Obscene Hungers: Eating and Enjoying Nightwood and Ulysses

Abstract

Then she began to bark also, crawling after him--barking in a fit of laughter, and touching. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood It is from a horror of life that Miss Barnes' work springs, and her book, it is to be carefully noted, is no more for general and indiscriminate reading than is Mr. Joyce's Ulysses. It is sometimes obscene, though never pornographic. Graham Greene, Fiction Chronicle One of T.S. Eliot's primary concerns, in his capacity as Djuna Barnes's editor, was that Nightwood would be, as Ulysses was, called obscene, tried, and banned. This fear is reflected in both his introduction to novel and his editorial changes, which include suggestion-discarded before publication but attested in manuscripts-that word obscene be replaced with unclean in novel's final pages (186). That this substitution did not make it into print suggests inadequacy of Eliot's replacement, which fails to account for allure of obscenity, reducing it to something that arouses repugnance, rather than desire. Yet obscenity, as Graham Greene makes clear in his review of Nightwood, arouses more than just bodily desire. By distinguishing obscenity from pornography, Greene posits a meaningful distinction between two oft-conflated terms; his implication is, contrary to contemporary usage, that literature can be good literature. Following this insight, I read both Nightwood and Ulysses as novels in order to develop a positive concept of obscenity that acknowledges complexity of this slippery concept and articulates its appeal. Obscenity, I argue, is constituted by depiction and arousal of desire, whether that desire be erotic, readerly, or gustatory. I locate a sense of possibility in textual depiction and production of desire, allowing hunger to limn desire in order to demonstrate how certain forms of obscenity can teach, as Freud puts it, lesson of carpe diem, rather than focusing on how or why other, more explicit, forms of obscenity have been suppressed. Elizabeth Ladenson claims that we are titillated by idea of dangerous literature-especially idea of a classic like Madame Bovary as dangerous-precisely because literature no longer poses any danger (xvi), but I want to suggest that reading for obscenity in canonical texts might reveal dangers that literature still can and does pose. Hunger itself can be a source of very real danger. The dangers of starvation were quite familiar to both Joyce, who wrote in wake of Irish Potato Famine, (1) and Barnes, who had submitted to a voluntary forcible feeding for a magazine article designed to draw attention to hunger strikes of British suffragettes. (2) Nonetheless, this kind of hunger is not my topic. If it is possible that, as Julieann Ulin claims, reappropriates potato physically and psychologically, turning it from a symbol of deprivation into a personal talisman, I argue that Bloom also reappropriates experience of hunger, showing that even in wake of historical atrocity that was potato famine, desire to eat can feel good (56). If hunger itself does not always feel good in Nightwood, it is nonetheless structured by desire, rather than deprivation. Despite link Jane Marcus suggests between Robin Vote and suffragettes, Robin is ravenous rather than self-abnegating (187). Her hunger is, like Bloom's, kind that Roland Barthes describes as a form of predictive imagination that encompasses the entire memory of previous and enables hungry subject to stitch together an imagined scene of future pleasure (Reading 264). Hunger is an experience of sensation simultaneously remembered, imagined, desired, and deferred; even as hunger is a bodily sensation itself, it is also felt as conspicuous lack of another bodily sensation. To be hungry is not to be eating; it is to want to eat. This kind of hunger offers a useful way of thinking about obscenity because it is a type of desire that evokes possibility of visceral and counternormative pleasures without inciting-at least in twentieth century-the editorial or juridical censor. …