Style's Hoax: A Reading of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood

Abstract

Judging by its modest six or so appearances in MLA Bibliography Djuna Barnes's Nightwood has meant a good deal less to literary critics than it has to some contemporary novelists. Admittedly it is a peculiar book by a writer whose other works (some interesting if precious early short fiction and impenetrable verse drama, Antiphon) are less than inviting. Nightwood itself is most often remembered for its high reputation with writers like T. S. Eliot. Apart from this sort of recognition it is examined either as a cache of modernism or, because it is rather tangled and obscure, it is sometimes rewarded with an extravagant explication de texte.' In short, it has not been much appreciated by critics while among novelists, notably Hawkes and Pynchon, it resonates. Hawkes picks up on blighted landscape and fictive detachment which allows Barnes to make comedy of violence, and Pynchon parodies her style in V while attending closely to her view of history as a bowdlerized version of human damnation. These correspondences are not so much influences as affinities, and most salient of them is writer's suspicion of morality of writing itself. It is this suspicion which causes Hawkes to observe that Djuna Barnes assumed a prophetic role in reverse, by which he probably meant that she used experimental techniques of her novel to break down conventions of characterization and relationships in order to get back to the tangled seepage of our earliest recollections and originations.2 Throughout Nightwood theme of de-evolution or of bowing down (Bow Down is title of first section and was originally meant to be title for whole book) has implications for act of writing. The book itself moves backward.