Performance and Grief: An Analysis of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood

by

Theresa Anita McCarron Gaumond, B.A.

A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English

California State University Bakersfield

In Partial Fulfillment for the Degree of

Masters of Arts

Spring 2013

Copyright

by

Theresa Anita Gaumond

2013 This Thesis,

"Performance and Grief: An Analysis ofDjuna Barnes's Nightwood"

by Theresa Anita McCarron Gaumond, B.A.

has been accepted on behalf of the Department of English

by their supervisory committee:

Dr. Kim Flachmann Dedication

I wish to dedicate this thesis to the memories of Joseph Hill, Beverly Baker and

Heather Bartek. Acknowledgements

I would sincerely like to thank Dr. Ayuso and Dr. Flachmann for taking the time and energy to advise me. Both of them generously offered to assist me and their guidance has been integral to the creation of this paper. I am continually humbled by both of their dedication to the education of students.

Since a project of this magnitude cannot be created in a vacuum, I need to graciously thank those who have served as a sounding board for my ideas: Lisbeth Tinocco, Nora Traut,

Laura Peet, Darlene Stotler, Dave Ryan, Chris Dison, Jeff Eagan, and Monica Diaz-Padilla.

Also, Kathy Hafler and Milissa Ackerley both were sources of encouragement. I also need to thank my co-tutors at the Bakersfield College Writing Center for the rabid debates on word choice. The epic discussion on “myriad” and “plethora” ensured that I would not use either word in this thesis. Special thanks are also directed to Shelia Youngblood for her cheerful willingness to serve as an editor.

I also must thank the three who have gone through this process along with me: my husband, Robert, and my children, Charles and Juliette. I know they will be happy to have me actively back in their lives rather than just waving at them from behind a stack of papers.

I am very lucky to have such patient family members in my life.

Table of Contents

I. Introduction: “All her Life She Had Been Subject to the Feeling of Removal”

A. Background 1

B. The Question 5

II. Review of the Literature: “Bend Down the Tree of Knowledge and You’ll

Unroost a Strange Bird.”

A. Introduction 9

B. Review of the Literature 14

C. Concluding Thoughts on the Review of the Literature 33

III. Masculine Failures in Biology: “A Well-Founded Suspicion as to the

Advisability of Perpetuating that Race” 35

IV. Hunting for Humanity in the Throes of Grief: “The Great Blind

Searchlight of the Heart:” 51

V. Closing Thoughts on Nightwood: “Haunting the Terminals” 62

VI. Works Cited 65

1

I. Introduction: “All her Life She Had Been Subject to the Feeling of Removal”1

A. Background

Nightwood is one of the more innovative books to come out of the modernist period

with its experimentations with structure and style. Louis F. Kannenstine wrote in his book

The Art of Djuna Barnes: Duality and Damnation that it “seems to exist outside of the modern age” (xvii). But even before she published Nightwood, Djuna Barnes was identified

among the American modernists as a distinctive writer. She was a well-known expatriate in

1920s Paris, and after the 1930s, was one of the creative denizens of Greenwich Village. A

list of her friends and drinking partners reads like an indexing of the major figures in

twentieth century art and literature: William Carlos Williams, Sinclair Lewis, Colette,

Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Peggy Guggenheim, Dolly Wilde, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest

Hemingway, and Natalie Barney to name a few. If Barnes was not personally acquainted

with someone, then more than likely she had interviewed them. She began her career as a

journalist for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, then published poetry in Vanity Fair, and wrote

features for the many newspapers that flourished in the years before the Great War.

Her early professional journalistic output did not translate to a multitude of literary

works. She spent her last 30 years rewriting the same poems over and over again. Toward

the end of her life, Barnes told one of her biographers that she wasted her time, but she

comforted herself by she was “marvelous” she had been when she didn’t (O’Neal 124).

Excluding an occasional poem, years would pass between publications: The Book of

Repulsive Women (poetry and illustrations, 1915), Ladies’ Almanack (poetry and

illustrations, 1928), Ryder (novel, 1928), Nightwood (novel, 1936), Antiphon (play, 1958),

1 p. 83. All chapter headings and Nightwood quotations will be from the Dalkey Edition. 2

and Creatures in an Alphabet (poetry and illustrations, 1982). She is arguably the least

known of the modernist writers, but the ramifications of her small oeuvre are great. Her

pieces have inspired a range of writers from Truman Capote to William S. Burroughs. Dylan

Thomas recorded the entire chapter “Watchman, What of the Night?” from Nightwood for

the BBC, and he said Barnes wrote “one of the three great prose books written by a woman”

(Field 20). Anaïs Nin believed Nightwood was foundational in her development as a writer and frequently had a character named Djuna—much to Barnes’s dismay.

Perhaps Barnes’s most fortunate admirer was T.S. Eliot; Nightwood would not have

been published without his influence. Also, he would have never read it if one of Barnes’s

acquaintances, Emily Holmes Coleman, had not been so impressed by the draft. Coleman

coerced Eliot into reading Nightwood, and, in turn, he became one of the editors along with

Coleman. Although the complete story of the editing process is beyond the scope of this

paper, the information on editorial framework is necessary since I will occasionally refer to

Barnes’s notes and manuscripts in addition to the published text. As Cheryl J. Plumb writes

in her introduction to the Dalkey edition, the extent of Eliot’s and Emily Coleman’s role in

revising Nightwood is problematic to many researchers (xiii). Eliot changed some of the

sexual references in order to retain the marketability of the novel. According to Emily

Coleman’s diary, Eliot switched “bugger” to “boys,” and he was “embarrassed” by the

references to male genitalia and pubic hair (Plumb xxii). Plumb also says that “most of the

phrases blue-penciled by Eliot [. . .] relate to sexuality or religion”; however, she does not

believe the meanings were changed, but rather “softened” (xxiii). Eliot was invested in

getting the novel published; he even made the final choice on the title. Fortunately, a good

deal of the correspondence among all three is available, and his blue-colored editorial 3 notations are preserved in both in University of Maryland’s Djuna Barnes Collection and

Eliot’s Faber archives.

The clearest picture of the editorial process, however, comes from Emily Coleman’s archives at the University of Delaware. Djuna Barnes wrote much of Nightwood while she lived with Emily Coleman at Peggy Guggenheim’s summer home. Since she was in closer proximity with Barnes than Eliot was, Coleman may have been more responsible for fixing the numerous spelling errors and narrative shifts. A published author in her own right (The

Shutter of Snow, 1930), Coleman was also a prolific diarist who kept detailed accounts from the 1920s until her death (Plumb Introduction xv). The editorial process of the novel is outlined in Coleman’s correspondence and journals. According to Plumb’s research,

Coleman was the impetus for alterations in chapter order and characterization (Introduction xvii). Still, the amount of influence on the novel by Eliot and Coleman will continue to be investigated by Barnes scholars and will be a fertile area for research over the next decades.

Although Barnes undoubtedly left a profound literary influence on those she encountered, she was not known for having a genteel personality. Part of what Emily

Coleman did was soften Barnes’s reflexive responses to Eliot’s criticisms. She had a vicious wit and temper which scathed many a potential acquaintance; she was famously reclusive and irritable during her last forty years in New York. Phillip Herring in Djuna: The Life and

Work of Djuna Barnes claims she “terrorized the shopkeepers of Greenwich Village” (296).

When a burglar crept into her apartment, she slapped him (Herring 300). One of the more amusing stories in Andrew Field’s biography, Djuna: The Formidable Miss Barnes, concerns

Carson McCullers’s desperate attempts to meet Barnes. She would ring Barnes’s apartment bell repeatedly until one day Barnes shouted to McCullers, “Whoever is ringing this bell, 4

please go the hell away” (Field 233). According to Hank O’Neal, she called the police on

“more than one occasion to remove weeping women from her doorstep” (xv). Highly suspicious of their motives, Barnes snapped at academics who wished to interview her in the

1970s by calling them “idiot children” (Field 244). In fact, when O’Neal was finishing his book, Life is Painful, Nasty, and Short . . . In my Case it Has Only Been Painful and Nasty:

Djuna Barnes, 1978-1981 in the late 1980s, he could not find even one of her remaining living literary colleagues who was willing to write an introduction. Berenice Abbott said that

“Djuna bores her to death and she was a literary snob” (xiii). Malcolm Cowley was even blunter in saying that “an introduction to a book about Djuna is one of the subjects that I would least willingly undertake” (xiii). She had alienated many of her literary contemporaries.

Even though her acerbic manner outraged many, she still had devoted admirers of her work that helped care for her. E. E. Cummings and Marianne Moore lived near her in

Greenwich Village, and Cummings called an ambulance when she fell and broke her hip.

Peggy Guggenheim sent Barnes a monthly allowance for most of her life, but monetary contributions never exempted one from Barnes’s harsh opinions. Natalie Barney gave her a stipend for nearly fifty years in gratitude for Barnes’s book, The Ladies’ Almanack. Even

though Barney helped to support Barnes for decades, Barnes called her “an old lesbian and

failed writer who came from a family that made a fortune in toilet seats” (O’Neal 139).

Samuel Beckett sent her part of his royalties from Waiting for Godot. She later dismissed

one of Beckett’s books as “farting” (O’Neal 141). No matter how harshly she acted towards

others, Barnes’s literary ability is indisputable since that is what attracted those admirers in 5

the first place. One particular element of her works that sets her apart from other modernist

authors is the emotionality inherent in her writings.

Barnes’s works are steeped in overt grief and rage, and all of her longer works can be

directly traced back to traumatic events in her life. Antiphon and Ryder both are vicious

retellings of her early family life. Themes of incest, rape and stolen virginity run through

both. Her constant thematic repetitions have been considered by critics as a stylistic attempt

to disassociate herself from the disturbances in her life, but she was never able to completely

divorce her works from partially retelling her past. Her masterpiece, Nightwood, is no

exception. It was written to cope with her anguish after her eight-year co-dependent

relationship with Thelma Wood ended, and most of the characters are traceable to their real-

life counterparts; for example, Thelma Wood is Robin Vote, and Djuna Barnes is Nora

Flood. Nearly all of the characters in the book have been identified by researchers to their

real-life counterparts. Barnes repeatedly called Nightwood “my life with Thelma,” and wrote to T. S. Eliot that the work was semi-autobiographical (Field 43). Nevertheless, care has to be taken not to confuse the events in the book with the reality of Barnes’s and Wood’s life together. The focus must remain upon the rhetorical and stylistics methods that Barnes uses within Nightwood to explicate the trauma of a failed relationship.

B. The Question

The fact that such an emotionally and stylistically charged book like Nightwood has not been exhaustively examined is odd, but in many ways, it is a difficult book. Hank

O’Neal says the way that she wrote is “so consciously complicated that one often needed a dictionary close at hand to know what she was writing about,” and Barnes kept one at her 6

side as she wrote (123). Marianne Moore said, “reading Djuna Barnes is like reading a

foreign language which you understand” (Herring 298). Barnes herself tried to circumvent

many readings of her words. She was furious that Nightwood was considered a lesbian novel

and that by association, she was considered a lesbian (O’Neal 27). She is famously quoted

about her sexuality, “I’m not a lesbian. I just loved Thelma” (Field 37). She did not want

any sexual readings of Nightwood and worked to subvert those. When Kenneth Burke wrote

his article “Version, Con-, Per-, and In-; Thoughts on Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood,” she called

it “disgraceful and nearly perfectly incorrect.” During her lifetime, anyone who published or

suggested a sexual encounter between Robin Vote and the dog in the last chapter of

Nightwood could expect a vituperative attack from Barnes (Herring 105; 107). She would

block the use of quotations if she did not approve of the researcher and legally fought most

attempted biographies. Even though her biographers Hank O’Neal and Andrew Field

interviewed her, neither of them published their books until after she died. Although they

were authorized by her, Barnes was doubtful of their motives and feared that they were

planning on destroying her literary reputation. After interviewing her, Andrew Field wrote

that she “met almost everyone with anger and waited for them to try and cheat her” (248).

She regularly told Hank O’Neal some variation of the statement that he ruined her reputation

as a writer and claimed he was “the death of Miss Barnes” during their final meeting (193-

194). Barnes’s suspicions may have been a result of both her difficult life and her

perceptions that many misunderstood her works—or at least, what she intended.

No matter what Barnes said, Nightwood is still considered a novel about

homosexuality since the book revolves around a lesbian relationship. Accordingly, with the rise of queer and gender studies and the publication of the Dalkey edition, more critical 7 attention focused on this book, but Nightwood was never entirely neglected; it was just overlooked. Nightwood was out of print for years, and now, all of her books are back in print; Jeanette Winterson’s preface to the 2006 edition highlights that. In contrast, when

Robert Hipkiss compiled a comprehensive Djuna Barnes bibliography in 1968, there were only nineteen articles about her works. Now, the articles on all of her works number in the lower hundreds, but Nightwood still needs to be addressed more thoroughly and frequently in academia.

There is a danger, though, when reviewing her works. Since Barnes’s creations are so autobiographical in nature, one could have an initial impulse to approach this book from an expressive stylistic standpoint—as Katie Wales defines it—“an old fashioned view of style itself as revealing the personality or ‘soul’ of the writer” (143). Barnes seems to have favored this type of reading. Although she wrote novels, they were all based on her life and spirituality. For example, Barnes wrote to Coleman that any misunderstanding of the final scene of Nightwood is a reader-centric problem: “if he’s not an idiot, he’ll know” (Plumb

Introduction xv). Her defense against a sexualized view on that portion is Barnes personally saw a dog and a woman act that way, and it was symbolic of a power struggle between the two. She did not see sexual context. With such frequently stated ties to her life, anyone reviewing Nightwood must be careful not to err into an authorial fallacy. The best way to avoid this potential mistake is concentrate on Nightwood itself through the critical lenses of gender and trauma theory combined with a stylistic analysis.

By using these tools, I intend to prove that the rhetorical and linguistic choices of

Nightwood directly align the characters’ performance of identity with the performance of grief. The reiterative nature of their losses serves to undermine the proscribed roles of men 8 and women by forcing the characters to remain in the stasis of mourning. Another aspect of the atrophy is that the characters violate the Platonic ideal of the Great Chain of Being.

Barnes calls self-identity into question through this action. Also, the way the repetition of words and phrases as rhetorical techniques signal the continuing anguish. Her use of submissive, negative polarity words and non-generative words reinforce this.

As the novel progresses, a constant state of reversal is the norm. The identities of both the male and female characters can only be defined by what they lose rather than what they possess. The questions of gender identity become even more reductive. The idea of the self—how to define humanity—becomes so tangled with the memories and pain that the essential humanness of the characters are stripped. I will argue that Nightwood revolves around an absence—a hole that is attempted to be filled by words, but ultimately, even words are deficient. This traumatic state of removal is not just expressed through the corporal proximity of the characters but through metaphysical displacement as well. As the characters become more disassociated from their humanity, they either become animals or exist in a non-sentient (neutered) state. Whenever the characters’ capacity for speech changes, the traumatic absence of Robin Vote overwhelms them and ruins their self-proscribed identity

.Without acknowledging this interrelation between words, grief and identity, Nightwood cannot be adequately understood.

9

II. Critical Responses to Nightwood: “Bend Down the Tree of Knowledge and You’ll

Unroost a Strange Bird.”2

A. Introduction

The critical responses to Nightwood were extremely limited prior to Djuna Barnes’s death. The reasons for these reactions are multiple. The first is that her works can be extremely difficult to analyze, and some of the methods used to delve into her work have only become recently available. Bahktin’s textual apparatus is a large portion of the most recent criticism. The work is very dense and difficult to understand even when compared to other modernist writers. Another reason for the scarcity of criticism is that Barnes also responded fiercely to any criticism of the book that she disagreed with and kept tight control of the copyright (O’Neal 25). She had no qualms about telling academics that they were completely wrong and profoundly stupid for misreading her material. The possessiveness she felt towards her writings extended to the translations too (Herring 278). She rarely allowed those since she was only fluent in English and could not check other editions for accuracy.

Secondly, the novel’s focus on homosexuality was very disruptive and almost prevented the book from being published. Cheryl Plumb’s introduction to the Dalkey edition notes that T.S. Eliot was concerned about censorship of Nightwood and the possible costs of a court battle if the book were charged as obscene (xxii). Edwin Muir, one of the publishers, thought he would be arrested because of the content of the book (Plumb Introduction xxiii).

The word “bugger” had to be changed and other homosexual references had to be “softened”

(Plumb Introduction xxii; xxiii). Barnes did, however, manage to persuade Eliot and the

2 p. 115 10

other publishers at Faber to allow the references to genitalia and pubic hair (Plumb

Introduction xxii). In spite of all these efforts, the book was not the success that they hoped

for.

Another problem is the book was out of print by 1945, and later sporadic publications

over the decades were not enough to create a consistent interest in her oeuvre. In the few

years before she died, she finished working on Creatures in an Alphabet and authorized Sun

and Moon Press to reissue some of her short stories and journalism. Although Creatures in

an Alphabet was published in 1982, the process of revision and publication was immensely difficult due to Barnes’s reluctance to decide when a poem was complete. Hank O’Neal details much of the difficulty in his biography of Barnes, and he claims that some of the poems were decades old, and there were multiple versions found scattered throughout her

apartment (82-92). Sun and Moon Press also had some troubles with getting and retaining

permission to publish from Barnes but were able to reprint many items. Still, many of their editions were actually issued after her death.

Barnes’s work may have been difficult to access, but she was never completely forgotten by other writers. As mentioned in the introduction, many authors referenced her as an inspiration in interviews and autobiographies. The rise of the women’s and gay rights movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s helped rekindle a greater scholarly interest in her works by those who were searching for authentic female and lesbian voices. As bizarre as it may sound, the fact that she was still alive when nearly every other American writer and artist from 1920s Paris was dead brought attention back to her and her work. Barnes was a pioneering journalist who covered events and social issues that were not considered appropriate for women (Field 44-45; O’Neal 129-130). For instance, in the early 1900s, a 11 common treatment for the mentally ill was force-feeding. To correctly explain this torture to the common reader, Barnes underwent the procedure—much as journalists covering the US

War on Terror subjected themselves to waterboarding. A picture of her being forcefed was published in New York World Magazine on September 6, 1914 (Field, Illus. 8). She interviewed many political and artistic figures of that time and was also a well-regarded illustrator. Nevertheless, no matter how irritated Barnes was by the association, Nightwood will always be considered a homosexual novel because of the sexual orientation of the characters. The only other novel with openly lesbian characters written at that time is The

Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall—another Parisian associate of Barnes. The paucity of homosexual literature places critical attention on Nightwood, but queer and gender theorists are not the only ones attracted to this book.

The scholarly responses to Nightwood fall under three main categories: those that review Barnes’s stylistic techniques and construction of the novel, those that address questions of identity, and those that feature Freudian psychoanalysis and perversion. There are some overlaps within the categories; the questions about stylistics usually carry over into the other groupings. Mainly, these questions arise from the fact that Barnes’s prose in this book is so unlike that of any other author or novel that it would be misleading not to acknowledge the effect her style has on the structure of Nightwood and the critical reaction to the work. By comparing the speech or silences of the various characters, discourse analysis can be used effectively to look at how words can dictate relationship statues. Also, the rhetorical analysis of her repetitions and frequent chiasmus serves as a forceful chorus for the language of loss in the novel. At times, the word choices become grotesque and overwhelm the narrative with the reiteration of images featuring loss and decay. 12

The sources that analyze the stylistic technique should focus on the text itself;

however, some articles become problematic since they may look at Barnes’s life as part of

the composition and structure of the novel instead of as the inspiration. In other words, some

of the Freudian and gender identity critics try to parallel events in Barnes’s life with her

works. Although Barnes wrote in her letters that Nightwood was inspired by the relationship

with Thelma Wood, some critics confuse the novel with an autobiography of her life in 1920s

Paris. One very obvious example is Phillip Herring’s "Djuna Barnes and Thelma Wood: The

Vengeance of Nightwood." In many ways, the article feels voyeuristic with Herring writing

about how often Thelma Wood had casual sex with both men and women when she was

drunk. Wood had blackout episodes; therefore, no recollection of her actions after she

became sober. Sometimes, Wood physically assaulted Barnes and occasionally threatened to murder her (Field 153). Even though Wood was violent, Barnes still struggled to keep their relationship viable. During the alcoholic binges, Barnes would find Wood and force her to return to their home (Herring “Vengeance” 5; Life and Works 11-12). Herring justifies

retelling the scenes in the context of a critical article by referring to how Nora Flood would

follow Robin Vote throughout Paris in a similar fashion.

Analogies between Nightwood and Barnes’s life exist, but the similarities should not

be treated superficially. The apartments of both the real lovers and their fictional

counterparts were decorated with “Venetian chandeliers, cherubim from Vienna and

ecclesiastical hangings from Rome,” but those items were purchased over the years of their

relationship (Barnes 50; Field 151). However, the inclusion of the decorative elements in

Nightwood takes a deeper meaning. Barnes writes that the decorations are homage to “the

museum of their encounter” and compares it to “Felix’s hearsay house” of the false familial 13

history that his father constructed about the aristocratic lineage of the Volkbeins (Barnes 50).

The details operate within the text symbolically since the “museum” is another instance of

atrophy between Vote and Flood. Museums are places of dead things—of relics that are

preserved. The apartment functions as a shrine to the love between Vote and Flood. Also,

the decor reflects the loss of spirituality and identity. The “ecclesiastical wall hangings from

Rome” are from the seat of Catholic power, but instead of adorning a house of spiritual love,

the decorations are ensconced in a “museum” of a corrupted love. In addition, “the Venetian chandelier and cherubim from Vienna” do not belong to the women’s ancestral heritage; they

are both Americans. Moreover, Barnes uses this idea to reinforce that Felix Volkbein is not

truly a Baron since the subtext is that ancestry can be purchased. Earlier in Nightwood,

Barnes writes at length about the methods that created the “proof” of the Volkbein Barony.

His father purchased paintings of lesser known actors to create a physical record of an

aristocratic legacy; hence, the “hearsay” of Volkbein (Barnes 7). If a reader merely

dismisses the example as an intersection between Barnes’s life and the text of Nightwood

since the apartments were furnished in the same fashion, then an effective analysis of the

book is impossible. It cannot be denied that some readers are drawn to Barnes’s writings

because of a curiosity on where the demarcation between reality and fiction lies in her works.

Nevertheless, the readers need to be aware of the demarcation between inquisitiveness and

scopophilia.

Questions of identity raised in the book are mostly dealt with by looking at

Nightwood through queer theory and gender performance. However, critics do respond to

the religious aspects of the book by concentrating on Djuna Barnes’s Jewish character (Baron

Felix Volkbein) and her commentaries on Catholicism. Others concentrate on what precisely 14

defines a human identity with much emphasis on the animalistic descriptions of Robin Vote.

For queer theory, much of it is focused on Dr. Matthew O’Connor who is a homosexual

gynecologist and Great War veteran who cannot stop talking, but these criticisms also address the lesbian relationships that hinge on Robin Vote. These involve Nora Flood, Jenny

Petherbridge, and a host of other nameless, cast-aside young lovers. The debate on gender identity is much more expansive since the biological roles of the characters are in stasis when compared to the societal and familial roles that the characters actually perform in the novel.

Many aspects of Nightwood also lend themselves to a Freudian analysis by looking at inversion/perversion and the effects of melancholy and memory. These critics analyze the scarring effect that Robin Vote has upon the other characters and how the absence of Vote acts as a physical presence. She is a specter that haunts them. Also, the repetitive actions of the characters are subjected to this school of thought. The locus of these reiterations is where the development of trauma theory logically comes into play with Nightwood. The overwhelming pain that the characters face after Vote leaves them causes either a physical or emotional cessation in their psyches.

B. Review of the Literature

The criticism on Nightwood can be sorted by general umbrella topics; however, two of the early articles on stylistics need to be reviewed separately due to their major importance to Djuna Barnes scholars. Both of these were published in Barnes’s lifetime, and she took the opportunity to respond to both. Kenneth Burke’s 1966 article “Version, Con-, Per-, and

In- (Thoughts in Djuna Barnes’s Novel Nightwood)” claims that the book in an exercise in

the “stylistics of lamentation” (345). By referring to the Freudian notion of homosexuality as

an inversion of heterosexuality, Burke espouses the view that the characters’ sexual 15 orientations are symbolic of the structure of Nightwood since he finds that much of the novel is reversed since the action of “turning, turning toward or running away (conversion, perversion, aversion)” (333). Burke’s fascination with stylistics and rhetoric is evident in the article because he attempts to “approach the work as a set of devices ultimately designed to make lamentation a source of pleasure for the reader” (331). He plays with the spellings and sounds of the character’s names—which border on the ridiculous at points: “Robin’s name [.

. .]” Vote,” a bit puzzling until one observes that (f and v being cognates, d and t being cognates, and oo being a modification of o) the word is tonally interpretable as “flood” without the l (Burke 337). However, he does approach her rhetorical strategies in a very fruitful fashion by looking at the repetition throughout the book; he was the first to look at how the verb bow down and its variants are pivotal to the book. Still, critics cannot agree on what precisely the repetition of “bowing down” means, and Barnes was livid at Burke’s interpretation. In 1988, Hank O’Neal was looking for a literary contemporary of Barnes to write the preface to his memoir. Although he considered the advanced ages of her prior colleagues, attempting to find an author was more difficult than O’Neal anticipated. Burke was one of six possibilities, but O’Neal did not even ask since he and Barnes had “quarreled ferociously [. . .] and were totally estranged” (xii). Barnes called the article “all wound up in symbolic meanings. Disgraceful, and nearly perfectly incorrect” and forbade the use of any

Nightwood quotes in the published article (Herring 105). Burke attempted to defend his reading to her and thereby finalized the schism between the two.

Even though Barnes was extremely protective of her work, she agreed with one critic—Joseph Frank. His 1963 article “Spatial Form in Modern Literature, Miss Barnes’s

Nightwood” later reprinted in his book The Widening Gyre, is one of “the only two people 16

who have got it right” (Herring 233). The other is the poet Edwin Muir, who was her friend

and advocate for publishing Nightwood at Faber (Field 20). Frank’s writings are seminal to

the study of modernist authors, and his analysis of the structure of Nightwood is of the same

high caliber. When he addresses Nightwood, he finds that it “lacks a narrative structure in

the ordinary sense, it cannot be reduced to any sequence of action for the purposes of

explanation” (Frank 31). Frank does not see non-traditional plot as a negative quality at all; he sees Barnes as abandoning the tradition form of a novel and likens her critical and popular reception to the initial reaction to the Cubist painters. Within the construction of Nightwood,

she “abandons any attempt to this [novelistic] verisimilitude, just as modern painters have

abandoned any attempt at naturalistic representations [ . . . ] the result is a world [ . . . ]

strange to the reader”(Frank 31). Barnes’s new way of fabricating a text can cause

difficulties for the reader, but the spiritual and emotional aspects of the relationships between

the characters need to be written in this way because the depth of the characters’ pain cannot

be understood without Barnes’s structure. He does warn against reading the book as a

“collection of magnificent fragments”; this book is still a novel—just a new style (Frank 44).

The book does have a logical structure that binds the narration, but it is a “pattern arising

from the spatial interweaving of images and phrases independently of any time-sequence of

narrative action” (Frank 49). Another important point that Frank makes is that the unit of

time/meaning within Nightwood is not a chapter, but rather, “a phrase or sequences of

phrases,” paralleling what T. S. Eliot wrote in his introduction to the book: “Nightwood will

appeal primarily to readers of poetry” (Frank 49; Eliot v). Although the point is arguable,

Frank appears to endorse that Barnes is creating a new form of writing—a fusion of modern

poetry and modern prose. 17

Many of the major American scholars and poets have written on Nightwood and its

stylistic features. Wallace Fowlie, probably best known for his translations of Rimbaud,

published the chapter “Woman: Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood” in his book Love in Literature:

Studies in Symbolic Expression, which examined the way the endings of the relationship

between the lovers dictate the structure of the work. He said that the “tragic core of

Nightwood drains the novel of accessories and rhetoric” (Fowlie 139). Frank saw the novel

as made up of “units,” but Fowlie saw the novel as “almost in spite of itself [ . . . ] fused into

one piece” (Frank 49; Fowlie 139). Oddly enough, there was a synchronicity that involved

Kenneth Burke, Walter Fowlie, and Susan Sontag. According to Alice Kaplan’s book

Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and

Angela Davis, Sontag decided to write her 1950 University of Chicago BA thesis, “The

Dialectics of Decay,” on the reversals that she found within the book. Sontag wrote that

Barnes made “something noble from what was dissolute and debased, and something high

from what was low” (89-90). Since she was taking a class from Burke, she used a stylistic

analysis that concentrated on words like “sleep, night, sea, bottom, womb, and [. . .]

lesbianism” (Kaplan 89). “Lesbianism” is not used in Nightwood; it is possible that the

concept of lesbianism is used in her paper. Sontag claimed that she was “seeking its essence

in the ultimate image of pure beast, equated with infancy in the sense of both childhood and

speechlessness” (Kaplan 89). Burke was her main reader for Sontag’s paper, and he approved of its analysis, but the other reader was not willing to pass the paper. A second reader was found, but that professor was of the same opinion. Fortunately, Walter Fowlie happened to be at the University of Chicago, and since he had published on Nightwood, he 18 was brought in to decide the case. He found her work to be of quality and recommended that she pass.

Another student who wrote criticism on Barnes and became a well-known author is his own right is the poet Jack Hirschman. According to Hipkiss’s bibliography, his 1961 dissertation, “The Orchestrated Novel: A Study of Poetic Devices in the Novels of Djuna

Barnes and Herman Brock and the Influences of the Works of James Joyce upon Them,” was the first dissertation on Nightwood (Hipkiss 193). Hirschman paralleled Joyce’s stylistic choices with the development of Barnes’s authorial voice. He said that she was still in an

“imitative stage “of Joyce in her earlier writings but that changed by the time she wrote

Nightwood (Hirschman 68).

Hirschman also admires Barnes’s writing style; she reminds him of Shakespeare with her facility with language. Barnes truly enjoyed both James Joyce’s writings and the man himself. She had interviewed him, and he had read to her from Finnegan’s Wake (Field 109-

110). Field believes that Hirschman’s claims that Barnes’s early work is entirely derivative of Joyce are false, and that Hirschman’s paralleling of their publishing histories (short stories then novels) as a sign of Barnes copying Joyce’s writings is a stretch at best (Field 111).

Many critics did see the link between Barnes and Joyce, but that was not the only author that they saw reflected in her work.

Prior to 1965, one very common type of stylistic analysis compares Nightwood to one of the other modernist authors much as Jack Hirschman did. Jane Marcus’s list “Mousemeat:

Contemporary Review of Nightwood” (1991) and Douglas Messerli’s Djuna Barnes (1976) contain fuller lists of references of critics and reviewers; the ones included here pertain most clearly to the foundation of my research on Barnes. While reviewing the Selected Works, 19

Stanley E. Hyman, critic and the husband of Shirley Jackson, compares Nightwood to Miss

Lonelyhearts by Nathaniel West, but thought it lacked greatness in comparison to that “fully achieved tragedy” (qtd. in Marcus 196). Roger Shattuck in his review found Barnes’s prose in Nightwood to be as “far ranging as Shakespeare,” like Hirschman, but he also compared her to Tolstoy, Proust and Joyce (qtd. in Marcus 196). Perhaps Shattuck’s best suggestion is that Groucho Marx should play Dr. O’Connor in a filmed version of Nightwood.

Although it may seem a stretch to some readers that an opaque novel like Nightwood could be transitioned into a screenplay, they overlook the fact that Barnes acted and frequently wrote for theater productions prior to her move to Paris. Her last major published work (also with Eliot as an editor) is the play, The Antiphon, and it was also one of the few works that she allowed to be released in translation. Still, The Antiphon “disturbs critics, who time and time again raise doubts as to the play’s suitability for stage performance”

(Kammenstine 142-143). In fact, the play has only been performed in its entirety in translation (Kammenstine 152). Edwin Muir influenced The Poet’s Theater to give a partial reading, but it was never fully staged in English. Regardless, the critics who find a link between Barnes and theater frequently compare Nightwood to The Duchess of Malfi by John

Webster and works by other Jacobean dramatists.

Various theatrical elements and the reliance on divine retribution cause critics to see a

parallel between Nightwood and dramas. A. Desmond Hawkins says that the way she had

the “characters sitting like bridge-fiends in an elaborate post-mortem on how the cards were

played” is similar to how Webster would halt the events in his plays and “follow with a

dialogue in tragic idiom” (qtd. in Marcus 201). Graham Greene and Hirschman also saw

parallels to Webster in her use of vocabulary and poem-like construct of the novel which 20

Carl Van Doren agreed with (Marcus 196; Hirschman 98). He thought that Nightwood should be “read with attention to each and consideration of its ideas and its structure” (qtd. in

Marcus 196). The fixity on the poetics of the novel brought attention to how Barnes was playing with the novelistic form—what Phillip Toynbee wrote that “this is a book [ . . . ] which sticks its tongue out at all ‘written’ books” (qtd. in Marcus 204). However, the true explosion in criticism arrived as a result of the changes in the discussion of discourse analysis and narratology that occurred after the English translation of Mikhail Bahktin’s theories on time and catharsis in the novel in 1981.

The unique narrative structure of Nightwood caused much commentary prior to the addition of Bahktin’s textual apparatus. For example, Dorothy Nyren wrote in her 1961 entry on Djuna Barnes in A Library of Literary Criticism: Modern American Literature that

“A clearer sense of [. . .] purpose is obtained by considering time thematically rather than structurally” (24). James A. Scott, in his 1976 book Djuna Barnes, writes that although

Barnes examines the fluidity of time in how she arranged Nightwood, she is much more involved with how time can cease or degrade in the perspectives of the characters (142).

Walter Sutton, in the 1957 article “The Literary Image and the Reader: A Consideration of the Theory of Spatial Form,” takes the apparatus set up by Frank and develops it further by analyzing the obsession that O’Connor has with time and how that influences the trajectory of the novel. Frank takes the position that Vote is the central figure of Nightwood, but Sutton claims O’Connor, “whose torrential conversation also dominates the novel, is also a central figure because he is at the opposite pole from Robin in his rational awareness of her unconscious plight” (118). For Sutton, the doctor’s preoccupation with time and the persistence of the past gives the novel its temporal structure. 21

Bahktin’s greatest contribution to the study of Nightwood may be the attention placed on the Carnivalesque and the grotesque. Even though the articles may not overtly credit

Bahktin, they are still responsive to the absurdity. Catherine Whitley’s article "Nations and the Night: Excremental History in James Joyce's Finnegan’s Wake and Djuna Barnes's

Nightwood" on how time and human feces connect with nationalism would not have been written without Bahktin’s reflection on defecation in his “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” where the “grotesque anatomical-physiological use of corporeality [. . .]

[‘embodies’] the whole world” (Bahktin 177). In accordance, Whitley says that “Barnes connects shit and history; a proper relationship to one’s own excreta is analogous to a proper relationship with one’s own personal and national history” (96). Another example of the use of Bahktin is found in Laura Winkiel’s “Circuses and Spectacle: Public Culture in

Nightwood” used the frequent imagery of the circus and the illusory nature of Robin Vote to explain how her lack of agency allows the lovers to pretend that they can control her. She is a “blank screen on which Nora and Felix project their desires,” but it is just an image; it never becomes a reality (Winkiel 19). When Flood insists on repeating the memories of their experiences and “then on a static image of Robin, the more Robin seeks a sleepwalking forgetfulness” (Winkiel 27). Winkiel sees the desire for fixing Vote both physically and temporally as indicative of the how the circus is a constructed image and the true nature of the beasts and performers are hidden under the eyes of the spectators. Winkiel places Vote’s lovers as spectators rather than as active participants in a relationship with her.

The theatrically of Barnes’s writing began to lead critics to consider the dramatic aspects of her work—whether through gender performance or analogies to celluloid performance.

Nancy J. Levine combines the two in her study “'I've Always Suffered from Sirens': The 22

Cinema Vamp and Djuna Barnes' Nightwood." She places the characterization of Robin

Vote in context with Djuna Barnes’s earlier journalistic writings but says that Barnes is

actually subverting the concept of the screen vamp. Barnes interviewed Alla Nazimova, one

of the original vamps, in 1930. Nazimova was abandoned by the film industry after the vamp

craze ended, and Barnes’s interview is a combination of a “what ever happened to” feature

and a human interest story. Levine claims that Nazimova was part of the inspiration for

Vote, but the idea does not seem to be documented in Barnes’s correspondence (274-275).

Nevertheless, Levine writes that Vote acted out part of the lifestyle of the vamp, but she did

not have the mesmerizing willpower of the vampire; otherwise, Flood would have been

trapped within the relationship. Since Barnes rewrote the stereotypical “man-eater” as a

“victim,” Levine believes that the gender roles are reversed (Levine 279; 280). Even though

Vote is the catalyst for the destruction of Flood’s heterosexual relationship with Felix

Volkbein, Vote’s identity is annihilated by the act of seducing Nora Flood. In the paradigm of the vamp, the female figure destroys the male figure through lust. The ruination is not just physical; the identity of the vamp’s object is shattered. Although Flood is the original victim of Vote’s desire, Vote’s position of the vamp is undermined when she becomes the one who cannot function without her lover; the predator is now consumed by its prey.

Levine is not the only critic who has found ways that Barnes has questioned roles of masculinity and femininity. In “Pregnant Men: Modernism, Disability, and Biofuturity in

Djuna Barnes,” Michael Davidson uses Dr. Matthew O’Connor as the intersection between dichotomies. He labels O’Connor as “the figure of the pregnant male is the site of such uncanny futurity--a figure feminized in his ability to bear children, queer in challenging traditional gender roles, disabled because pregnant and thus subject to medical and 23

therapeutic care” (Davidson 209). Davidson sees the doctor’s “verbal grotesquerie is a

textual equivalent of the non-traditional body” (215). Here is another critic that owes a debt

to Bahktin, but Davidson extends the analysis of Nightwood into the field of Queer and

gender performance theory. Davidson takes an additional step in his analysis of O’Connor

and puts him outside of conventional gender roles. Interestingly, Davidson claims that there

is already an established tradition of feminized masculinity; he uses examples from ancient

literature to support his theory on male pregnancy: Athena’s birth from Zeus’s brow and Eve

from Adam’s rib. For Davidson, the male ability to bear children becomes a sign of divinity.

The blurring of gender in Nightwood also leads to a blurring of identity: the division between

male and female, animal and human, the mundane and the sublime is not stringently limned;

it is rather a continuum that obscures the dividing lines between dichotomies. The doctor

cannot be firmly placed on the spectrum because he cannot be comfortably defined. His

function in the novel as both a psychoanalyst and as a father-confessor prevents the

classification.

The slipperiness of the characters’ identities is also illustrated through religion. In,

“"The Bible Lies the One Way, but the Night-Gown the Other": Dr. Matthew O'Connor,

Confession, and Gender in Djuna Barnes's "Nightwood,” Laura J. Veltman writes that nearly all of the characters are defined by their religion (206). Other critics like Mairéad Hanrahan,

Meryl Altman, and Jane Marcus address Volkbein’s fixation on hiding his Jewish heritage and replacing it with a Protestant lineage, but Veltman concentrates on the Catholicism of

O’Connor and how he acts as a spiritual advisor to the other characters. Veltman says that it

is necessary for the doctor to be Catholic because of the sacrament of penance; otherwise, the

bending of gender types would not be possible within the book. The act of confessing allows 24

the sinner salvation through God’s divine mercy, but the confessional had a negative

reputation during the late 1800s—early 1900s. Anti-Catholic agitators claimed the

confessional box was the locus for priests defiling young girls. They claimed that God’s

forgiveness was obtained through sexual favors, thereby, debasing the sanctity of the church

(Veltman 212-213). O’Connor’s position as a spiritual judge subverts the Protestant rumors

of over-sexualized clergy because he is not sexually interested in the young woman who is

confessing to him (Veltman 207). The chapter, “Watchman, What of the Night,” is “more

than a parody of confession, rupturing, rather than reinforcing the traditional structure of the

confessional ritual” (Veltman 216). When the doctor “‘confesses’ his desire to be a woman,”

his hope births “a ‘third sex’ that defies categorization” thus “making his position within the

masculine/feminine hierarchy interminably unfixed” (Veltman 216). One of the tenets of

Catholicism is that the sacrament of penance forgives all sins and allows the sinner

redemption. O’Connor’s constant verbosity seems to be an act of confession in itself. As

long as the doctor continues to verbalize his homosexuality, he will be absolved. Barnes’s

use of the Catholic sacrament of confession enables the doctor to somewhat escape the

patriarchy that Veltman believes that he is confined within. However, the Volkbeins do not

have the luxury of the confessional to save them from their positioning as an outsider.

Another area where Barnes investigates questions of Otherness is within the Jewish

religion. Graham Greene also noted the spiritually within Nightwood, but he did not fully

delve into the ramifications of religion within the book (Marcus “Mousemeat” 196). Mairéad

Hanrahan, "Djuna Barnes's Nightwood: the Cruci-Fiction of the Jew” claims that Barnes’s

“writing undermines the very distinction between the Jew and the non-Jew” (33). Hanrahan admits that the placement of the Jew in the novel reflects the status of the homosexual, but 25

she concludes that Barnes was using Volkbein’s Jewishness to illustrate the failure of the

characters to adequately represent their identities. Thusly, she argues that Felix Volkbein is

characterized in the position of the Other that is even further outside normalcy—he is

undefined because his identity is a false construct. Although Barnes defines Volkbein as a

Jew, Hanrahan writes that the “Barnesian Jew suffers from so total a lack of identity, so

unredeemable a confusion that any attempt to redeem his condition only aggravates it” (32).

The confusion reiterates whenever Volkbein tries to firmly cement his non-Jewish identity.

He desperately looks for signs of nobility in other men thus hoping that any recognition from

a true aristocrat will, in turn, validate Volkbein’s claim. His social circle does not include the

belle monde featuring titled nobles; it includes the demi monde of circus performers and

actors who have taken the names of aristocrats. Also, his servants were not selected for their

abilities but rather their likeness to royalty (Barnes 9-10). The “alibi for the blood” that Felix

Volkbein’s father created to confront any doubts was ruined by Volkbein himself since “with

the fury of a fanatic he hunted down his own disqualification” (Barnes 8; 9). The act of

naming does not constitute identity; Volkbein is not a Baron or a Protestant. Since Volkbein

is trying to perpetuate his lineage through his son, Guido, Hanrahan also concentrates

stylistically on the repetition of the word “race.” The concept of race is not to clearly define

the background of the Volkbein family but to show the physical and metaphorical race that

was lost through their very existence. The idea of race even encapsulates the Wandering Jew

of medieval lore.

The idea of the Wandering Jew arose in the morality plays. The figure was typically a cobbler who had scoffed at Christ as he suffered on the cross. As punishment, the Jew was condemned to meander around the earth until the Second Coming. Jane Marcus in her article 26

“Laughing at Leviticus: Nightwood as Woman’s Circus Epic” spends more time investigating

the use of the grotesque in Nightwood, but she does look at the “anti-Semitism” in the text

(229). In many ways, this section of her article is dubious. Marcus writes that Barnes’s

metaphoric use of Roman circuses and gladiatorial contests is a “prophesy with chilling

accuracy [of] the Nazi destruction of millions of Jews and other outcasts, devoured by their

modern technological lion, the gas chambers and ovens of the concentration camps, ” but that

claim is not one of foresight; it is of hindsight (230). Anti-Semitism was not invented by the

Nazis and not addressing the centuries of pogroms and other atrocities against Jews throughout European history as the real inspiration of the imagery associated with Volkbein’s

Jewishness is inaccurate. Marcus calls Volkbein “the foot soldier of history, the portable slave, the legman of disaster” but does not address his part of the disaster in Nightwood with his marriage to Nora Flood (229). Instead, she conflates his Jewishness as a warning of the millions of deaths that would come in the decade after the publication of the book. Guido

Volkbein married a Gentile woman, Hedvig, to distance himself from his heritage, but

Marcus compares Hedvig to a “blond Aryan beast slouching toward Buchenwald” (230).

Much of the criticism on trauma theory deals with how a survivor becomes a witness to a calamity, but the death camps did not exist when Barnes wrote Nightwood. The characters and Barnes did not display any prescience to the devastation of Europe; they deal with the traumatic aftermath of a destructive relationship. Marcus quotes Kenneth Burke’s statement that “Nightwood is not political, that it has nothing to do with the Nazis,” and she should have believed him. Additionally, she suggests that Barnes and Wood may have travelled to

Berlin in the early 1930s to watch a circus that was later “scapegoated by the Nazis,” but their attendance at this event is nearly impossible for they were no longer together (Marcus 27

249; Herring 164). Philip Herring wrote in his biography on Barnes that Wood moved to

New York in 1928 after they separated; it is doubtful that they were even on the same continent when the performance occurred (163-164). Marcus may have read too much into

Hedvig’s “goose-step of a stride” (Barnes 5). Nevertheless, the article provoked a marked response to both Barnes’s portrayal of Volkbein’s religion and Marcus’s analysis of it.

I wish to clarify that my commentary is not to belittle Marcus’s assessment of the

Shoah. A genuine sorrow pervades the article: she is correct when she says that all of the characters in Nightwood would have been murdered by the Nazis. I disagree with her assumption that Barnes foresaw the Holocaust and wrote about it in Nightwood because the facts of Barnes’s life supersede this reading. Even though I wrote earlier that some readers have confused Barnes’s life with her fiction, the claim that Nightwood is a work of prophecy warning of the oncoming massacres of the Jewish people, disabled, and homosexuals is absurd and must be addressed. All of her biographers mention her connection to Hitler.

From 1914-1916, Barnes was engaged to Putzi Hanfstaengal, but he left her to marry a

German woman. He later became Hitler’s Chief Minister of the Foreign Press. Hanfstaengal offered Barnes a chance to interview Hitler in 1923, but she could not find an editor willing to pay Hitler two dollars a word for the interview. She told Hank O’Neal if she had interviewed him, “she would have discovered Hitler’s monstrous intentions and turned him in” (130). Herring wrote that Barnes also had a chance to interview Hitler in 1931 when she was visiting Hanfstaengal in Berlin, but the appointment was never finalized. Hanfstaengal later fled Germany after an assassination attempt in 1937, and the opportunity for Barnes to meet Hitler passed (Herring 69-71). If Barnes had been aware of Hitler’s plans at the time she wrote Nightwood, there would be records in her correspondence and journals. She had 28

many close friends who were endangered by Hitler’s policies. During the reign of Vichy

France, Natalie Barney would have been deported to a concentration camp and her property

confiscated since her grandparents were Jewish (Barney 190-191). However, Nightwood was

written well before The Final Solution (Die Englösung) was established in the 1940s.

The debate over modernists’ forewarning of the Holocaust is heated. Jane Marcus

has not readdressed her claim of Nightwood’s prognostication recently, but Robin Blyn uses

elements of Marcus’s ideas in her articles on Nightwood (both cite “Laughing at Leviticus”):

“From Stage to Page: Franz Kafka, Djuna Barnes and Modernism’s Freak Fictions” and

“Nightwood's Freak Dandies: Decadence in the 1930s." Blyn uses the Carnivalesque to help explicate her viewpoint on modernist novels, but her effectiveness is tempered by the references that are “an indexical sign pointing inexorably to fascism” (Nightwood’s 507).

The shadow of World War II hangs over her criticism, and she claims that Nightwood warns of the deaths of the marginalized and disabled. Revisionary historicity has caused fervid disagreement among critics.

Although some critics do agree with Marcus’s reading that Nightwood is a predictive text, other critics found Marcus’s assumption of Barnes’s foretelling the Shoah disturbing.

Arguably, the most cohesive response comes from Meryl Altman in her article, "A Book Of

Repulsive Jews?: Rereading Nightwood" which directly responds to both Marcus’s article and the common ways that Modernists refer to Jews. Altman writes that she is “puzzled [ . . .

] by assertions that the Jewish parts of the novel are just a ‘cover story,’ an attempt to confuse the censor and deflect attention from the novel’s ‘real’ subject matter (that is homosexuality and lesbianism)” (161). She writes that even though Volkbein does not practice Judaism, he is still identified as a Jew, and his Jewish identity is as much a part of 29 him as homosexuality is to the other characters. Altman disagrees with Marcus’s idea that the issue of Jewishness was included to obscure the homosexuality in Nightwood. Barnes was cognizant of the effect of homosexuality on the book and reader; otherwise, Vote would not have carried a child. Barnes wrote to Emily Coleman that “of course those two women would never have been in love with each other if they had been normal, if any man had slept with them, if they had been well f----- and had born a child. Which is ignorance and utterly false, I married Robin to prove this point, she had married, had had a child yet still was

‘incurable’” (Plumb xviii). Barnes wanted the argument about homosexuality caused by a mental disease foregrounded in the work; accordingly, she addresses or avoids many of the common arguments about why women become lesbians. None of the female characters are raped to explain why they turned away from men, and Vote fulfills her societal function as a woman by marrying and providing the next generation. Altman also points out that the Jew is used to reinforce the genetic nature of Otherness. She asks, “Can one cease, by an act of will, to be a Jew? Hitler thought not and Nightwood with its repeated reference to “racial memories,” “impermissive blood,” “racial incapacity,” “sensatory predicament,” seems to agree in spite of Felix’s “preoccupation” with the dominant European culture” that he and his son will never be an acceptable part of society because there is something intrinsically wrong with them; their “bad hereditary is out of a eugenics tract” (Altman 165). For Altman, the

Jew does not “obscure” the homosexual, the Jewish characters highlight that Barnes uses her characters to show homosexuality is natural. It is also in the blood. Moreover, Altman writes that Barnes does not use the homosexual or Jewish characters as stock figures or stereotypes. Altman has found in her research that non-Jewish writers (or those who deny their Jewish heritage) commonly use Jewish characters in two ways: scapegoats and 30 antagonists (163). Volkbein is none of these. He is caught within the same society as the other characters and suffers along with them. Altman says that the real debate on Nightwood should not be if the book is prediction of the Shoah and the rise of fascism, but rather on how much eugenic theory influenced the characterization in the book (168-169). In many ways, this corruption of Darwinism crosses over into the questions of identity within the book.

Using Freudian psychoanalysis and his concepts of perversion and melancholy are another way that critics analyze the identity issues raised in Nightwood. Along with his stylistic analysis, Burke is the first to write about “the accent of lamentation” and the ways depression and grief are represented in the novel (331). He also approaches the Freudian concept of the homosexual as invert, and that concept reflects the structure of the novel.

Later critics developed Burke’s ideas on the Freudian influences in Nightwood further by looking how at the novel balances the emotional and physical responses of the characters.

Barnes expends much description in Nightwood to explain how all human actions are natural—even if the actions may be defined as inverted by the dominant group. William

Johnson in his article, “Modern Women Novelists: Nightwood and the Novel of Sensibility,” mentions the issue of how Barnes explicates humanity within the book. Much of the article is beyond the scope of this paper; his concepts on women writers, the poetic novel and the use of metaphor would be helpful to readers having difficulty with Barnes’s work, but his paradigm on how man attempts to define nature is relevant here. He explains “on the archetypal level, man imposes a human shape on a small part of nature in opposition to all that he cannot control [. . .] [it’s] the masculine impulse to impose order on experience” (41-

42). Barnes places a human shape on everything that cannot be controlled in Nightwood.

Vote can be read as the forces of nature enclosed in a human form. Flood and Volkbein 31 cannot control their emotional pain. For Barnes, the “human shape” is part of nature and does not “impose order on experience” because the lack of control is an aspect of the human experience. Johnson’s quote also reveals the birth of the Other. The act of being different from “man” is what causes the desire for regimentation. In Nightwood, the difference in the characters from the norm does not remove them from Barnes’s definition of humanity.

According to this worldview, the homosexual is a despised figure in society, but that does not mean the homosexual is not a part of humanity. Even before her relationship with

Wood, Barnes did not agree with the prejudice against homosexuals. According to Thomas

Heise’s article, "Degenerate Sex and the City: Djuna Barnes's Urban Underworld," in 1918, she interviewed New York City Police Commissioner Richard Enright who vowed “to stamp out the ‘depraved tastes’ of the ‘new underworld’ in the Village” (Heise 287). In other words, he was planning on forcing the homosexuals out of Greenwich Village through arrest and harassment. As the interview progressed, Barnes repeated that she knew these “potential criminals or criminals” and that they were good people (qtd. in Heise 287). Barnes did not see homosexuality as an automatic indication of degradation. Accordingly, in Nightwood, the fact of the characters’ sexuality is less important than that they are humans.

Obviously, the characters know that they are homosexuals, but they rarely name themselves as such. Their orientation is normally revealed through narratives. Dianne

Chisholm in her article "Obscene Modernism: Eros Noir and the Profane Illumination of

Djuna Barnes” notes that the word “lesbian” does not occur in the text but “invert” does

(177). She specifically looks at the speech acts of O’Connor and notices that he refuses to utilize “one of the most powerful strategies of his profession, the doctor panics at the thought of actually deploying his authority to name, categorize and pathologize” (Chisholm 177). 32

Although the text questions if O’Connor is a licensed doctor, he still performs as a gynecologist. Since he diagnoses the aftermath of heterosexual congress (pregnancy) and treats it through either midwifery or abortion, his avoidance of labeling homosexuality is telling. He supports himself financially through the sexual acts of others. Freud names inversion as a disease of the psyche, but the doctor plays with inversion as a fantasy of “an aura of a romantic lie” (Chisholm 177). Also, O’Connor is not precisely homosexual. He reiterates throughout Nightwood that he wishes he was pregnant and married to a man. His

Freudian fantasy is not one of penis envy; O’Connor suffers from a uterine envy.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Freudian fantasies were linked with inversion or degenerative sexuality. Chisholm writes that the doctor fears interpreting homosexuality as a disease, but other critics believe O’Connor creates a microcosm of society that accepts homosexuality. Dana Seiter’s article, “Down on all Fours: Atavistic Perversions and the

Science of Desire from Frank Norris to Djuna Barnes,” reviews the theory of degeneration that was popular at the time Barnes was writing Nightwood. The theory of degeneration says that when humans give into their baser (non-heterosexual or religiously approved) sexual instincts, then the qualities that separate man from beasts dissipate. Humans devolve when they are homosexual or have non-procreative sex. In a way, the concept is similar to eugenics. Racial purity and mastery is not just marked by physical traits, but it is also a moral quality. Any deviance needs to be excised in the schema, but Barnes subverts the theory throughout Nightwood. Seiter reads O’Connor’s speeches as a way “to provide insight to into their (and his own) sexual behavior emphasizes that the transition of medical knowledge depends on a master narrator in and through which sexual norms can be articulated and given cultural coherence” (545). For Seiter, the narratives are not dodging the 33 issue of the naturalness of homosexuality; instead, the doctor’s speeches normalize homosexuality since he treats it the same way as he does heterosexuality. He is a confessor figure for both Flood and Volkbein, and he helps them to justify their reactions to the failure of their relationships with Vote. Barnes does not see the homosexual as inverted; rather, she sees the failure of a love affair as the true inversion of human nature.

C. Concluding Thoughts on the Review of the Literature

The bulk of the criticism on Barnes’s Nightwood can be divided into three major categories: (1) gender studies with a variety of foci (either feminist, Queer and/or identity performance); (2) the use of Bahktin’s concept of the carnivalesque and the stylistic function of the novel; or (3) Freudian psychoanalysis. Although the book was published in 1936, the vast majority of commentary on her works has been published since the 1980s. The new critical focus was mainly caused through the rise of the Queer and women’s rights movements, which created a renewed interest in the modernist woman authors of the 1920s and 1930s like Stevie Smith, Mina Loy and others. Furthermore, Sun and Moon Press reissued many of Barnes’s out-of–print journalism, drawings and writings throughout the

1980s. Also, Bahktin’s schema for understanding the novel was translated into English in

1981, and the availability of his schema further opened up new avenues to understand

Nightwood. For stylistics, Nightwood lends itself readily to narratology and discourse analysis by the nature of both the novel’s construction and the sheer verbiage of the doctor when contrasted with the silence of Robin Vote.

One other category that was touched on minimally in the review of the literature is the research on how Barnes’s life aligns with the events and characters within her writings.

For some critics, the line of research has been a very fruitful area, but concentrating on the 34

book in this fashion changes it from a stand-alone modernist novel to a historical snapshot of

1920s Paris. Djuna Barnes was such a unique personality, and when a critic couples that fact

along with her statements and correspondence about how her personal life directly aligns

with her works, it is difficult to avoid an approach that borders on authorial fallacy. Still, it is

rather interesting that even with the rise of reader-response theory in the 1970s, there is still such a focus on her personal life as the key to understanding this complicated book.

The story of how the novel came to be published through the auspices of Eliot and

Coleman is fascinating, but the reconstruction of its editing and revision process is not the same as focusing on whom she based Jenny Petherbridge. That research on the actual revision process is necessary in order to figure out if Barnes was forced to change

Nightwood, and, as she wrote Coleman, “hurl chapter after chapter into the fireplace” or if those vanished pages needed to be excised and were removed by Barnes herself (Plumb xiii).

It does appear that the only changes were either cosmetic or a reduction in the number of homosexual references. Research on the editing process is helpful to the understanding of

Nightwood, but articles need to focus on her professional life and not her personal one.

35

III: Masculine Failures in Biology: “A Well-Founded Suspicion as to the

Advisability of Perpetuating that Race”3

The male figures in Nightwood struggle with questions of masculinity as much as the female characters struggle with questions of femininity, but the male figures are actually defined through their inability to reproduce. Barnes achieves this effect by using representations of nature to illustrate how the difficulties in fertility parallel the cessation of the characters’ emotional movement. The male characters in Nightwood are at a biological impasse. The concept of entropy runs throughout the book, but the section that deals the most apparently with the failure of masculinity is “Where the Tree Falls.” The interaction is between the male characters that are the most impacted by Vote’s infidelities. All three,

Vote’s husband—Baron Felix Volkbein; her son, Guido; and mutual acquaintance, Dr.

Matthew O’Connor—show failed growth. When looking at Volkbein’s mourning process, the bereavement for Robin Vote is reinforced as a generational endpoint. The ability to create the next human generation falters with the introduction of Vote into the Volkbein gene pool; her non-human Otherness spawns the regenerative but non-productive quality of emotional obsession and grief.

Vote is an interruptive force upon the characters in Nightwood: nearly all of the characters within the book struggle with the emotional and physical residues of a failed relationship with Robin Vote—even if they were not explicitly paired with her. In fact, all three of these characters represent an aspect of male gender identity: Felix Volkbein is heterosexual, O’Connor is homosexual, and Guido is asexual or neutered. Although

O’Connor was never sexually involved with Vote, he is still caught in the maelstrom of pain that surrounds her past lovers. They all obsessively seek out O’Connor to reiterate their

3 p. 3 36

sense of loss and their need to reinstate Vote in their lives, but they do not speak with the

doctor; they speak at him. In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud calls this reaction a “trait

of insistent communicativeness which finds satisfaction in self-exposure,” and most

conversations in the book follow the same pattern (585). For example, Nora Flood

relentlessly writes letters to Vote as the doctor attempts to reason with her to stop. However, he becomes infected by the need to repeat himself verbally as Flood must by manuscription.

The confusion about Vote blurs how communication happens. O’Connor treats the act of writing the letters as a speech act: “’Can’t you be quiet now?’ [ . . . ] “Can’t you be done now, can’t you give up, now be still, now that you know what the world is about, knowing that it is about nothing” (Barnes 105). The anaphora that Barnes uses in this section underscores the contagiousness nature of the “insistent communicativeness.” O’Connor orders her to stop her repetitive action through a rhetorical technique of repetition. The polyptoton of know/knowing is an attempt of the doctor to shift Flood away from the automation of writing. The movement from the present tense to the present continuous (the be form is elided) suggests that O’Connor desires Flood to realize her world has changed to a future without Vote: “it is about nothing.” The insidious nature of Flood’s fantasy still influences O’Connor to reiterate and clarify his points. He continually addresses Flood as

“you” in the aforementioned passage, but he later states that “Robin [. . .] was always the second person singular” (107). Flood does not understand the shift from the plural to the singular, and O’Connor tries to reinforce the relationship is over. The doctor wants Flood to

“give up” both the pen and the hope for reconciliation, but she ignores him.

She cannot stop speaking about writing to Vote. It is the only available method of communication that Flood can use with Vote: “If I don’t write to her, what am I to do?” and 37

“I’ve got to write to her” (Barnes 107). Her mania with reconnecting with Vote makes Flood

unable to communicate with those around her. She says that “I don’t know how to talk,” but

she also does not know how to listen (Barnes 109). There is only one point in “Go Down,

Matthew” where Flood acknowledges that she hears O’Connor—when “he had got her

attention for the first time,” but the lacunae is brief (Barnes 110). She soon “does not know

why she talks to him,” and the conversation degenerates to her not noticing his speech acts

anymore: “she had not heard him” (Barnes 112; 113). Barnes is more likely to use anaphora

or anadiplosis in Nightwood, but one of her rare uses of chiasmus follows Flood’s selective

deafness. The sentence structure inverts the progressive nature of life and mocks O’Connor’s

earlier injunction to stop communicating with Vote. Flood proclaims “Every hour is my last,

and [. . .] one can’t live one’s last hour all one’s life” (Barnes 113). The repetition of

pronouns is similar to O’Connor’s use of “you,” but Flood does not realize that part of her

has accepted the loss of Vote; Flood does not say “you” once O’Connor names that word as

belonging to Vote. H. G. Widdowson in his book Discourse Analysis writes that communicative convergence “is always a matter of negotiating some kind of common agreement between parties in an interaction,” but the only common agreement between the characters is that Robin Vote is a disruptive force whether or not she is physically present

(54). Flood refuses to halt her attempted communications with Vote because the cessation of writing will also deny any other chance of convergence. In fact, part of the failure to communicate with O’Connor results from Nora Flood’s protective instinct. If she listens to the doctor’s words, then her fantasy of her relationship with Vote is disrupted. According to

Widdowson, another aspect of communication is the ability to balance between the co-

operative imperative and the territorial imperative (63-64). The co-operative imperative 38

allows discourse to take place, but there is a danger that the identity of one of the

communicators can be subsumed by the other party’s attempt to position him or her in the

conversation. The territorial imperative protects against an engulfment of identity, and an

“incursion the other’s space will not be welcome” (Widdowson 64.) Although Flood sought

out the doctor in the past chapters, he is the one who opens the dialogue in “Good Down,

Matthew.” Instead of Flood actively rebuffing O’Connor, she will not respond to him. By

refusing to speak to him, she retains the possibility of a relationship with Vote because the

doctor is telling her the truth that she cannot hear.

The act of speaking without listening is a protective camouflage used by other

characters in Nightwood. In his last appearance in the book, O’Connor “said to himself,

‘Listen,’” but Barnes does not clearly explain who should listen to the doctor. Since

O’Connor is preoccupied with Nora and “the lives of other people in his life,” the imperative

may be addressing them or he may be self-referential (Barnes 130). The polyptoton is

another sign of the doctor’s confusion. He is not worried about their identities but how their

actions impact his life. When he enters the bar after his final conversation with Nora, the

patrons expect him to entertain them, but that is not O’Connor’s purpose in Nightwood. With

all of his ramblings and loquaciousness, he is actually the voice of reason. The others in the

cafe misidentify him as a pathetic figure; they either feel sorry for him or find him amusing.

Volkbein, the circus performers and Flood are drawn to the doctor as a figure of ethos. Their

shared marginalization places O’Connor as the spiritual guide for the other main characters.

The bar denizens are unable to see the diagnostic ability of the doctor toward

spiritual malaises. One patron says the doctor is “always getting everyone in trouble by

excusing them,” but he does not recognize O’Connor’s function as a priest confessor. 39

O’Connor is a source of forgiveness. In some ways, the idea of the doctor as a confessor

recalls Veltman’s article, "The Bible Lies The One Way, But The Night-Gown The Other":

Dr. Matthew O’Connor, Confession, and Gender in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood," and the

Protestant fears of the confessional as a place of sedition and sexual transgression. Those

who are outside the norm are either feared or devalued. As a result, the spectators disregard

the doctor as ruled by pathos. His habitual drunkenness creates insecurity among the patrons

since they “ever knew what was truth and what was not” when O’Connor speaks (Barnes

131). Their common response is to laugh at him.

Since the doctor cannot create a mutually understandable dialog, he tries to

communicate with the only other disenfranchised person. After his fruitless conversation

with Nora Flood, he encounters the other marginalized person in the building—a defrocked

Catholic priest. Priests are defrocked because they transgressed against the laws of the

Catholic Church; it is not a voluntary action. Although Barnes does not state how the priest

lost his ordination, the priest exists in the same nebulous part of society as the other

characters. However, a defrocked priest can still provide the sacraments of Penance and Last

Unction if the penitent is dying, and no one else is available. O’Connor turns to the ex-priest to confess because the doctor’s life, as he has known it, is at an end. The doctor weeps that

“it’s all over, everything is over, and no one knows it but me” and seeks absolution but not for himself (Barnes 136). He wants forgiveness for everyone involved with Vote. O’Connor does not confess any sins of his own; he speaks of the obsessive love that Flood has for Vote.

He sobs for Guido, the deformed manifestation of Vote and Volkbein. The doctor even pities

Jenny Petherbridge. The ex-priest does not recognize the fatality inherent in the doctor’s words and the necessity for him to listen to O’Connor’s confession. As O’Connor continues 40

his attempt, “the ex-priest was smiling to himself but O’Connor did not seem to see or hear

anything but his own heart” (Barnes 133). The admonishment to “Listen” has gone

unheeded by both the ex-priest and himself. O’Connor is in the same situation again that he was with Flood previously in the chapter. His grief with “the lives of other people in his life”

deafens others’ ability to listen to him. The doctor’s warnings and prophecies go unheeded

because no one will hear him.

However, the longest instance of a truly interactive conversation occurs in “Where

the Tree Falls,” when Volkbein speaks of his melancholic obsession with Vote and his

worries about the main physical reminder of her—their son. As Volkbein prepares to leave

France, he finds the doctor in order to have a final discussion about his obsession with Vote

and the “shadow of a vast apprehension—” their son’s inability to thrive (Barnes 99). The

doctor himself is grieving as he returns from a funeral of an ex-lover with his chin “lowered

as if in a melancholy that had no beginning or end” (Barnes 92). The dialogue begins

similarly as to other points in Nightwood; the characters start to talk and then ignore each

other. Volkbein is “abstracted, but he smiled, out of politeness,” while O’Connor speaks of

the deceased, and then, O’Connor fixates on what he plans to have for dinner while Volkbein

speaks of Vote (Barnes 93). The novel then shifts as they drive through the woods: “the

doctor lifted his chin to the night air and listened now with an intensity with which he hoped

to reconstruct the sentence” (Barnes 93). The repetition of physical movement helps

O’Connor recreate the forgotten words—much as the Baron tries to reconstruct his

relationship with Vote through his repetitive verbalization.

The Baron has a problem much larger concerning Vote than attempting to rekindle

the lost relationship. He is blind and cannot correctly perceive Vote. He uses a visual aid 41 which does not seem to be very effective. Barnes describes it as a “monocle which shone, a round blind eye in the sun (9). Also, his blindness kept him from enlisting in the army, and his disability keeps him from fully identifying the non-human strangeness about Vote. When he meets her, Volkbein only sees her eyes accurately when the line of sight is interrupted.

He is fascinated by her eyes’ shade of blue but does not move beyond superficiality until

“she closed her eyes and Felix, who had been looking into them intently [ . . . ] found himself seeing them still faintly clear and timeless,” which he then realized her eyes are the eyes of a beast (Barnes 36). Volkbein seems to have difficulties whenever she is in his physical environs because “he found her presence painful, and yet a happiness. Thinking of her, visualizing her, was an extreme act of will; to recall her after she had gone, however, was easy as the recollection of beauty without its details” (Barnes 39). Volkbein cannot see details, but his lack of clarity makes him believe that Vote and he are alike. Volkbein notices that “she has the touch of the blind,” but he is extrapolating his blindness on her (Barnes 40).

Vote’s hands are emblematic of her sexuality and Volkbein “experiences an unaccountable apprehension” and fear (Barnes 40). Volkbein can dilute the threatening nature of Vote’s sexuality by labeling it as a disability. As long he pretends that he is blind to her sexual desire, and then he can believe that she is the same way.

The Baron’s blindness causes other disabilities. As he speaks to the doctor in the carriage, the Baron admits that he cannot describe her; he realizes that he “never really had a clear idea of her at any time. I had an image of her, but that is not the same thing” (Barnes

93). His enforcement of blindness agrees with Lacan’s concept in “The Subversion of the

Subject and the Dialectic of Desire,” when he wrote, “precisely because desire is articulated

[. . .] it is not articulable” (681). Volkbein cannot define what or who he has lost because he 42

never knew who or what he had in the first place. Even though they see her, they cannot

control her, and the act of seeing Vote can be difficult because of the disabilities of the

characters. For instance, after the birth of their child, she angrily hits Volkbein and knocks

his monocle off his face. She did not want to bear Guido, and her act of violence should

have ruptured Volkbein’s image of Vote. Instead, he is blinded again to whom she is; he

could not see her clearly. The inability to define precisely what is Robin Vote and what she

signifies through the characters’ physical senses is part of why the characters refer to her as

an animal throughout Nightwood. It is the juxtaposition of the natural setting and both men’s

emotional pain that enables a true conversation about Guido—the issue of Vote’s non-

emotional animalism intertwined with Felix Volkbein’s love.

As part of the legacy of the loss of Robin Vote, Guido also stagnates by being unable

to grow physically, mentally, or emotionally. Volkbein deems that Vote and he are

“inseparable” through Guido’s existence, but the attachment is detrimental to both father and

son (Barnes 99). The Baron finds comfort that Guido is “very like her,” but earlier, he

described their child as being “born to holy decay. Mentally deficient, and emotionally

excessive, an addict to death; at ten, barely as tall as a child of six [. . .] with cold hands and anxious face [. . .] trembling with an excitement that was a precocious ecstasy” (Barnes 99;

90). Although he is fearful of what his son will become as the years pass, the stunting of growth is part of Volkbein’s definition of immortality. He says that “our basic idea of

immortality is a condition that cannot vary. It is the motivation of marriage,” and the doctor responds that divorce breaks “an image—of our safety” (Barnes 94). Barnes’s use of italics

on cannot vary serves to reinforce the concept. 43

For Volkbein, the birth of Guido was not for the purpose of reproduction. He wanted

“sons [who] would recognize and honor the past,” not the future (Barnes 42). Guido’s birth was a way to enforce the non-changeable state of the marriage and grant the Barony a form of immortality. For the Volkbeins, it is more important to be a husband instead of a father because of the secretive nature of the family’s true lineage. Barnes writes that Felix

Volkbein is “reiterating the tragedy of his father” (42). Guido Volkbein had married Hedvig in order to ratify his heritage as a noble non-Jew. Their wives are a sign that both Volkbeins are no longer Jewish. Hedvig is Viennese, and Robin Vote is a blue-eyed American. Neither of them carries an ethnic marker of Jewishness; that blood is passed patrilineally—not through matrimony. Guido is incidental in the logic. When Barnes delineates the Baron’s philosophy, she couples every instance of a synonym of immortality with a form of security

(94). Obviously, the act of admitting the dissolution of the marriage will have ramifications for the Baron beyond the loss of his wife; he will forgo his biological inheritance: “in accepting his son the Baron saw that he must accept the demolition of his own life” (Barnes

91). If Volkbein continues to believe that as long as Guido does not have human agency, then he retains some aspect of Robin Vote and have not truly lost her to others.

Guido’s traumatic incarceration in a juvenile state even seems to prevent the act of speech. None of Guido’s statements are written as a direct speech act by Guido; they are all encapsulated within Volkbein’s thoughts or speech. Even though Guido is only ten years old, he told his father of his desire to become a priest. Volkbein’s reaction was that he “had been startled out of himself,” but it is unclear whether the act of speech or the content caused the disruption (Barnes 90). Volkbein investigates the Catholic faith in order to find the most beneficial order for Guido. However, Volkbein’s hope is that he will find a place for Guido 44 in the French priesthood since those priests “seemed to be a composite of husband and wife in conjunction with original sin”--much as Guido had issued from Robin Vote’s womb

(Barnes 91). Since Felix is Jewish, he would carry original sin according to Catholic dogma.

He was never baptized. Vote became Catholic during her pregnancy with Guido, and the act would have purified her of original sin (Barnes 42-43). Guido truly is a “composite [. . .] in conjunction with original sin” because of his parents. If Guido enters the French Catholic church, the Baron will still be able to hold onto the image of his marriage and immortality encapsulated within Guido. However, the entrance of Guido into the priesthood forestalls any successive generation and maintains Volkbein’s generation as the reproductive locus and therefore the endpoint of reproduction.

Another instance of Guido’s speech structured within Volkbein’s language occurs when they are unexpectedly reminded of their traumatic break with Vote. Jenny

Petherbridge, Robin Vote’s current lover, goes to the Volkbein family home, ostensibly to purchase a painting but actually to mock the men in their grief. Petherbridge leaves their apartment by saying “Baronin Robin Volkbein, I wonder if she could be a relative” (Barnes

99). In fact, the mention of Vote’s married name is enough to paralyze Volkbein and cause

Guido to vomit. They lose control over their speech; Volkbein cannot physically move, and

Guido purges as a physical response. After the immediate crisis, neither can effectively communicate; Volkbein reverts to the language of his youth and speaks German to Guido.

Here, the Baron claims that Guido “often puts questions to me about his mother, and I had managed always to direct his mind to expect her” (Barnes 99). Once again, Guido is denied vocalization, but the lack of speech is more insidious. The locus of his mother’s arrival is pushed to the future; she is always on her way to them. Guido is prevented from realizing 45

that his mother is a memory because he is not allowed to talk about her. The expectation of

her arrival keeps immediacy for them; she will come back, and when she does not, the

grieving process is renewed by the family that she abandoned.

The idea of biological cessation is held within the title of the chapter itself: “Where the Tree Falls.” Guido and Vote are described as “estranged” from interacting with others in

Nightwood, but they are closely paired (Barnes 91; 103). Quite a few scholars have commented on Robin Vote’s lack of active speech but not about Guido’s. For example,

Judith Lee claims that “Robin’s silence is a way of rejecting the experience of her own difference,” but she compares it to the verbosity of O’Connor (215). The genetic cause and effect also becomes apparent by looking at the full verse from Ecclesiastes that the chapter title is from: “If the clouds be full of rain, they empty themselves upon the earth: and if the tree fall toward the south, or toward the north, then the place where the tree falleth, there it shall be” (Ecc. 11.3, Barnes 226; 90.1). When taking into account the preoccupation with progeniture in the chapter, the reading of the verse must reflect that bias. The inevitability of death and the resulting decay is foreshadowed by the verse which helps to explain that Vote’s marriage to the Baron was truly a disunion since the result of their union, Guido, is destined to fall also. The traumatic deluge of grief over Vote halted both the growth of the Baron and their son. After all, the woman that she left him for is named Nora Flood, and her name is symbolic of the inundation. Volkbein becomes so disassociated from the normative construct of a family that he desires the death of his child: “the thought of my son’s possible death at an early age [causes] a sort of dire happiness” (Barnes 99). Guido’s death would free Volkbein from his wife and the necessity to care for a child who is already “an addict for death.” O’Connor tells Volkbein to “seek no further for calamity for you have it in your son. 46

After all, calamity is what we are all seeking” (Barnes 101). By using of chiasmus,

O’Connor means that Volkbein’s relationship with Vote was enough of a disaster, and it does

not need to be compounded. Petherbridge and Flood continue their pursuit of Vote until their ruination results, and the doctor is trying to stop the tragedies. Volkbein is advised to let go of his grief over Vote and care for his son. O’Connor tries to tell the Baron that although the son may be stunted, he is growing, and time, with or without Vote, will pass. The inability to create a future without Robin Vote’s presence has damned the men of her family to remain in a mournful cycle that is structured on their desire for her return—which will never happen.

Barnes’s other investigation into male identity and reproduction within Nightwood

hinges on Dr. Matthew Mighty-Grain-of-Salt Dante Connor. The doctor is not firmly aligned

with any of the usual paradigm structures, and he cannot be simplistically defined as

masculine or feminine. His shifting nature is warned by the idiom “Grain of Salt” embedded

in his name. Both the reader and the audience should be skeptical. He is a foreigner to Paris,

but he does not quite fit in with the expatriate community since he is an Irishman from San

Francisco. His various claims and stories entertain the group, but “no one ever knew what

was truth and what was not” (Barnes 131). After all, his “interest in gynaecology has taken

had driven him half around the world,” but he is not a licensed doctor—he is a sham and an

abortionist (Barnes 13). One could read it as he was fleeing prosecution. It is not an

unfounded assumption for the reader to make; while caring for a semi-comatose Robin Vote,

O’Connor steals a one hundred franc bill from her dresser top. Volkbein witnesses the theft

of the money, but he also sees the doctor steal something else first.

Another one of the striking characteristics of the homosocial relationship between

Volkbein and O’Connor is that Volkbein changes after interacting with the doctor. It is 47 remarkable when considering how many of the other characters are emotionally trapped throughout Nightwood. Michael Davidson in his article “Pregnant Men: Modernism,

Disability and Biofuturity in Djuna Barnes” claims that “O’Connor’s monologues shatter stable identities,” but that is not precisely true (215). Nightwood has a paradigmatic shift.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes in her book Between Men: English Literature and Male

Homosocial Desire that there is a “special relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desire and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power,” but the male relationships within the book are not a conventional love triangle (25). The men in Nightwood are defined by their Otherness, and none of them have any resemblance of control. Their various physical disabilities of blindness and sterility prevent their domination of the women in the text. Of course, the women are dominated by the society at large, but in the microcosmic society of Nightwood, they have more power than the men.

None of the characters really have a stable identity; otherwise, they would not be so chronically affected by Vote. However, O’Connor is a catalyst for change: he delivers Nora

Flood at birth, introduces Robin Vote and the Baron, and reveals (inadvertently) the affair between Petherbridge and Vote. For Volkbein, the doctor is a prophet—a Tiresias-like, half- male and half-female figure who not only predicts the future but influences it. When

O’Connor initially encounters the Baron, he offers Volkbein a drink who responds that he does not drink at all. The doctor foretells that “you will” (Barnes 17). In the Baron’s last scene in the book, his alcohol consumption has radically changed. He bears the physical markers of an alcoholic, and “to hide the red that flushed his cheeks he has grown a beard ending in two forked points” (Barnes 103). For many of the other characters, O’Connor is a

Cassandra-like figure because they refuse to heed his warnings, and their subconscious view 48 of his femininity allows his words to be dismissed easily. In contrast, Volkbein realizes the doctor’s predictive ability during the theft in Vote’s apartment, but that does not mean

Volkbein can interpret O’Connor’s pronouncements correctly.

O’Connor’s actions to mask the pilferage tell of his gender displacement but act as a catalyst for Volkbein’s acceptance of the doctor’s homosexuality. Many critics have remarked on O’Connor’s transvestitism, but it appears to be more fundamental part of the doctor’s identity than a sartorial choice. Initially, Volkbein finds himself “experiencing a double confusion” as he watches the doctor (Barnes 35). O’Connor makes “gestures of one, who, in preparing the audience for a miracle, must pretend that there is nothing to hide,” and thus creates “the most flagrant part of the hoax,” but the smoke and mirrors is not just to hide the monetary loss (Barnes 35). His priority is not to steal the cash, but rather, some of Vote’s markers of feminine identity. O’Connor acts quickly, “snatching a few drops from perfume bottle [ . . . ] dusting his darkly bristled chin with puff, and drawing a line of rouge across his lips, his upper lip compressed on his lower in order to have it seem that their sudden embellishment was a visitation of nature” (Barnes 35). As Judith Butler writes in Gender

Trouble, “the figure of the interior soul understood as “within” the body is signified through its inscription on the body, even though its primary mode of signification is through its very absence, its potent invisibility” (184). At first, it may appear that O’Connor is appropriating the trappings of femininity, but according to Butler, the doctor is performing the act of inscribing his gender identification on his own body. He ignores his masculine “darkly bristled chin” and powders it; he rolls his lips together to even out the lipstick application.

By blending the makeup, he attempts to create “a visitation of nature” where there is a seamless divide between gender reality and gender enhancement. The locus is where the 49 concept of absence arises; as long as the changes wrought to his masculine face by the feminine cosmetics look natural, and then the doctor can display his interior alignment and place it safely into the public sphere. Volkbein’s “double confusion” resides in witnessing

O’Connor’s dual identification of gender; the confusion was from the supposed theft of gender—the doctor had not stolen the money at that point.

The uncertainty that Volkbein feels is not an entirely negative situation. He is entertained by the doctor’s performance of gender. Volkbein sees O’Connor as a magician preparing a feat of grand illusion, and the act is successful for both men. The use of the makeup is an element of O’Connor’s magical thinking that he is a woman, and the accoutrements of femininity helps to bridge the gap between his internal perceptions and how others see him. The moment of suspended disbelief extends to Volkbein also. He sees the doctor as “unorthodox,” but does not balk at accepting O’Connor as a woman (Barnes 33).

Volkbein does not incriminate him in the theft of the feminine objects. For Volkbein, the gender performance does not degrade until the doctor steals the money. Volkbein sees the action as morally out of character for O’Connor and the “fabric of magic had begun to decompose as if the mechanics of machination were indeed out of control and were simplifying themselves back to their origin” (Barnes 35). Volkbein’s act of witnessing the doctor’s lapse causes an emotional shift within Volkbein.

Baron Volkbein spends a majority of Nightwood in submission to others. He is introduced in “Bow Down,” and “he bowed slightly to anyone who looks as if he might be

“someone,” but after he meets Vote, he lives in submission to her (Barnes 9). The Baron does not bow to others as often after their marriage, but he blinds himself to any negative outcome of the marriage. Volkbein saw Vote as a “figure of doom” when they met (Barnes 50

39). When Volkbein and O’Connor speak of marriage in regards to Vote, O’Connor warns

that “the last child born to aristocracy is sometimes an idiot, out of respect—we go up—but

we come down” (Barnes 38). The Baron uses his disability to hide from the doctor’s

prediction; he “dropped his monocle, the unarmed eye looked straight ahead” (Barnes 38).

The doctor’s words should have comforted Volkbein because he knows that his father

falsified their aristocratic connection. His family should be safe from the inbreeding that in

rampant in the nobility; nonetheless, they are endangered. O’Connor’s prophecies are true

again.

In many ways, the characters cause their own undoing because of their refusal to

grant Vote her own identity. If Vote cannot react and change to stimuli, then her lovers can

remain the same also. Hence, the stasis of mourning is reinforced by Barnes’s rhetorical uses

of parallelism and repetition. Guido will never age, and Baron Volkbein will never truly lose

his wife. His entrapment in her memory allows Volkbein to remain married. As long as he

continues to mourn as her husband, Volkbein does not have to question that he has failed the

basic biological directive as a male: to successfully reproduce in order to ensure the survival

of the species. However, the only character who truly desires to be pregnant is unable to bear

children; O’Connor is biologically a male. None of the characters in Nightwood are satisfied;

they think that they long for the one they never truly possessed, but they really wish for permanence.

51

IV. Hunting for Humanity in the Throes of Grief: “The Great Blind Searchlight of

the Heart:”4

Nearly all of the characters in Nightwood spend their time looking for Robin Vote;

they either hope to claim her as a lover or regain her presence after she leaves them. In some

ways, the repetitive pursuit of Vote takes primacy over the characters’ desires to actually

possess her. After her lovers lay claim to her, they become traumatized by her lack of

emotion even though there are initial signs that she is not humanly sentient. Her emotional

void causes a rupture in their perceptions; the truth of Vote’s identity is redefined by each

new lover, but none of them has an accurate depiction of whom she is. She reflects her

lovers; they love her because she is like them, but the dominion that they have over her is an

illusion. They mistake her preference for not making decisions as an incapacity for choice.

When Vote makes decisions, she leaves.

Whenever Vote flees, she creates a traumatic break in her lovers’ psyches since they feel that

they lost part of their being and identity. The fantasy is destroyed by Vote’s physical

movements; her ex- lovers are trapped in the stasis of a traumatic moment and cannot relinquish the image that they have constructed.

Trauma theory is helpful in understanding the obsessive nature of the characters in

Nightwood. Trauma theory has become more common in literary analysis through the works of Lori Daub, Shoshanna Feldman and Cathy Caruth, but the origins of trauma analysis comes from Freud. Over the course of his life, Sigmund Freud was preoccupied with the reactions that death and grief could cause in a patient. Two of his works, “Beyond the

Pleasure Principle” and “Mourning and Melancholia” explicitly address how the attempt to

avoid negative experiences creates a rupture within one’s psyche. They provide an

4 p. 79 52 expressive framework for understanding the development of a traumatic reaction. In his

1917 paper, “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud delineates how “normal” grief or mourning can transform into a neurosis that becomes self-perpetuating and, in some respects, enjoyable to the one who suffered the loss (Freud 587). However, the enjoyment caused by the neurosis is not a healthy pleasure. Flood admits to O’Connor that she is happier without

Vote because she “had to watch her wanting to go away and yet to stay,” but Flood continually revisits the crisis of Vote abandoning her (Barnes 117). Flood cannot release the trauma; she tries to repossess her anger by committing incest “with others who had slept with my lover and child” by finding all of Vote ex-lovers (Barnes 129). Flood hopes that through the debauchery, she will “do something that Robin will never be able to forgive, then we can begin again as strangers” (Barnes 129). She defiles their home with a succession of lovers where “every object [. . .] attests to their love,” but now is marked with degradation (Barnes

50). Vote never brought lovers home; Flood’s actions have ruined Vote’s place of “sleep and safety” (Barnes 117). Flood’s anger manifests as the “self-tormenting in melancholia [ . . . ] which signifies, just like the corresponding phenomenon in obsessional neurosis, a satisfaction of trends of sadism and hate which relate to an object, and which have been turned around on the subject’s own self” (Freud 588). Flood says that Vote “should have put her down” instead of ending the relationship; Flood has come to hate her existence (Barnes

130). The one who suffers from the grief of separation—whether it is from a death or end of a relationship—displaces the anger that he or she feels toward the lost object, internalizes the pain and creates more anger.

The one who causes the rupture needs to be punished for the break, but the object of the trauma survivor is no longer physically present. By the “circuitous path of self- 53

punishment,” the mourner has a way of “taking revenge on the original object [. . .] in order to avoid the need to express their hostility to him openly” (588). Therefore, the one from whom the pain originates cannot feel the pain that the mourner is feeling and is not aware of the agony. Someone needs to serve as a receptacle for the emotional overload. In her book,

Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, Cathy Caruth writes that “central problem of listening, of knowing and of representing what emerges from the actual experience of the crisis” is the pivot of the traumatic break (5). Most of the characters in

Nightwood are unable to listen to anyone but themselves. As part of their traumatic experience, they must “represent” the event of Vote leaving them, but the ex-lovers do not

“know” what happened. O’Connor serves the function of listener. Both Flood and Volkbein seek him out, but O’Connor is overwhelmed by their refusal to let Vote go. The doctor experiences a hysteric breakdown because “all of them—sitting on me as heavy as a truck horse—talking [. . .] Why doesn’t anyone know when everything is over except me?”

(Barnes 136). The doctor is the only one who can “know.” He is the only one with the

tripartite understanding that Caruth claims is necessary. If Vote ex-lovers admit that their

relationships are over, they will lose something that is precious to them. William A. Johnsen

in his article “Modern Women Novelists: Nightwood and the Novel of Sensibility” claimed

that “Nora, like Felix, searches for her without wanting to find her, cherishing her

bereavement” (36). To align how they are acting with the Freudian concept of grief, the pain

is now pleasurable. Suffering is supposed to lessen as part of the grieving process, but the

other characters wallow in their emotional state.

The mourning process does not happen within the correct timeframe. The temporal order is skewed. Freud wrote that the normal cessation of mourning occurs after a period of 54

“reality-testing” (589). However, Flood began testing the reality of Vote’s relationship with

her before it ended. She created rituals to bind Vote to her, so Vote could “remember that

she belonged to Nora” (Barnes 50). Flood had an “unreasoning fear” of Vote vanishing and

“unconsciously at first, she [Flood] went about disturbing nothing,” so Vote could always

find her way back to Flood (Barnes 50). Flood’s rationale is that if the furniture was moved,

Vote would not recognize the apartment as her home. Furthermore, Flood would sing the

same songs as Vote in order to find “an echo of her unknown life” and create another

commonality between the two (Barnes 51). Neither of these mystical acts kept Vote from

leaving Flood for Petherbridge. They did not even keep Vote faithful. Flood claims that she

only fully possessed Vote “when she was drunk and had passed out,” but “they always put

hands on her when she was drunk” (Barnes 120; 119-120). Vote had to be unconscious for

Flood to control her. Flood’s trauma could not stop with the passage of time because every time Vote was conscious, the traumatic moment would happen again.

The act of mourning becomes corrupted in Nightwood. The dissonance in the chronology of grief mars the reaction of the mourner. Furthermore, in “Beyond the Pleasure

Principle” (1923), Freud writes that “loss of love and failure leave behind them a permanent injury to self-regard in the form of a narcissistic scar” and creates a “compulsion to repeat”

(603; 605). Mimicking the obsession, Freud restates this phrase (as translated) numerous times within his text. Time thus becomes unhinged from its linear progression; the shock

“obliges him to repeat the repressed material, as contemporary experience instead of [. . .] remembering it as something belonging to the past” (Freud 602). Although the need to repeat a past event as a contemporary one may seem odd, it is actually a way to regain the emotional control that was lost by the person when he or she experienced the trauma at the 55 exact moment it initially occurred. As Freud observed, “each fresh repetition seems to strengthen the mastery they are in search of,” and replaying the event can mentally create an opportunity to change the past (611). Flood has to relive the act of Vote leaving; she doesn’t

“dare stop for fear of the moment it will come back again” (Barnes 117). The rationale is a fantasy because the juxtaposition of the memory and reality recreate the break—not cause it to cease.

The ruptures caused by Robin Vote follow Freud’s pattern of loss through the repetitious actions and words that are used in Nightwood. Nearly all of the characters are trapped at the site of the trauma of Vote’s absence. Cathy Caruth in her book Trauma:

Explorations in Memory explains that “to be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event” (4-5). The characters are “possessed” by both: the image that they have created of Robin Vote and the event of her abandoning them. As the relationship between

Jenny Petherbridge and Vote was ending, Petherbridge “accused Robin of a ‘sensuous communion with unclean spirits.’ And in putting her wickedness to words she struck herself down” (Barnes 138). The allegation against Vote is one that can be made against

Petherbridge; she is covetous and wishes to “possess” what belongs to others. Petherbridge is, after all, “the Squatter” (Barnes 60). The only unclean spirit that Vote is involved with is

Petherbridge herself. Through her act of naming Vote, Petherbridge forfeits the semblance of control that she had over Vote. Since Petherbridge can no longer understand Vote, which is “more unendurable than her absence,” she has surrenders her self-identity along with losing Vote as her lover (Barnes 138). Vote finally regains her freedom. She achieves the anonymity that she desires throughout Nightwood; Vote is finally “forgotten in the fixed stillness, obliterating her as a drop of water is made anonymous by the pond into which it has 56

fallen” (Barnes 138). Vote’s true desire is not for her lovers but a desire for absence of

being.

The non-responsive nature of Vote leads the other characters to invent her in

whatever image fits their emotional and physical needs. Robin Vote is commonly seen as a

non-sentient being. Her first appearance in the novel is in the chapter “La Somnabule” (the

Sleepwalker), and she is unconscious on a bed. Her body is so non-responsive that it emits a

smell of decay that “was of the quality of earth-flesh, fungi” (Barnes 34). The act of sleeping

appears to be more than sleep; Vote is surrounded by “phosphorus glowing” and “ungainly

luminous deteriorations” much as bioluminescence can illuminate a corpse (Barnes 34). She

is not a human creature; rather, she is of the plant kingdom.5 Her skin is not flesh, but “the

texture of plant life” (Barnes 34). As Felix Volkbein and Dr. O’Connor rouse her from her

comatose state, she is startled awake from “some deep shocked realm” (Barnes 35). In fact,

the event of her waking causes her to make one of her few direct verbalizations in the book:

“I was all right” (Barnes 35). Vote was truly “all right” until they interrupted her slumber,

and she “fell back into the pose of her annihilation” (Barnes 35). Nevertheless, she is not

allowed to subside back into the realm of non-sentience. When Volkbein becomes attracted

to her, his attempts to make her more human begin to create the dissonance that will

culminate in his traumatic experience.

Volkbein’s desire to make Vote human is operative on multiple levels. She is a

Galatea-like figure for Volkbein. Satoshi Nishimurai in his article, "Djuna Barnes's

Nightwood,” removes Robin Vote further away from humanity by analyzing how she

5 5 When Barnes was writing Nightwood, the binomial nomenclature system only acknowledged two kingdoms: plants and animals. The division of fungi into its own kingdom outside of plants had not occurred. 57

symbolized by non-sentient living things. He writes that Vote’s “supposed humanness is an

effect of such a rhetorical device as personification,” but the concept is not precisely accurate

(204). Her lovers compare Vote until she matches their referent. Volkbein looks for ways that Vote and he are similar, and when he cannot find any, he invents them. When he introduces her to the trappings of Old World European aristocracy, she grows bored and falls asleep. Volkbein realizes he is “not sufficient to make her what he had hoped; it would require more than his own argument” (Barnes 41). Instead of accepting Vote as having her own identity, Volkbein considers finding others who would be able to refashion Vote into what he wants her to be. Volkbein trusts in her changeability. He sees her “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” (Barnes 39). A statue is a thing made by humans in the likeness of a living creature. When Volkbein sees her metaphorically like a statue, he contrives a malleability to will represent her. The idea is

an illusion; man is incompetent to change her. Although Vote is compared to being made of

stone, she is still somehow organic since the forces of nature corral her into a creation of

biology—not of humanity.

Before going further with Barnes’s definition of humanity and gender, the way she

structures living creatures needs to be understood. In the introduction to Smoke and Other

Early Stories by Djuna Barnes, Douglas Messerli postulates that she “became fascinated

by—almost obsessed with—the role of human beings in the metaphysical structure of the

universe [. . .] [Nightwood’s structure] bears resemblance to the Great Chain of Being—the

structure reified in the eighteenth century in which man is positioned between salvation and

damnation is caught halfway between the angels and the beasts” (17). The claim is not 58

farfetched. According to the University of Maryland archives, Barnes owned multiple books

by Plato, and many should have been in her possession before writing Nightwood. There are

other Platonic images in Nightwood. Plato writes that human souls were split into the

genders and that the half soul encased in one body was looking for its missing half. When

Volkbein decides that Vote is to be his wife, she is “the converging halves of a broken fate”

or his soulmate (Barnes 37). The truth of their meeting is the “broken fate” is the real

occurrence. Their relationship will end because she is not his other half, but Barnes uses

another Platonic concept more extensively. According to Plato’s concept of the “Great Chain

of Being,” the living world is structured in a hierarchy: Gods and minions, humanity,

animals, plants, and elements (earth, wind, fire, and water). Messerli believes that Barnes’s

“characters are positioned along a spectrum of their relationship to these two extremes:”

sentience and non-sentient (17). Robin Vote is no exception to the proposed schema, but she

is the most flexible in Nightwood. Barnes moves her along the Great Chain of Being according to the perceptions of the other characters.

Vote is never fully human because the other characters are unable to understand her.

She resists definition since “two spirits were working in her, love and anonymity” (Barnes

49). The imposition of naming her as a lover or a wife forces Vote to disassociate with her

partner because it is an attempt to make her human. Vote’s self-identity is threatened. The

experience of her ex-lovers’ trauma “is bound up with its crisis of truth” (Caruth Trauma 8).

To carry the metaphor of the Great Chain of Being further, Locke’s Essay Concerning

Human Understanding defines how the ideation of the self occurs. It depends on three

aspects: the physical presence (the body), the ability to think (the mind or consciousness), 59

and the ability to reflection on past events (memory). Vote’s lovers all violate these

guidelines when they attempt to pigeonhole Vote as a reflection of themselves.

The first violation occurs on the site of Vote’s body. Locke writes that it would be “a very strange use of the word man, applied to an idea out of which body and shape are excluded” (para. 10). He means that a man is partially created by his shape. The metaphor is

not from Locke, but the concept is like the philosophical conundrum of how one knows if he

or she is a human dreaming of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of being a human.

Robin Vote is not awake; she is dreaming. Barnes introduces her in “La Somnabule” (the sleepwalker) and describes her “as if Robin’s life held not volition for refusal” (Barnes 40).

Vote appears to be human in form, but her physical form is contradictory. She is a “tall girl with the body of a boy,” but “she is like an old stature in a garden” (Barnes 43; 39). Vote’s physical nature becomes an observable phenomenon rather than a state of being.

The second transgression against Vote’s identity is her lovers’ perception of her mind. To fulfill Locke’s requirement of human consciousness, the mind has to be a participatory organ, rather than the reactive one that marks the identity of animals. She does not seem to think for herself, but all of the other characters try to think for her.

Volkbein was “surprised” that Vote had a different opinion than he (Barnes 39). Flood sees

Vote as a “tall child [. . .] walking and needing help and safety,” but Flood’s coddling of

Vote has a disparate effect (Barnes 121). In a moment of drunken anger, Vote tells her that

Flood has made her feel “dirty and tired and old” (Barnes 120). This statement is a direct

speech act by Vote (Barnes 120). However, Flood cannot comprehend it: “I said, “Do you

really meant that?” And she said she meant it.” By the movement from a direct speech act to

an indirect speech act, Flood removes Vote’s agency. Through encapsulating Vote’s words 60

within Flood’s own, Flood regains the control that she lost over the relationship and, more

insidiously, reinforces Flood’s identity as a caretaker for Vote.

Vote’s mental response appears to be reactive except when she decides to flee. When

Vote leaves, she makes a decision. Vote’s attempts to communicate are foregrounded when she retreats from her ex-lovers, but her they built an identity that precludes a life without

Vote. They refuse to hear her. Barnes rarely uses direct speech with Vote in Nightwood, but when Vote actually speaks, the act warns that a crisis is coming. When she leaves Volkbein,

Vote says, “I’ll get out” (Barnes 45). Vote orders Jenney Petherbridge to “Shut up,” and soon deserts Flood (Barnes 66). For humans, “consciousness always accompanies thinking, and it is that which makes everyone to be what he calls self, and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things” (Locke para. 15). Vote’s ex-lovers rob Vote of this characteristic of humanity, but that is not all they take from her. The most telling evidence of human consciousness lies within the ability to recall prior events, but Vote is stripped of her memory.

The final location of the traumatic event is within the memory. For Locke, the persistence of memory is aligned with “as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person; it is the same self now it was then; and it is by the same self with the present one that now reflects on it, that that action was done” (para 15). The bridge between the different aspects of a person’s life illustrates the retention of identity through diverse events, but according to

Flood, Vote exists without the ability to remember. Flood is lying to herself. When Vote is first encountered in Nightwood, “she recognized the doctor [. . .] and at the moment he spoke, she placed him” (Barnes 36). When Vote wanders, she makes the choice of not telling where 61 she was: “she did not explain where she had been, she was unable or unwilling to give an account of herself” (Barnes 45). Flood’s refusal to grant Vote the ability to remember is another way for Flood to control Vote’s identity. As the years pass, Vote goes out more at night, but her movements are not excuses to binge; Vote is trying to retain her identity outside of the relationship. When “the departures of Robin became a slowly increasing rhythm,” Flood hunted for her in the bars and restaurants and tried to force her to return to their home (Barnes 52). Vote resisted. Flood cannot accept partial blame for the failure of the relationship; she tells the doctor “that the night does something to a person’s identity,” but the night allows Vote to have an identity without her lovers. She must keep moving to escape.

In Nightwood, Robin Vote is the site for the traumatic response by the other characters, but she is not the cause of it. One major difficulty in dealing with a trauma is that it is considered to be an event that is represented in ways that are both truthful and incomprehensible. Every participant in the trauma will see a different aspect of it, but that becomes the truth to the individual. The seed of the mental break for the characters in

Nightwood resides within the concept of self-identity. By disallowing Vote her own sense of agency and identity, her ex-lovers forced her to leave the relationship, and in turn, the event caused a crisis that fractured the identities of her ex-lovers. Nevertheless, the traumatic break would not have happened if Volkbein, Flood and Petherbridge had constructed their identity without using Vote’s presence or lack of presence as a foundation. 62

V. Closing Thoughts on Nightwood: “Haunting the Terminals”6

After a reading of a draft of Nightwood, Thelma Wood “hit Barnes in the mouth, knocked her down twice, and threw a cup of tea at her” (Herring 165). Even though

Nightwood is written as fiction, some aspects of it are uncomfortably close to actual events as evinced by Wood’s strong reaction. This duality of truth and invention is both successful and problematic. Nightwood can be a demanding book to read. The prose is, at times, impenetrable, and the literary references are obscure, but those reasons are not entirely why

Nightwood can be hard to understand. Djuna Barnes wrote a difficult book because she was grappling with her own grief and struggling to understand why love ends. Her constant thematic repetitions of words and phrases heighten the loss—not only as a rhetorical advice—but as an evocation of trauma.

The catastrophic nature of the trauma forces those who experience the initial event to relive the rupture. The repetition can take on the form of reenacting the moment, or, in the case of the characters of Nightwood, to obsessively speak about Robin Vote. As long as they continue to vocalize about her, they have not completely lost her. Their repetitions enable a type of time travel that returns them to before the locus of the trauma. Her ex-lovers want to repair the break-up with Vote, but they do not want to fix what caused the division; they desire to have the event erased.

Petherbridge, Flood, and Volkbein’s yearning for a prelapsarian time is false because their relationship with Vote is a fantasy. All of them believe that they are the only ones who understand Vote, but they are reflecting their own identity onto Vote. They project a lack of agency on her because they prefer her to be dependent. If she cannot function without the

6 p. 137 63

guidance of any of the three, then she will not survive without them. They are the ones who

need her in order for their self-identities to survive. The most amusing event in Nightwood

shows Flood’s delusions. She tells Vote, “in the resurrection, when we come up looking

backward at each other, I shall know only you out of that company.” Vote responds, “Don’t

wait for me” (Barnes 52). Flood will wait because her identity, like the identity of

Petherbridge and Volkbein, is inextricably tied to Vote. When Vote leaves, the hole in their

identities is replaced by their suffering from her absence.

Vote acts in a manner that illustrates that she has a proclivity for action and causes

her lovers to experience a crisis of identity. Before a relationship ends, Vote commonly

travels away from the physical presence of her lover. She wanders relentlessly until she

decides to break up the partnership. Vote’s incessant travels are a profound contrast to her

ex-lover’s reactions; they become trapped in the stasis of the traumatic moment.

The trauma caused by Vote’s removal sunders the self-identity of the other characters. Throughout Nightwood, they deny Vote her humanity. They compare her to inanimate objects and claim she does not have sentience in order to control her. Her ex- lovers place her beneath them on Plato’s Great Chain of Being, but the act of categorizing is not accurately done. The other characters do not realize that Vote cannot be manipulated because she is human.

Djuna Barnes may have been coping with her own grief and rage at Thelma Wood in

Nightwood, but she created a meaningful work. The absences within Nightwood are what make the book such a profound text. The characters try to fill the losses of love and self- identity and presence with words, but it is not enough. The trauma is too great, and the characters are unwilling to let it recede into the past. Their self-identity becomes definable 64

by grief and atrophy. Although her ex-lovers fixate on regaining their identity through the repossession of Vote, she becomes free from the strictures that they placed on her. 65

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