We have to make space in the dialogue for rage and frustration sometimes, and for impatience. Identity categories provide a ground for political agency: they allow us to demand rights and recognition and they help us to find each other, to form alliances and communities. But they can also be used to contain and police us.
Unlike earlier lesbian and gay movements, whose politics depended on the idea of visible identities, queer theory grew out of a critique of identity politics. Yet her lists of historical women are designed to confuse, combining queerer names with those about whom no speculations have been made.
Barnes piques, then frustrates, our desire to know. And although her autobiographical pronouncements, which are sometimes disingenuous, often tongue-in-cheek, are no substitute for reading her work, even they end up speaking to the complex questioning of identity we find in her books.
The apparently touching love story of Robin and Nora is also a kind of hoaxing, and we are not permitted to weep with Nora over her loss. Once the bloodthirsty nature of such love is uncovered we are allowed the sympathy appropriate to such an inevitable delusion.
Barnes's "sense of humor is evident from the beginning, " Greiner wrote, "and her use of funny elements with a depressing theme reflects the perplexing mixture so vital to black humor. While interweaving humor and horror, Nightwood explores the theme of "man's separation from his primitive, yet more fundamental animal nature, " Greiner observed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.
This separation between human and animal is expressed by Dr. O'Connor who, at one point in the novel, states that man "was born damned and innocent from the start, and wretchedly—as he must—on these two themes—whistles his tune. Beginning with a historical allusion, the novel "turns its back on history, on faith in coherent expression, and finally on words themselves, " Pochoda stated.
This scene of devolution into beast is written, in contrast to the exuberance of the rest of the book, in a plain and unenergetic style to show the ultimate failure of language to overcome the animal within man. Nadeau had a Freudian explanation for the devolution in Nightwood.
He argued that the novel "does not depict human interaction on the level of conscious, waking existence. It is rather a dream world in which the embattled forces of the human personality take the form of characters representing aspects of that personality at different levels of its functioning.
She is an animal— pure and simple. He identified the main characters as friends of Barnes in Paris and found that Barnes herself was the character Nora.
Robin was identified as Thelma Wood, a woman with whom Barnes had a love affair. But how much of the novel is taken from life is unclear. Field's account, Koch maintained, "is sometimes impossibly evasive, especially on matters sexual. Shortly after publishing Nightwood, Barnes ceased writing and, in , she returned to New York City.
For the rest of her life she lived in a small apartment in Greenwich Village and published only one play and two poems. Her withdrawal from the literary world caused her reputation to pale. And Barnes's refusal to allow much of her earlier work for magazines to be reprinted kept the scope of her achievement unknown.
In her book Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach admitted that Barnes "was not one to cry her wares. Despite her reserve, Barnes maintained a secure place in American letters because of Nightwood, which has been in print since it first appeared in Nightwood, Greiner wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, "stands high in the list of significant twentieth-century American novels.
Greiner believed that "Djuna Barnes's work will eventually receive the attention it deserves. Baldwin, Kenneth H. Kannenstine, Louis F. Taylor, William E. All rights reserved. Beach, Sylvia, Shakespeare and Company, Harcourt, Scott, James B. Atlantic, May, Berkeley Daily Gazette, March 31, As well as the modernist circle, Barnes was a popular member of the lesbian community that had gathered on the Left Bank. After a brief affair with salon hostess Natalie Barney a rite of passage for almost every lesbian woman moving to the area she wrote and illustrated The Ladies Almanack — a comedy record of the gay bed-hopping that centred around a character called Dame Evangeline Musset, AKA Natalie Barney, who privately published the work.
After they split, Barnes spiralled into an alcohol-fuelled depression. It was Natalie Barney who intervened, rescuing Barnes from her hotel and nursing her back to health. Barnes poured the desperation and heartache of her shattered relationship into Nightwood which viscerally explores the love and horror of their affair, before moving into stunning explorations into the nature of love and lust, night and day, ambition and snobbery and violence.
The longest section of this extraordinary novel involves a conversation between Nora, the main protagonist, and the gay, cross-dressing Dr. In one of my favourite parts of the novel, Nora tells the Doctor that after Robin left, she went to the bars that she had visited and danced with the women Robin had danced with.
In these women, she hoped to find her lover again. But all she found were women who Robin had left. She carried on drinking and was so ill with alcoholism that when her friend Peggy Guggenheim got her out of France before war broke out, no one believed she would survive the journey back to the States. She did — she survived a lot longer in fact, right up until
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