Nightwood as a way of life: queer aesthetics, capital, and sociality

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay takes up the question of sociality in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. While the issue appears throughout the history of Barnes scholarship, a recurrent theme persists: Nightwood lacks a clear articulation of communal affiliation. While this lack of communal bonding was initially lamented when linked to certain feminist projects, it is now celebrated when linked to certain queer projects. Against the grain of both approaches, I focus on Barnes’s style and link it to Foucault’s project of an aesthetics of self. I detail the ways Barnes is a keen reader of the conditions of relatedness and the ways she emphasizes the aesthetic possibility to transform relationality, to provide a horizon of collective engagement with things and people that might otherwise express only the reification of commodity culture. To do so, I emphasize how Barnes specifies the range of historical demands on queer and gendered affiliation, demands that span literary and art-historical representation and the shaping forces of capital. Finally, by presenting Nightwood as a model for queer world-making and modernist literary possibility, I hope to show how Barnes importantly contributes to questions of historiography and sociality, and reshapes the relationship between feminism, queer commentary, and modernist literature.