diez 1989 nightwood's modernism

8/13/2019 Diez 1989 Nightwood's Modernism

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ENRIQUEG A R C ADIEZUNIVERSIDAD DE VALENCIADJUNA BARNES'NIGHTWOOD; A MODERNIST EXERCISE

On or about December 1910 human lifechanged. These now famous words of Virginia Woolftried to reflect the consciousness of the speed ofchange at the beginning of the century. This sortof dramatic or prophetic gesture only revealed theintensity with which writers and artists of allkinds lived one of the most dynamic periods ofhvunan history. James McFarlane and Malcom Bradburygo so far as to say that Modernism was one of thoseoverwhelming dislocations in human perception whichchanged man's sensibility and man's relationship tohistory permanently. In its multiplicity andbrilliant confusin, its commitment to an aestheticof endless renewal, or as Irving Howe calis it, itsimprovisation of the tradition of the new,Modernism is still open to analysis and to debate.Even if we are talking of Postmodernism and evenPost-postmodernism, the period we are referring tonow (first quarter of the century, roughly) doesnot have a single concrete and aesthetic reference.As a matter of fact, few ages been as mltiple andas promiscuous in their artistic cholees as wasModernism. Very often, though, the tendency tosophistication and mannerism, to introversin, andto technical display for its own sake and eveninternal scepticism have often been cited asessential in the definition of Modernism. And sincethe terms have a vague connotation, we will have toestablish some kind of framework of reference ordefinition of the movement in order to moverelatively safely in the analysis of a novel oftenmentioned as a masterpiece of modern aesthetics.

When speaking of the novel as genre we tend toassociate Modernism with the internal stylizationof the form, the distortion of the familiar surfaceof the observed reality, the use of the so calledspatlal novel which is only the disposition ofartistic content according to the logic of


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metaphor, form and symbol rather than the linearlogic of the story, the psychological progress orhistory. There Is a new emphasls on technlque ndon tactics of presentation which trap the reader inthe illusion of consclousness, what Len Edel hascalled the scrambled data of the uncensored mindin an attempt to render the illusion of innerreality instead of the illusion of a real world asin the period of Dickens, Balzac or Tolstoy. Neverhas the novel been closer to creating its ownpoetics,like other genres, than at this period ofModernism. Following the example of Flaubert theModernists were deeply aware of the architecturalpossibilities of the novel. Henry James in hisprefaces,and Conrad in his, tried to formlate anaesthetic credo which would elvate the novel fromthe level of popular entertainment to the realms ofartistic self-consciousness and even to the kind ofsecular religious ritual which drama had been forthe Renaissance. In other words, artists, who arethe antennae of the race, always writing thehistory of the future , wanted to record the changethat occurred in 1910. And suddenly, terms such asplot,structure, texture and point of view invadedthe critical jargon and became the standard testfor the excellence of any novel, indeed thestandard for inclusin in the canon in the odsense of the canon of the masters....

After this rather general introduction, let menow focus the discussion on the topic of theprogram: Djuna Barnes* Nightwood: A ModernistExercise .

When Djuna Barnes published her novelNightwood. in 1936, the high point of Modernism hadalready been reached: Joyce had published Ulyssesin 1922; Eliot's Waste Land dates from that Annusmirabilis ;H. James had been dead for two decades,the Sound and the Furv was seven years od, and themajor works of most of the American Writers of theLost Generation (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, etc.) hadbeen published. Djuna Barnes was in many ways a

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dlstlngulshed member o that coterie of expatrlateswho looked at the American Scene from the othersi of the Atlantic and who participated activelyin the fervor of artistic creation and artisticrenewal that dominated the Paris-based scene of av ryspecial decade, one not again equalled in thiscentury.However, the reputation of Djuna Barnes hasnever been as solid as that of Fitzgerald,Hemingway, or for that matter any other members ofthe group. Even today her work is rarelyanthologized; though her stories and The Ladies'Almanac have been reprinted, there was never a

Barnes boom. Scholarly surveys of Americanliterature fail even to index her ame. Her firstnovel,Ryder, has been out of print since 1928. In1962,the publication of the Selected Works ofDjuna Barnes partially corrected the previousoversight and it is almost a testament to the smallbut almost fanatical following her works have had.

This situation presents a clear contrast withthe high critical acclaim given to some of herworks, particularly Nightwood. T. S. Eliot, whoarranged for its publication by Faber was unusuallygenerous in his praise of the novel. And twelveyears later, at the time of the second edition,his admiration of Nightwood has not diminished.These are his words: What I would leave the readerprepared to find is the great achievement of astyle, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance ofwit and characterization, and a quality of horrorand doom very nearly related to that of theElizabethan tragedy. Almost every other criticaljudgement has pointed out the singularity of thisbook. Mark Van Doren says: For brilliance andformal beauty few novis of any age can comparewith it. But one must also say how desperate itis . Edwin Muir questions the generic identity ofNightwood; Whether the book should be called anovel it is hard to say. It is more a vicariousconfession, like most of the best fiction.

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Leslie Fiedler looks at the brilliant surfaceof the novel with a suspicious eye. Its style isdescribed as oddly skewed. But in general wecould reasonably say that the reputation of thenovel lies In some of its strlklng passages, In thepoetic quality of this language and in the

shocking nature of its theme. And writers asdiverse as Malcolm Lowry, Dylan Thomas, CarsonMcCullers and John Hawkes have been lavish in theirpraise of the work and eager to proclaim itsinfluence on their work.

More than half a century after itspublication, Nightwood contines to attract theattention of specialized criticism although it hasnot generated as much printed critical material asone would expect from its excellent credentials .But there is no doubt that the interval of fiftyyears has introduced an important element into thepicture: that of the contemporary reader. And he orshe is a very self-conscious reader. The works ofmodernist writers have generally been approachedand evaluated according to their formal qualitiesas if the meaning of the text remained anchored inits immanent qualities. It is true, as I havealready pointed out, that the modernist text withits formal exhibitionism and its foregrounding oflanguage called attention to itself as if thesewere the only elements that counted. The authorpractically disappeared behind curtains and thereader was turned into a clever but submissivedetector of tricks and clues.

The picture has somehow been altered. Todaythe reader demands participation in the process ofappropriation of a text. And his active role in thecreation and evaluation of a text brings back itshistorical dimensin, which had been lost under thedemands of formalism and structuralism, bothinterested in patterns and systems rather than inthe individual reactions of a reader. '

It now seems that the inclusin of the reader7


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Nora Flood, Robin Vote, Jenny Petherbridge and Dr.Matthew O'Connor. The next three chapters are, forthe most part, monologues by the doctor in which hebroods upon the Incidente of the prevlous chapters.Finally the last chapter, The Possessed is asllghtly forced plot resolutlon which comes as atour de forc because that is the only chapter inwhich what happens is told in a straightforward,realistic manner by an omniscient narrator.

It is not the fragmentation of point of viewor the rupture of chronological line thatsurprises the reader, though. William Faulkner in1929,for example, had published one of the boldestexperiments in narrative point of view in thelanguage; and although the initial approach to TheSound and the Furv is confusing for the reader, thestory unfolds progressively as we follow thedifferent perspectives upon the same incidents. Inother words, fragmentation was almost a narrativeroutine in the modernist novel which shocked andalienated the readers at first, but which becamestandard practice throughout the century.Fragmentation in the modernist novel was thenecessary counterpart to its thematic development.What is difficult in Nightwood is the near totalabsence of naturalistic elements to serve as theskeleton of the story or, in other words, theminimal concession to verisimilitude. James Joyce,Faulkner, even Virginia Woolf created stories ofextremely complex form, but they were rooted in thelived experiences of their readers. There was arealistic substratum of lived experience which wassublimated or transcended by a system of symboliccross-references. In Nightwood there is almostnever a description of circumstance or environmentwhich is relevant to the understanding of acharacter or which provides a social setting. Weare asked to accept Barnes' world as we accept anabstract painting. Joseph Frank, once again,compares the style of Djuna Barne to that ofBraque as a contrast to that of Cezanne. And Ibelieve the comparison enlightens quite clearly the

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nature of Nightwood. What characterizes Cezanne isthe tensin between hls deslre to attaln aesthetlcfonn through colour and U n e and hls deslre toreach hls goal through the deplctlon ofrecognlzable objects. Joyce slmllarly accepted thenaturallstlc principie by presentlng hls charactersIn thelr routines and clrcumstance, but at the sametime he created a symbollc structure ofImpllcation. Nightwood. llke a Braque collage, Isdeprlved of a world of Immedlate reference.

T.S. Elllot used the adjectlve poetlc todescribe this effect and he also warned the readerabout the dlfflculty of the novel: he was right.Nightwood requlres not a second, like he suggested,reading but a third and a fourth. And I bellevethat this may simply be too much to ask from acontemporary reader who Is well tralned Inconnecting loose-ends, in chaslng leitmotifs and inputtlng the puzzle back together, but is impatientwith a poetlc language which muses and circlesaround itself. As a result of that cholee of styleand structure, the reader knows that somethlng isgolng on, but he is terrlbly distant from thecharacters. He is told that there is pathos, but hehas not been exposed to It. It is only therecapitulation of the Incidents of the novel thatmakes him aware of the horror and misery of thecharacters. Faulkner, with a style that at times isnot so dissimllar from D. Barnes, creates some klndof emotional rapport with hls characters. Once youhave read The Sound and the Furv you cannot forgetBenjy or Quentln or even the hateful Jason. In myopinin, Djuna Barnes fails to seduce the readerinto her story. He or she keeps at a distance fromthe book pondering whether It is really worthlistenlng to those long, intense, almlessmonologues. Readers have many of the feelings ofawe and un-involvement that they have in readingEliot's Gerontion. perhaps the work closest intone,brllliance and hermeticism to Nightwood.What then is the story?


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It i8 the story of a group of expatriates inpostwar Europe. The basic scene is Paris, with acouple of excursions to Viena and America. Thestructuring of the events is really not soirregular. The first chapter, in which Flix isintroduced, sets the time and location of the story(Paris 1920) when Flix is 40 years od; son of anItalian Jew, vaguely reminiscent of Leopold Bloom,who dies before Flix was born, and a VienneseChristian, who dies in childbirth. Pathologicallyobsessed with the idea of an aristocratic past,Flix sticks desperately and ridiculously to theconcepts of royalty and nobility and he bows downto anyone who may have a title. He comes to knowmany people from the entertainment world who assumefictitious ames such as Barn, Duchess, Princess.In the second chapter, Flix who is in the companyof his drinking crony and confidant, Dr. O'Connor,meets Robin Vote, when the doctor is urgentlysummoned to the hotel to save Robin from theeffects of a wild night out. Flix falls in lovewith Robin; they get married. She gives him a son,Guido,and immediately abandons Flix. In the thirdchapter, she takes up with Nora, an American ofaristocratic origins who lives in an ancestral homein the State of New York where she entertains anassortment of poets, radicis, beggars, artistsand people in love . In the fourth chapter, Robinleaves Nora and comes to live with Jenny, a womanpresented in the novel as a parasite andopportunist. The fifth chapter is an endlessmonologue of Dr. O'Connor when Nora visits him toinquire about the meaning of things, specially themeaning of the night. In the sixth chapter, Flixleaves Paris for Vienna with his son, not toreappear in the novel. The seventh chapter is againa conversation between Nora and the doctor aboutthe lost love of Robin. The doctor leaves the novelscreaming like a madman. And the final chapter,very short, takes place in the United States, atNora'8 mansin where Robin has takeh refuge fromJenny and from the world. There Nora's dog findsRobin in the chapel crawling on all fours in front

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of a makeshift altar. When Robin and the dog meetforehead to forehead she chases the dog into acrner where they bark at each other. The novelends on this surrealist note which negates anypossiblity of catharsis for the reader.What I have just done is obviously adisservice to Nightwood because Djuna Barnes nevermeant to crate a straightforward story. Nothingmuch happens. Rather than action what we have is anintense,relentless scrutiny of man's hopelessnessand misery. Nightwood is concerned with theperception, memory and association of itscharacters and their consequent behaviour. It draws

heavily on images from natura, childhood andreligin. If we had to look for an image thatsomehow reflected the structure of the novel Iwould choose that of the circus. Not only do Noraand Robin meet at the circus but the rest of thecharacters are presented as a gallery of grotesquesand transvestites. According to Donald Greiner,ightwood provides insight into the disorderedhuman condition by conveying generalizations aboutlove, bestiality and religin and it avoids thereader's expectation of verisimilitude and ofcharacter development .

I agree finally with Joseph Frank in hisdescription of Nightwood as a spatial novel. DjunaBarnes like almost every modernist writer (Flaubertincluded) favoured the technique of constructing aplot in the manner of collage by juxtaposingdifferent bits and pieces which have their ownidentity outside the main frame. Perhaps the wordcollage is not appropiate because of theconnotatlons of random cholee and the aleatorynature of this pictorial form. What I mean by thatis that the novel is built on a series of static,quite independent, tableaux related to each otherby the interconnections among the characters, bysymbolic overtones and by a carefully chosen systemof cross-references. Structure and theme work handin hand to render the terrible isolation of each of


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the characters in the novel. The reader does notunderstand fully the Impllcations o each tableauxuntll he or she flnlshes readlng the novel orrereads it. The first five chapters of the novel,for example, are composed around each of the malncharacters. They are not presented as roundcharacters but rather, in each composition thewriter has chosen the most significant orrevelatory detail about the character.The appearance of Robin Vote, a protagonistwhose point of view is never given, is perhaps thebest of the tableaux. The doctor later we find heis a fake doctor) and Flix who are drinking in a

Paris bar are callad by a bellboy from a nearbyhotel to look after a lady who has fainted andcannot be awakened. This is the description givenby Djuna Barnes:The perfume of her body exhaled was ofthe quality of that earth-flesh, fungi,which smells of captured dampness and yetis so dry, overcast with the odour of oilof amber, which is an inner malady of thesea,making her seem as if she hadinvaded a sleep incautious and entire.Her flesh was the texture of plant life,and beneath it one sensed a frame,broad.porous and sleep-worn, as if sleepwere a decay fishing her beneath thevisible surface. About her head there wasan effulgence as of phosphorous glowingabout the circumference of a body ofwater-- as if her life lay through her inungainly luminous deteriorations-- thetroubling structure of the bornsomnambule, who lives in two worlds--meet of the child and desperado.

Robin is no more than a beautiful but lifelessimage when first seen, for she is stretched out onthe bed like a ballet dancer frozen in midstep.Flix is watching from behind a plant. The doctor80-


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is involved in a strange ritual behind the screen.At one point he uses Robin's make-up on himself andsteals a bank note from Robn. The bellboy isstanding around. But just as Important as thecharacters is the envlronment which creates afeellng of rituallzed death, of impending doom, ofa sleeping beauty who will awaken to death insteadof life. From these descriptions we begin torealize that Robin symbolizes a state of existencewhich is beyond good and evil. She is bothinnocent and depraved precisely because she has notreached the human state, where moral vales aredominant. The doctor describes her as a wild thingcaught in a woman's skin, monstruously alone,monstruously vain. Robin goes through life withouta c q u i r i n g any human sense of gui lt,responsibility, or remorse. She leaves Flix andtheir son to start a lesbian relationship with Noraand then leaves Nora for Jenny. She goes throughthe novel as if living in a dream from which shehas not yet awakened. Her promiscuity andselfishness are only aspects of her radicalinnocence, that is, her inability to relate toanyone.That is why the novel ends with Robin goingback to the woods, to nature, to a kind of pre-historic time in her Identification with the dog.It seems as if the failure of the rest ofcharacters lies in their incapacity to raise her tothe level of the human.

But the dominant image throughout the novel isthat of her lying in bed in the middle of such anincongruous scene, which reminds Dr. O'Connor of aRousseau painting.If we want to stretch our understanding andinterpretation of the novel a little further, wecould affirm that Nightwood tries to go beyond theindividual nature of the characters and give theman allegorical projection. Flix and Nora's failure

with Robin represents the irreconcilable forces ofhistory and nature. Neither Flix's bowdlerizedversin of European history or Nora's8


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reenactment of American traditional vales canprovide Robin with a sense of identity.Dr.O'Connor, the man who wants to be a woman,is a grotesque and unreliable Tiresias in hiscapacity to understand the dark side of life, the

night.At first he seems to thrive in the ambiguousworld of his transvestism, being everybody'sconfidant and moral reflector while at the sametime he is an invetrate liar, a drunkard, a thiefand totally ineffectual. His exit from the noveldoes provide a different picture. Sick of listeningto everyone's problem he exclaims:Oh, he cried. A broken heart have youl

I have falling arches, flying dandruff, afloating kidney, shattered nerves and abroken heart But scream that an eaglehas me by the balls or has dropped hisoyster on my heart? Am I going forwardscreaming that it hurts, that my mindgoes back, or holding my guts as if theywere a coil of knives? Yet you arescreaming and drawing your lip andputting your band out and turninground and roundIAfter this outburst he goes back to the bar toget drunk again.In many ways the structure of Nightwoodreminds one of a morality play where the characters

are representations of vices and virtues. But,unlike the morality play, as I have alreadymentioned, there is no final catharsis, noredeeming quality, In this sense, Djuna Barnesjoins the school of cruelty and horrorrepresented by writers as detached as FlanneryO'Connor, Nathanael West, John Hawkes and, attimes,William Faulkner.

Finally, I would like to make a few commentson the language of Nightwood. which contines to beits major claim to glory.82


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If we read the book straight forwardly, itsstyle will crumble down in its excesses, paradoxes,and poetic vagueness. Its epigrammatic quality willno doubt perplex and bother the contemporary readerwith its intensity and moral eagerness. Itsproustian comparisons and smiles will seemslightly overdone. Its obsessive, almostFaulknerean, groping around the character'smotivation will appear almost irrelevant to areader who has been provided with an incompletapicture of those characters.But all of those elements would be lesstroublesome if readers would take hold of the

novel,as Elizabeth Pochoda puts it by the handleof its wit, 10 for it is a funny book althoughfunny in a sort of desperate way; funny with thekind of humor one finds in John Hawkes or FlanneryO'Connor. Looked at in this way, the book is anexercise in self-destruction. One has the feelingthat language and style are out of proportion tothe subject as if language itself were a circus actto dazzle and shock onlookers. Flix's claim to afuture based on a falsified conception of the pastis reduced to ashes in the first page of the novelwhere the author telescopes Flix's background intwo paragraphs in the best mock-epic tradition ofFielding. From then on he cannot escape his owncaricature so that his grand language on thesubject of history becomes self-mocking and self-defeating. The same is true of the language used inthe relationship between Nora and Robin. Thelanguage of the passages about Nora's passionappears moving until one realizes that it isheightened just enough to suggest melodrama. Thatslightly hyperbolic style suggests that there issomething else behind her language; perhaps herinability to cope with love even if she talksabout it in a grand manner. The function of stylein Nightwood is to enhance the disparity andmaladjustment of dream and palpable reality. Thereis a sentence in the novel which seems an accurateassessment of what Barnes intended in her work:

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Sklll l8 never so amazing as when It seemsinapproprlate . In thls novel, Djuna Barnes alsoseems to have gone out o her way to asslgn thebest stylistic effects to the most Inapproplatecharacter and setting: Dr. O'Connor praying hispenis, hls Tiny O'Tole, in the church of St.Sulspice and Robn's Journey Into anonlmlty endlngwlth her ludlcrous attempt to crawl back into thebeast world.

The doctor's monologues are a superb exampleof this amazing skill. His penetrating observationson human nature defy logical penetration: there isa paradox at the core of every important utterance,whether it is his or it is the novelist's. We alsoknow that he is a liar. However his language showsthe writer's best effort to convey the character'sunrelenting demystification of man's oeuvre andman's capacity to think and reason with a poeticrendering of the mystery of life. One wonders ifDjuna Barnes was in full control of her style orwhether what began as a joke on the charactersfinally ended by swallowing the novel aswell.I amafraid that the latter is the case more than once.Her brilliant linguistic and stylistic exercise isalways on the tight rope, very cise to self-parody. The very end of the novel seems tocorrobrate that feeling when the prose of the lastsection suddenly becomes fat and realistic as ifthere were no place for language to go.

To conclude I would say that in spite of itsextravagance and in spite of a certain faddishnessof style, Nightwood is a superb example ofmodernist prose and one which will continu to beread and admired. Few writers have been sosuccessful in exposing man's hopelessness andfailure with such a degree of detachment andconfidence.

diez 1989 nightwood's modernism

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