted a crude version of the doctor’s speech. As they converse, Felix relates that he tried to enter the priesthood, even going so far as to write a thinly passionate letter to the pope. Felix and Matthew briefly discuss Robin’s inability to stay committed to any one person, and then depart each other’s company. There is a break in the narrative, cutting to Felix and young Guido meeting Frau Mann again in Vienna. The peculiar group sits in a café, the Baron unable to let go of his tragic obsession with the upper echelons of society and his inability to belong there.
In part seven, “Go Down, Matthew,” Matthew again visits Nora, who continues to mourn her lost relationship with Robin. Nora unremittingly writes letters to Robin, which O’Connor implores her to discontinue. He then begins a winding, spiraling speech on an account of a prostitute in London, sexual inversion, love, intimacy, suffering, and shame. In her distress, Nora calls out for the doctor to cure her of the pain of her tortured love. During the span of their dialogue, Matthew and Nora
122 progressively revolve around each other's hysterical words, never quite speaking to the other’s desire. Dr. O’Connor tires of Nora's sobbing frenzy and leaves. He goes to a café, gets drunk, and curses humanity for coming to him in its desperation, begging him to redeem its agony. “Now,” he ends the section crying, “the end—mark my words—now nothing, but wrath and weeping!” (175). In the short and densely woven final episode of Nightwood, “The Possessed,” Robin accompanies Jenny back to New York. Soon after, Jenny curses her, accusing Robin of having an intimacy with impure essences; Robin abandons her. Some unspecified time after, Nora returns to her home in America, and takes to sleeping in the woods. She awakes one night to the barking of her dog at a chapel in the distance, where upon investigating, she discovers Robin standing in her boy’s trousers before an altar to the Madonna. As Nora, startled and manic, enters the scene, she plunges into the jamb of the chapel door and is knocked unconscious. As the novel ends, Robin falls to her knees and begins to bark, crawl, cry, and fight with Nora’s dog. Robin and the dog, in the final moment, lay down on the floor with each other, their eyes exhausted and bloodshot.
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