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The Tainted Aesthetic of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood

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The Tainted Aesthetic of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood Miranda Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone / Multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal on the English- speaking world 21 | 2020 Modernism and the Obscene “Obscene and touching”–the tainted aesthetic of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood Margaret Gillespie Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/27773 DOI: 10.4000/miranda.27773 ISSN: 2108-6559 Publisher Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès Electronic reference Margaret Gillespie, ““Obscene and touching”–the tainted aesthetic of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood”, Miranda [Online], 21 | 2020, Online since 09 October 2020, connection on 16 February 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/27773 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/miranda.27773 This text was automatically generated on 16 February 2021. Miranda is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. “Obscene and touching”–the tainted aesthetic of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood 1 “Obscene and touching”–the tainted aesthetic of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood Margaret Gillespie Introduction: Barnes scholarship and the question of obscenity 1 A number of scholars (Gilmore 1994,1 Plumb 1995, 2 Faltejskova 2010 3) have viewed obscenity in Djuna Barnes’s writing as primarily a question of eluding institutional and societal constraints where her censored modernist peers famously failed.4 The author’s Ladies Almanack (1928), a bawdy chapbook celebrating American heiress Natalie Barney’s lesbian coterie, for instance, was privately printed as a limited edition and covertly hawked on the streets of Paris. Such was the linguistic opacity of the once- performed play, The Antiphon (1958), written in arcane Shakespearean-style verse, that its disturbing theme—a father’s sexual abuse of his daughter—went largely unnoticed.5 The novel Ryder (1928), a “female Tom Jones” (Caselli 197) in the novelist’s own words, and Nightwood (1936), loosely based on Barnes’s ill-fated Parisian love affair with silverpoint artist Thelma Wood, were both partially “sanitized” at editorial stage to avoid censorship, with or without the novelist’s assent.6 2 One of T.S. Eliot’s key concerns, in his role as editor for Nightwood, published in London by the highly respectable Faber and Faber in 1936, was that the novel would suffer the same fate as Ulysses, be judged obscene, go to court and be banned (Blake 153). Eliot’s misgivings were certainly not without foundation for a text that in the words of Jane Marcus “flaunt [s] every possible taboo from the excretory to the sexual and […] invent [s] taboos uncatalogued even by Freud” (Marcus 2004: 102). The publisher took a number of precautionary steps, “robing” the novel in a drab and worthy introduction— the discursive equivalent of “pale grey,” as one contemporary reviewer aptly observed (Potter 173), and excising explicit references to homosexuality. Terms like “fairy,” Miranda, 21 | 2020 “Obscene and touching”–the tainted aesthetic of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood 2 “faggot” and “queen” (Faltejskova 95) as well as many of the cross-dressing protagonist Matthew O’Connor’s, saucier same-sex tales and escapades were removed.7 Earlier in the editorial process, Emily Coleman, Barnes’s friend and de facto literary agent, also convinced her to cut lines referring to O’Connor’s flannel nightgown as “not only the womanly, but the incestuous garment,” claiming the lines were “meaningless” (Hollis 245). 3 Yet as Diane Chisolm has rightly observed, the bounds of legal discourse are just one benchmark by which obscenity may be judged: “obscene art may be legalized by new court rulings and/or legitimized by a body of liberal taste and still retain the power to shock” (Chisolm 169). Eliot was successful in publishing Nightwood, but even after partial bowdlerization, it still remained “considerably more sexually explicit” than most books previously published in the United Kingdom (Potter 173). Reading Nightwood through Sade and the surrealists among others, Chisolm showcases its transgressive potential which she argues deploys “a vast battery of obscene materials” to irreverently assail the regimented norms of legal, sexological and theological discourse to figure a mise-en-texte of the “‘obscene’ frame of speech in which any unbecoming sexuality must be lived and thought” (Chisolm 195, 172). For Rachel Potter, Nightwood’s obscene “bodies, minds and words” are significant in highlighting a shift in the inter-war cultural climate and the demise of moral censoriousness, occasioning a veritable sea change in the parameters of what would constitute literary value and novelistic form (Potter 174). 4 My focus and interest here, however, lie less in the “flaunted,” manifest, obscenity of Nightwood than in the notion of the obscene as an issue of problematic visibility within the text. Returning to the twin etymological origins of the term, the Latin obscaenus meaning “from or with filth, ill-omened or abominable,” and the Greek ob skene, meaning “off-stage, not fit to be seen on-stage” (McKay 80), I propose to explore not only what “filth” or “abomination” the narrative openly reveals, but what it also conceals within its discomfiting poetics. More specifically, drawing on the interface between literature and trauma theory, I will discuss how a text like Nightwood may function as a conduit, enabling the textual enactment of the repressed/ob-scene memory of abominable/obscene traumatic experience. This is not to suggest a reading of the narrative as biographical mapping. Central to my thesis is the notion that traumatic memories cannot be accessed directly but paradoxically come into being only through the process of testimony—in Barnes’s case, the creative process that is then offered up to the reader as witness. But how is this “ob-scene obscene” figured in the narrative? Is there a discernable poetics, or even ethics, of the obscene? My exploration will open, by way of example, with a reading of Nightwood’s unsettling final chapter, which offers an instance of both manifest and latent obscenity. We will go on to see how the character of Robin Vote functions within the logic of the narrative to encode traumatic memory, and more specifically the trauma of incest. This will lead us to reflect upon the interplay of incest, traumatic memory and modernist textuality before offering a series of readings towards the definition of a poetics of the “ob-scene obscene” in Nightwood and asking whether the creative act may have an ethical role to play in healing an authorial voice possessed by its traumatic past. Miranda, 21 | 2020 “Obscene and touching”–the tainted aesthetic of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood 3 Nightwood: the unsettling final chapter 5 As he revised Nightwood prior to publication, Eliot had also initially been keen to suppress the novel’s controversial final coda chapter, “The Possessed,” set in a decaying chapel where the female character Robin Vote fights with a dog belonging to her former lover Nora, before collapsing into tears and bringing the dog down with her (Caselli 181). The manuscripts of the last versions of Nightwood show that even though the chapter was finally retained, Eliot was still considering replacing the expression “obscene” in the final paragraph by the more innocuous “unclean”—a recommendation Barnes refused to follow, wryly dismissing it as an “example of T.S. Eliot’s ‘lack of imagination’”8: Then she began to bark also, crawling after him—barking in a fit of laughter, obscene and touching. Crouching, the dog began to run with her, head-on with her head, as if to circumvent her; soft and slow his feet went padding. He ran this way and that, low down in his throat crying, and she grinning and crying with him; crying in shorter and shorter spaces, moving head to head, until she gave up, lying out, her hands beside her, her face turned and weeping; and the dog too gave up then, and lay down, his eyes bloodshot, his head flat along her knees. (139) 6 The meaning of the passage was apparently obvious to Barnes herself—“Let the reader make up his own mind if hes [sic] not an idiot he’ll know” she commented (Plumb 1995: xv)—and it has prompted clear responses from some critics. In his 1975 assessment for instance, Robert Nadeau had no qualms in pronouncing the passage “strangely beautiful in spite of the fact that the action described would be considered obscene by almost any standard” (Nadeau 160, my emphasis). More recently, Teresa de Lauretis has described it as “shocking in its unequivocal simulation of a sexual act from frenzied crescendo to failed orgasmic release” (De Lauretis 121). Yet the scene has largely invited a “critical silence” (Blake 161) on the part of scholars, and those who have chosen to comment on the ending have tended to either stand pruriently back, viewing it as a dystopian descent into bestiality, or to offer oblique or abstract appraisals of its possible meaning. Kannenstine’s 1977 monograph on Barnes, Duality and Damnation, for instance, refers to “a bizarre ritualistic ceremony with the beast which brings her down to its level” (Kannenstine 94, my emphasis) and Jane Marcus retreats behind the cover of allusion referring simply to “the novel’s controversial last scene with the dog” (Marcus 1984: 154). Avoiding the sexual question altogether, Donna Gerstenberger has interpreted the ending as a postmodern riff on The Waste Land (Gerstenberger 39)9 while Erin Carlston sees it as an “ironic rebuttal of fascism” (Carlston 79); many twenty-first- century scholars have pursued Gerstenberger’s and Carlston’s less literal approach, reading the passage through the lens of queer theory or the posthuman (Blake 162).10 7 My own unease around this passage comes from elsewhere and is rooted in the oxymoron—“obscene and touching”—with which the narrative voice glosses the episode. The expression points to an unresolved tension between a doting, sentimental gaze on the one hand (“touching”) and a moral abomination on the other (“obscene”), and seems to invite the reader to be at once charmed and yet troubled by the spectacle conjured up before their eyes—that “strangely beautiful” scene in Robert Nadeau’s words.
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