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DIUNA BARNES's NIGHTWOOD and the CARKVALESQUE MEGAN

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DIUNA BARNES's NIGHTWOOD and the CARKVALESQUE MEGAN LOOKING FOR 77IE FOREST EV TIE TREES: DIUNA BARNES'S NIGHTWOOD AND ThE CARKVALESQUE MEGAN ROUGHLEY D. PHIL. THE UNIVERSITY OF YORK DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND RELATED LITERATURE JULY 1991 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Acknowledgements Abstract iv Abbreviations vi INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE From Confidence to Doubt: A History of Reading Night wood 10 CHAPTER TWO Through the Carnivalesque to Uncertainty 72 CHAPTER THREE History Deflowered 118 CHAPTER FOUR Nightwood God's Little Bag of Tricks 172 CHAPTER FIVE Eroticism and Death 232 CONCLUSION 298 NOTES 304 BIBLIOGRAPHY 338 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First of all, I wish to express my profound gratitude to Nicole Ward Jouve for her bravery and imagination in supervising this thesis and for being so generous with her incisive intellect. I would also like to thank the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, especially Jacques Berthoud, for permitting me to work with a text and with theories which have fascinated me for some time. And, I would like to thank the Department of English and Communication Studies at the University of New England for putting up with a sometimes "preoccupied" lecturer for the past year and for their encouragement. I would like to express my gratitude to The Committee of Vice- Chancellors and Principals of the Universities of the U.K. for an extended Overseas Research Scholarship and to the University of New England for an Internal Research Grant, both of which made the completion of this thesis possible. To my colleagues at U.N.E., Tim Nelson and Annette Stewart, I would like to say "thankyou" for reading, patiently, various drafts of chapters. I would also like to express my gratitude to Bob, for his unquestioning support, and to Lois, for raising me on imagination. And to "Shem the Penman" Roughley, my corporeal enemy and spiritual friend, I would like to express my eternal gratitude. ABSTRACT This thesis is a poststructuralist analysis of Nuns Barnes's NAThtwood as a "carnivalesque" text marked by an engendered difference. The first chapter is composed of selected biographical material, considerations of previous critical analyses of Barnes's work, and the primary establishment of my approach to Nightwood It culminates in an analysis of a passage from Nightwood which illustrates the "carnivalesque" nature of Barnes's discourse and introduces the following discussion of the "carnivalesque" in theory. The second chapter is a description, analysis, and distillation--via the commentary of Julia Kristeva and Jacques Derrida's concept of "differance"--of Bakhtin's concept of the "carnivalesque" as presented in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics and The Dialogic Imagination. This process yields a functional concept of the "carnivalesque" that will be used as the rudiment of my particular reading of the text. I also, briefly, consider Barnes's text as an arguably "carnivalesque" writing. In the third chapter, I examine Night wood as a self reflective text engaged in a carnivalizing of the subjective critical paradigms determining and delineating our reading of both historical and fictional -iv- discourses at least since the nineteenth century. For example, I examine how Nightwood's aphoristic practice confounds a conventional development of Character, how Night wood inverts the hierarchical relationship of "plot" over "image", and how it overturns the traditional priority of "speech" over "writing". Chapter Four is a reading between Nightwood and The Confessions of St. Augustine and between Night wood and The Spiritual Exercises of 51. Ignatius of Loyola. It examines NAghtwoods carnivalesque relationship to certain predominant Pauline paradigms and Night wood's perverse adoption of certain Ignatian methods of "composition". In the fifth chapter, I examine AUghtwoods engagement with Freudian psychoanalytic theory and consider Barnes as what Kristeva would call a "writer of abjection". In the course of doing so, I also consider the possible effects of the gender of the author on the writing of the text. ABBREVIATIONS Lewis and Short Lewis and Short's Latin Dictionary. Eds. C.T. Lewis and C. Short. Oxford: Claredon Press, 1889. Liddell and Scott Greek-English Lexicon. Compiled by H.G. Liddell and R. Scott. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1871. OED The Oxford English Dictionary. INTRODUCTION _ 1 - DJuna Barnes's novel Night wood has been admired for its poetic and modernist qualities by readers like T.S. Eliot, Kathleen Raise, and Dylan Thomas. At the same time, it has been criticized as a narcissistic and too-private or perverse--even "sick"--work by Graham Greene, and it has been dismissed as mere rhetoric or "blubbery prose" by Ezra Pound.' Critical consensus on its value as "art" has not been Nightwoods lot. However, there has been general agreement on the text's difficulty: most critics agree that Nigh twood offers intricately complex writing, no matter if this complexity is assumed to arise from modernist experimentalism, some form of psychological verisimilitude, excessive rhetoricity, or Just plain bad writing. The first part of my argument Is that the complexity of Nightwood's language, rather than being a rhetorical adjunct to the plot, is the primary generative feature of the text and should be the focus of any analytical consideration of Night wood Traditionally, the language which conveys or presents a novel's plot or theme has been held to be secondary to the plot or story which it purportedly tells and valued in relation to its non- obstructive or transparent qualities. In the terms of this desire for a clear or transparent medium of linguistic presentation, complex language like that of Nightwood could be considered as an example of unnecessary obfuscation or excessive rhetoricity. However, in Night wood what appears to be obfuscation is part of a complex rhetoric that is an essential part of this novel's creative attempts at subverting the traditional preference for plot over language and some - 2 -- of the related conventions of epistemological, theological, and psychoanalytic discourses. Night wood dialectically engages the discourse-rendered world by turning it upsidedown and targeting that which it represses, its underworld--night, the unconscious, the untermenschen. Mikhail Balchtin, the Russian "dialogist", has identified this type of novelistic enterprise as the "carnivalesque"--the necessary generative, revelling and revelatory, inversion and subversion of established order. The thesis of this dissertation is that Djuna Barnes's Night wood is, fundamentally, a carnivalization of traditional (hegemonic) literary and non-literary (philosophical, theological, psychoanalytic) discourses. Mighturoods carnivalization of these orthodoxies is of particular interest because it is one of the very few "carnivalesque" texts written by a woman and because Barnes wrote it, not within the (domestic, social, subjective) sphere of women's writing delineated by Austen, G. Eliot, the Brontës, Woolf, Colette, Rhys, etc, but within the (intellectual) sphere of writing by men, the very sphere of the orthodox itself.2 I should qualify my use of Bakhtin's "carnivalesque", however, as I have not simply adopted a modus operandi, or an ideology, from Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics or The Dialogic imagidatiom My use of the "carnivalesque" is, first of all, always informed by Roland Barthes's and Julia Kristeva's concepts of "intertextuality" and by a recognition of -3- Nightkroaa's insistence on structurality. It seems that the "reality" behind Nightwoods writing is always a reality of structures-- hierarchical relationships, binary oppositions, etc.---, and it is this reality that is always being questioned, or exposed, by the novel. Where traditional philosophy and religious and literary interpretation ascend to a meta-position from which to account for all the variables of life and/or text, NAThtwood descends to "structure" and thus, honestly, offers no resolution. This is, perhaps, why so many texts cross through Nightwooct because the text itself is not a resolved thing. Its references are not centripetally directed to its own internal, fictional, ideal world, nor do they signify centrifugally toward some external non-textual reality: they are always of a text- to-text nature--from Arightwood to the texts of Montaigne, Donne, Eugene Sue, Shakespeare, Loyola, the Bible, the 'Book of Concealment", newspapers, maps, children's drawings, tattoos, etc, etc. In short, NiEhtwood's references are always to other scripts in a general system of language. The myriad explicit references in the text give us but the clue to the intertextuality of Arightwool4 which goes beyond citation and reference itself. In a sense, citation and reference are the symptoms of Nightwoocfs intertextuality. Beyond the proper names and inverted commas, Night wood seems preoccupied with certain paradigmatic discursive structures that inform the meanings of Western writing ("in a preoccupation that was its own predicament" (p. 47D. Thus, I do not, as a general rule, but with one notable exception, argue for specific texts or sources that Barnes may have been carnivalizing, nor do I attempt to prove that Barnes actually read any of the texts that I read Nrightwoodthrough—wdth the exception of the Freudian text. The texts that I have chosen to "face up to" Night wood, including the Bakhtinian text, offer operative paradigms of the conventional structures that Night wood seems to be engaging with or to be composed by: whether or not Barnes was familiar with these texts is almost entirely beside the point. My use of the "carnivalesque" is also informed by Jacques Derrides (non)Concepts of "writing" and "differance and by a recognition of Arighturcxxfs insistence on the written (everything from tattoos to hieroglyphs and letters) and on "difference" and deferral. Chapter Two of this thesis is in part a reading of Bakhtin between Plato and Derrida, and it develops a poststructuralist concept of the carnivalesqueli as one of those "nonsynonymous" terms that "inscribe différance within themselves", (as Alan Bass puts it in a footnote to Derrida's Margins of Philosophy).
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