Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1936)

I have a 2016 New Directions paperback; it has Jeanette Winterson's 2006 preface, T. S. Eliot's introduction to the first American edition (by Harcourt, Brace in 1937), and Eliot's 1949 note to the second edition. This is how Winterson starts her preface:

Certain texts work in homeopathic dilutions; that is, nano amounts effect significant change over long periods of time.

Nightwood is a nano-text.

And a little ways down the page: "reading it is like drinking wine with a pearl dissolving in the glass. You have taken in more than you know, and it will go on doing its work. From now on, a part of you is pearl-lined."

I think so. I also think these are lovelier ways of saying that there is no reading Nightwood all in one go, for any value of "reading" but the literal. You can sit there and turn its pages and run your eyes down them till you've read the last. But for you to do justice to Nightwood--which is to say, for it to do justice to you too--you need Winterson's long periods of time.

Anyway, I scheduled one day and took three and have thoughts. Nightwood is interesting for its explorations of gender(fluidity) and sexuality, for its "racial" categories and explications, for its high modernism. The first and the third are what they are, the second fascinates me. "Racial" is Barnes's word, "race." Here is Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O'Connor speaking:

We wash away our sense of sin, and what does that bath secure us? Sin, shining bright and hard. In what does a Latin bathe? True dust. We have made the literal error. We have used water, we are thus too sharply reminded. A European gets out of bed with a disorder that holds the balance. The layers of his deed can be traced back to the last leaf and the good slug he found creeping. ... Each race to its wrestling! ... The French are dishevelled and wise; the American tries to approximate it with drink. It is his only clue to himself. He takes it when his soap has washed him too clean for identification. The Anglo-Saxon has made the literal error; using water, he has washed away his page. ...

Such as the bolded are Nightwood's "races," distinct, overlapping; Jew, Gentile, Christian are some others. The book thinks in and elaborates on these categories, and: "Each race to its wrestling!"

Let me actually say something about, or around, the third thing I listed above, the novel's high modernism. When I think of high modernism I don't think of high emotion, being raised in me or being felt on the part of the author making the work, both of us are too much in our heads. Yet that avatar of high modernism, T. S. Eliot, writes in his introduction to Nightwood that its characters "became alive" for him, and behind his claim that the characters are vivid you can see something he doesn't quite say: he cares about them. The one among them who caught me off guard was Felix, who wants a son--"'Why is there no child? Wo ist das Kind? Warum? Warum?'"--gets a son--"Mentally deficient and emotionally excessive, an addict to death; at ten, barely as tall as a child of six, wearing spectacles, stumbling when he tried to run, with cold hands and anxious face"--and, accepting his son, demolishes his own life: "He knew that Guido was not like other children, that he would always be too estranged to be argued with; in accepting his son the Baron saw that he must accept a demolition of his own life." I cared, youall, I cried. I was surprised.

Another point tangential to Eliot. I complained about the tubers in The Waste Land. Nightwood too is earthy, like! (in another sense!) tubers. Take this--

There is not one of us who, given an eternal incognito, a thumbprint nowhere set against our souls, would not commit rape, murder and all abominations. For if pigeons flew out of his bum, or castles sprang out of his ears, man would be troubled to know which was his fate, a house, a bird or a man.

--and this--

Am I the golden-mouthed St. John Chrysostom, the Greek who said it with the other cheek? No, I'm a fart in a gale of wind, a humble violet, under a cow pad.

--both courtesy again of the good doctor. But the difference between "tubers" on the one hand and "bum" and "fart" on the other is that there is no belligerence in the choice of the latter words. I struggle with those tubers, obviously! and the poor things aren't standing the weight I'm making them bear! because I see a belligerence in their placement, a purposeful deflation, a smirk, that puts me off. I don't get that sense with Nightwood even when it's scatological. Instead, I get the sense that the all-seeing eye and the all-encompassing pen are registering all the world, from its saints to its dung.

But this is disingenuous. Barnes is not registering a world, she is creating one; there's a lot more poiesis going on here than mimesis. This is a theme I'll expand on in future posts, but in this case the creation is happening not just in scenes--as in the long conversation between Nora and the doctor, in his filthy room--but on the level of sentences, even of phrases. Barnes is putting words together in a new way--new even in 2020.

Shall I leave you with a funny quote? I think I shall leave you with a funny quote. This is the doctor again (saying more than the funny thing, which appears toward the end):

"Make birds' nests with your teeth; that would be better," he said angrily, "like my English girl friend. The birds liked them so well that they stopped making their own (does that sound like any nest you have made for any bird, and so broken it of its fate?). In the spring they form a queue by her bedroom window and stand waiting their turn, holding on to their eggs as hard as they can until she gets around to them, strutting up and down on the ledge, the eyes in their feathers a quick shine and sting, whipped with impatience, like a man waiting at a toilet for someone inside who had decided to read the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And then think of Robin who never could provide for her life except in you. Oh, well," he said under his breath, "'happy are they whom privacy makes innocent.'"

I had to finish the paragraph, past the punchline. But the Decline and Fall! Read in/on a toilet! To quote the good doctor one last time: "Glittering God"!