Nightwood (1936)

I read a chapter. I don't care who calls this a classic; it's lumpy, pretentious twaddle. The endorsement by T.S. Eliot—himself a classic of lumpy, pretentious twaddle—should've told me as much. ( )

For whatever reason, it seems that “Nightwood” has one of the more precarious reputations in twentieth-century literature. The name of its author, Djuna Barnes, is still synonymous with the life of the modern, and Modernist, American expatriate living in Paris; however, like Lawrence Durrell, another author I have been thinking quite a bit about, she seems to have fallen into disfavor – and this is quite a loss.

And like Durrell’s “Alexandria Quartet,” this coheres as fiction in a completely different way from most other fiction. While Durrell’s prose is florid and sometimes downright meretricious, Barnes uses her characters, especially the eccentric Dr. O’Connor, to stretch the limits of language and meaning. O’Connor, a fay dandy and philosopher-mystagogue, is so preposterous and unbelievable it’s a miracle that he even works as a character. He serves as a perennial touching conversational touching stone for all the other characters, endlessly and giddily upending their assumptions and, especially in the case of Nora, emotional commitments.

The other characters, each histrionic in their own way, are all fairly normal in comparison; the plot is barebones and simple. The “Baron,” a self-stylized aristocrat manqué, marries Robin Vote, who seems lost and discontented whoever she surrounds herself with and wherever she goes, often being driven to roam the streets of the city at night, a listless flaneur. The chapter “Watchmen, What of the Night?” is one of the most beautiful meditations on night that I have ever read in literature.

Soon after having a child with the Baron, she leaves him and moves in with Nora, with whom she is just spiritually out of place. Robin then finally leaves Nora for Jenny, at which point Nora turns to Dr. O’Connor for solace. His brand of consolation is some peculiar poesy to say the least. At the height of Nora’s despair, her heart rent in two by a woman she truly loved, O’Connor offers these words: “For the thickness of the sleep that is on the sleeper we ‘forgive,’ as we ‘forgive’ the dead for the account of the earth that lies upon them. What we do not see, we are told, we do not mourn; yet night and sleep trouble us, suspicion being the strongest dream and dead the throng. The heart of the jealous knows the best and the most satisfying love, that of the other’s bed, where the rival perfects the lover’s imperfections. Fancy gallops to take part in that duel, unconstrained by any certain articulation of the laws of that unseen game.”

T. S. Eliot’s beautiful introduction does two things introductions rarely do: holds back any plot spoilers (not that there is really anything to “give away,” per se) and actually sheds light on the text. It can safely be read, as I read it, before finishing the book. And I second Eliot’s take on the novel, especially his observation that in “Nightwood” you will find “great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterization, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy.” The brilliance of wit and characterization is something I can only second and treble. This is bold, high Modernism at its most audacious, and the sum of its effects is simply stunning. ( )

Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) is an excellent example of the “writer’s writer,” admired by such personages as T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and William S. Burroughs while basically ignored by the general reading public. With the recent interest in marginalized women writers she has come back into print and her 1936 novel Nightwood seems well on its way to taking its deserved place in the modernist canon.

The plot of this novel is nebulous and ill-defined. The chapters are not numbered, only evocatively titled, indicative more of individual prose poems or musical themes than an actual linear progression from A to B. The prose is decadent, vacillating between Djuna’s glacial, sensuous yet bitterly austere descriptive passages and the scatterbrained, vulgar ramblings of the astonishingly perceptive Doctor Matthew O’Connor. There is a liberal dosage of foreign language, mostly phrases in French or German that Djuna did not bother to translate. I always find that a bit aggravating but until the annotated version comes out I shall simply take it as a gentle prod to actually learn another language… sometime.

The slender cast consists, besides the doctor, of the forlorn Baron Felix Volkbein, Nora – a woman devouring herself in the wake of her lover’s departure – and Jenny, who lives off what she steals from others. The focus of these individuals is on Robin Vote, “la somnambule,” the inhuman centerpiece of this little story, often missing from the action of the narrative yet preying on everyone’s minds. Seen almost exclusively through the lenses of other people, Robin remains an elusive figure, a woman with a strain of the primitive in her, compared throughout to various beasts, the eye of the storm rather than the main character.

That last office is filled nominally by O’Connor, a unique adaptation of the madman with the medical degree that is to be found in so many places (see Grimesby Roylott, Fu Manchu, Jekyll and Benway, for starters). However, Matthew O’Connor is not psychotic in the pulp sense of the word; rather, he seems possessed of a ravenous egotism, incapable of being interrupted, drowning out all other voices, yet for all that a strangely powerless individual. Talk as he will, no one really listens; Nora comes to him for advice but does not heed it; a doctor but not a licensed practitioner and a man absolutely convinced he should have been born a woman. Unlike the rest of the cast, left on the stage as near-catatonic mannequins after intricate introductory character sketches, O’Connor is allowed to fill in for himself and the struggle to understand his coarse, nonsensical monologues is rewarded by the occasional lucid illumination, such as during his talks with Nora:

“It was more than a boy like me (who am the last woman left in this world, though I am the bearded lady) could bear, and I went into a lather of misery watching them, and thinking of you, and how in the end you’ll all be locked together, like the poor beasts that get their antlers mixed and are found dead that way, their heads fattened with a knowledge of each other they never wanted, having had to contemplate each other, head-on and eye to eye, until death; well, that will be you and Jenny and Robin.”

So O’Connor, who seems to know ahead of time what events are coming into play and makes liberal comment upon the other characters amid a slew of non-sequiturs about life in general, seems nothing less than the philosopher of the piece, the man with the answers and, ironically, the only character who spends any time thinking about other people. The holy fool gone horribly awry.

The novel comes across as a freakshow, a carnival, a free-for-all, a circus and it’s not surprising that such performers have crept into the narrative by page 11: "Early in life Felix had insinuated himself into the pageantry of the circus and the theatre. In some way they linked his emotions to the higher and unattainable pageantry of kings and queens…. He moved with a humble hysteria among the decaying brocades and laces of the Carnavalet; he loved that old and documented splendour with something of the love of the lion for its tamer – that sweat-tarnished spangled enigma that, in bringing the beast to heel, had somehow turned toward him a face like his own, but which though curious and weak, had yet picked the precise fury from his brain." However, they do not linger, as each segment forms a shift in the precise nature of the drama. So chapter two forsakes Germany for France and the circus dressing-rooms for hotels, museums and the respectable society Robin briefly confines herself to, and so on and so forth.

In the end this novel would still be no more than a curiosity, a bizarre artifact from the 30s, were it not for the final two acts: Go Down, Matthew, in which earlier imagery is rewoven into the text and the mad doctor reveals all – or at least, all that’s important about him, his hitherto baffling place in the narrative and his garrulousness; and The Possessed, a bizarre scene on the face of it but which is really just Robin, in silence, doing what O’Connor, with words, has already done. In trying to bridge from their displacements to their proper forms they weep at the imperfection of the attempt. Without these two acts, Nightwood is just a beautifully crafted, heartless trifle. With them it transforms into a novel fully deserving its resuscitation and the status of a “lost classic.”

Nightwood has, doubtless, a limited scope – not one of the characters has a sunny disposition – but this in no way limits the book’s merit. One very important point, however, is to accept the book’s artifice. The story skips calmly from Nora’s original meeting with Robin (in the circus, watched over by lions) to the time when Nora begins to grow obsessed while Robin pulls away. Ask ‘but how did that happen?’ and the illusion will crumble. This is not a “psychological” novel in the realist sense of the term. It might be best to keep in mind E.M. Forster’s definition of the “prophetic” writer when approaching Nightwood. That done, there’s a whole world within the pages, centered on the complacency of decay and the derangement that can constitute love.

Recommended with that reservation.

http://pseudointellectualreviews.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/nightwood-djuna-barnes... ( )

Definitely worth reading a second time, since the language is quite dense. Wonderful, though! ( )

Rating: 1.75* of five

The Book Report: Serial adultress and all-around malcontent Robin leaves her too, too unendurable husband "Baron Felix" after presenting him with the desired heir...only the child is crippled...and takes up with Nora, a whiny dishrag of a nothing-much who represents Robin's desire for dreary domesticity. Needless to say, Robin can't stand too much of that and leaves Nora at home so she can cavort and disport herself with all and sundry. While so doing, Robin meets Jenny, a serial widow (why does no one wonder how this dry, juiceless woman LOST FOUR HUSBANDS?!) and a sociopath whose sole pleasure in life is making others unhappy. Bye bye Nora, hello Jenny, and ultimately Robin seeks the help of Dr. O'Connor, a male transvestite and fraudulent medico, with predictable results. The ending of the book is one of the weirdest I've ever read, involving Nora, Robin, a dog, and a truly weird accident in a church.

My Review: Queer Ulysses. Famous for "raunchy" sex descriptions,most of which would not raise a Baptist preacher's eyebrows in this day and time. Dreadful, sesquipedalian sentences recounting unpleasant peoples' doings in endlessly recursive and curiously directionless arabesques.

Do not read this after the age of twenty-four. It will cause your nose hairs to ignite and your T-zone to break out in painful cysts. Seriously...don't. ( )