Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism 9780748646760

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Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism

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Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism

Julie Taylor

Edinburgh University Press

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© Julie Taylor, 2012 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 pt Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4675 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 4676 0 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 6437 5 (epub) ISBN 978 0 7486 6436 8 (Amazon ebook) The right of Julie Taylor to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Introduction: Broken Hearts and Bleeding Wounds – Traumatic Modernism? 1 2 3 4

vii ix

1

‘The Excellent Arrangement of Catastrophe’: Witnessing and Performance in The Antiphon

36

Djuna Barnes Beside Herself: Mixed Feelings, Sentimental Modernism and Ryder

74

‘The Infected Carrier of the Past’: Nightwood, Shame and Modernism

110

‘That Magic Reiteration’: Ladies Almanack and Happiness

145

Conclusion

182

Notes Bibliography Index

184 202 215

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To my parents, Rita and Ivan, and my sister, Jane

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Acknowledgements

This book grew out of a PhD dissertation at the University of York. I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding three years of doctoral study and a research trip to the Djuna Barnes archives at the University of Maryland. I thank Beth Alvarez, Curator of Literary Manuscripts, and her colleagues in Special Collections, University of Maryland at College Park Library for being so kind, efficient and accommodating during my visit. The insights of my PhD supervisor, Victoria Coulson, have been indispensable to this project. Victoria’s imagination, support and terrific generosity have continued to enrich my intellectual life: among the many things I’ve learnt from her is that pleasure is a significant part of the critical task. A number of people have generously offered their advice, support and practical help at various stages of this research. I thank Trev Broughton, Jane Elliott, Vicki Mahaffey and Joanne Winning for carefully reading and commenting on my work. Thanks are also due to Alex Goody, Susan Manning, Ann Martin, Fiona Stafford and Philip West. I am grateful to my anonymous readers at Edinburgh University Press for their helpful suggestions and would like to thank my editor, Jackie Jones, for her enthusiasm and interest. I am grateful to the fellows of Lady Margaret Hall for appointing me Joanna Randall MacIver Junior Research Fellow. This opportunity has given me valuable time and space to revise my work on Djuna Barnes. Thanks in particular to Helen Barr, Christine Gerrard, Erin Goeres and Bharat Tandon for showing me just how congenial a department can be. New friends have made Oxford a pleasant place to return to and old ones have continued to provide love and support. Kim Hackett and Emma Crabtree have been immensely loyal and kind over the last few years. Diz Manning deserves extra special thanks for repeatedly demonstrating that a best friend is indeed a wonderful thing. Rita Taylor and Ivan Taylor have offered all kinds of support and I’m continually

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thankful to and for them. I owe more than I can say to my fabulous sister, Jane Sally Taylor. A portion of Chapter 1 appeared under the title ‘Revising The Antiphon, Restaging Trauma; or, Where Sexual Politics Meet Textual History’ and first appeared in Modernism/modernity, 18.1 (January 2011): 125–47. Copyright © The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission by The Johns Hopkins University Press. I am grateful to the publishers for permission to reprint here. Citations from published works and reprints of artwork by Djuna Barnes are copyright The Authors League Fund, as literary executor of the Estate of Djuna Barnes. I thank The Author’s League Fund for permission to cite from Barnes’s unpublished works, drafts and correspondence, and am grateful to its Executive Director, Isabel Howe, for her help and generosity.

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List of Illustrations

2.1 ‘Going To, and Coming From’, Ryder 2.2 ‘Midwives’ Lament, or The Horrid Outcome of Wendell’s First Infidelity’, Ryder 4.1 Illustration for ‘July’, Ladies Almanack 4.2 ‘Zodiac’ illustration for ‘August’, Ladies Almanack 4.3 Illustration for ‘March’, Ladies Almanack 4.4 ‘The book all ladies should carry’, Ladies Almanack

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89 94 155 160 162 166

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Introduction: Broken Hearts and Bleeding Wounds – Traumatic Modernism?

And what in the world, dear Edwin could I do for Bollingen? As I told Eliot, I’m not a ‘writer’; once in every twenty years or so, the wound bleeds, that’s all. (Djuna Barnes to Edwin Muir, 26 October 1957) ‘Oh,’ [O’Connor] cried. ‘A broken heart have you! I have falling arches, flying dandruff, a floating kidney, shattered nerves and a broken heart!’ (Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, 139)

The grande-dameish tone of Djuna Barnes’s letter to Edwin Muir, in which she emphatically situates her ‘bleeding’ modernism outside the institutional body of the Bollingen Foundation, is typical of her later correspondence. A glamorous yet cantankerous representative of Left-Bank expatriate life, the Djuna Barnes one encounters in modernist life-writing has rather a lot in common with Nightwood’s melancholic, cross-dressing, unlicensed gynaecologist Dr Matthew O’Connor. Like her doctor, Barnes deploys her melodrama with camp flourish. And equally, both the biographical Barnes and her literary oeuvre support O’Connor’s somatic conception of feeling, his deliberate conjunction of psychic pain and embodied experience. Barnes’s writing forces us to remember that reading engages the body: in both quotations she invites us to smile with delight and gasp with horror. Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism argues that these mixed feelings are central to Barnes’s aesthetically and politically challenging oeuvre. In works that allow us to further comprehend the variousness of the modernist project, Djuna Barnes describes how affects circulate between bodies – and between texts and bodies – in ways at once generative and disruptive. Barnes’s oeuvre helps us to appreciate Brian Massumi’s claim that ‘feelings have a way of folding into each other, resonating together, interfering with each other, mutually intensifying, all in unquantifiable ways apt to unfold again in action, often unpredictably’ (2002: 1). Furthermore, Barnes’s exploration of affect suggests a new way of imagining her intertextuality. The

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powerful ambivalences and non-dichotomous differences – between past and present, self and other – that recur in Barnes’s readings of bodies and embodied feeling may also be observed in her readings of textual corpora. And while these temporal and epistemological structures occur in a range of affective scenarios, including happiness, they are perhaps most immediately apparent in the experience of trauma. Barnes’s description of writing as a bleeding wound suggests a metaphorics of trauma while reminding us of the physical etymology of that word ‘trauma’.1 And the notion of writing as a bleeding wound productively confuses writing as trauma with writing about trauma. Several of Barnes’s works explore directly the psychic and somatic experience of trauma, the feeling of woundedness. This thematic preoccupation often relates to the issue of childhood sexual abuse, an issue that almost certainly has a connection with Barnes’s own biography. The idea of writing as trauma, however, takes us beyond questions of Barnes’s early life to help us better understand her modernism. Specifically, the structure of belated comprehension that characterises the trauma response offers a compelling way of thinking about the performative reiterations of literary history that have been generally described as Barnes’s parodies, pastiches or satires. The notion of belatedness is key to psychoanalytic understandings of trauma, from Freud’s early insight that ‘hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences’ (1955: II, 7, italics in original) to recent work by the psychoanalytic critic Cathy Caruth (1995, 1996).2 I argue that Barnes’s modernism involves a belated ‘witnessing’ of earlier literary forms, which are read, paradoxically, as if for the first time. As with trauma, Barnes’s modernism is estranged from notions of originality: her texts exist as repetitions, and it is through these repetitions that the complexities of literary history may be fully realised. This understanding challenges the mutually exclusive narratives that modernism was either a phenomenon of historical rupture or deceptively congruent with nineteenth-century forms. Through its focus on modes of feeling, Barnes’s oeuvre suggests a complex and generative relationship with the literature of the immediate past, in particular the texts often dismissed by high modernists for their ‘sentimentalism’. The trauma structure invites us to consider an attitude to the past that is governed by neither nostalgia nor repudiation, but that interrupts linearity and privileges affective ambivalence rather than narrative clarity. And crucially, the question mark in the title of this Introduction gestures towards the way that the already diverse affects of trauma correspond to just one shade of the emotional landscape that the structure of retrospective experience and non-dichotomous difference can describe.

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As Jessica R. Feldman notes, because of the varying understandings of modernism and its origins, each argument about it ‘can thus be seen as a straw-man argument since its assumptions are eminently open to challenge’ (2002: 6). And like Feldman’s work, my assessment of the particularity of Barnes’s ‘affective modernism’ relies somewhat on the notion of ‘high modernism’: works dating from around 1880–1945 which take ‘the long and impersonal view, turning away from the ordinary and the fleshly, the vulgarly emotional and the preachy’ (Feldman, 2002: 6). Yet I also want to insist that Barnes’s work is not an alternative modernism but a part of modernism, and that reading her work makes for an even more nuanced model of modernist textuality.3 While I identify certain recurring features of canonical modernism that are challenged by Barnes’s work, I do not want to suggest that ‘modernism’ is not a capacious enough term to include the Barnes corpus. Indeed, as Rita Felski has argued, rather than ‘identifying a stable referent or set of attributes, “modern” acts as a mobile and shifting category of classification that serves to structure, legitimize, and valorize varied and often competing perspectives’ (1995: 14–15). Barnes’s work can in fact help us to acknowledge how the complexities of modernist attachments might escape certain totalising critical trends. Indeed, while research on Barnes has been slight, her work has played a disproportionately significant role in the reconceptualising of modernism that has taken place over the last thirty years. Barnes has been a key figure in feminist reappraisals of the modernist canon, as is suggested by her inclusion alongside Virginia Woolf and Rebecca West as one of Bonnie Kime Scott’s ‘women of 1928’ in Refiguring Modernism (1995). Mary Lynn Broe’s 1991 collection, Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, and Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank (1986) are also rich testimonies to the usefulness of Barnes’s texts for reconsidering women’s role in modernism and exploring the impact of feminist theory on critical studies of the period. Equally, Barnes has been a notable casein-point in the queering of literary modernism, in works such as Mary E. Galvin’s Queer Poetics (1999) and, less centrally, in countless works on gay and lesbian literature, in studies on ‘sentimental’ or ‘gothic’ modernism and in Tyrus Miller’s (1999) influential study of ‘late modernism’.4 Barnes has always been, I am suggesting, a figure who has helped critics articulate some of the complexities within modernist studies, particularly those residing at the intersections between gender, sexuality and modernity. Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism continues this tradition of appealing to Barnes’s oeuvre to expand the parameters of our understanding of modernism, but it also aims to provide sensitive and revisionary readings of Barnes’s neglected major works – The Antiphon

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(1958), Ryder (1928) and Ladies Almanack (1928) – as well as offering a new interpretation of her celebrated 1936 novel Nightwood. The last two decades have seen a growing critical interest in Barnes’s historically under-researched oeuvre, but although journal articles and chapter-length studies on Nightwood have proliferated, fewer critics have been attentive to Barnes’s other works. The first full-length critical studies, James B. Scott’s Djuna Barnes and Louis F. Kannenstine’s The Art of Djuna Barnes: Duality and Damnation, did not appear until 1976 and 1977 respectively. In 1986, Cheryl Plumb explored the symbolist influence on Barnes in Fancy’s Craft: Art and Identity in the Early Works of Djuna Barnes, yet Barnes’s centrality to feminist studies of modernism throughout the 1990s was not reflected in another monograph until Deborah Parsons’s helpful 2003 introductory guide Djuna Barnes. At the end of the last decade, however, research on Barnes began to steadily flourish. Alex Goody has made valuable insights about Barnes’s treatment of such diverse phenomena as war, Jewishness, fashion, the New Woman and the grotesque in her cultural studies-oriented Modernist Articulations (2007). Diane Warren’s comprehensive monograph Djuna Barnes’ Consuming Fictions appeared the following year, and was followed in 2009 by Daniela Caselli’s excellent Improper Modernism: Djuna Barnes’s Bewildering Corpus, which sought to better articulate Barnes’s place in the modernist canon and presented extensive research from the Djuna Barnes archive. The most recent Barnes monograph appeared in 2010: Monika Faltejskova’s Djuna Barnes, T. S. Eliot and the Gender Dynamics of Modernism. Faltejskova’s book has, alongside Cheryl Plumb’s 1990 ‘restored’ and annotated edition of Nightwood, contributed to our understanding of the role of gender in the textual and editorial history of Barnes’s most famous novel. Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism contributes to this growing critical momentum through an elaboration of the dynamic connections between the affective body and Djuna Barnes’s textual corpus. The chapters that follow benefit from substantial and significant research at Barnes’s archives at the University of Maryland. Barnes’s unpublished correspondence and her personal library are particularly valuable resources for any revisionary reading of her oeuvre, and the expansiveness of her archive – which includes correspondence, artwork, cuttings, daybooks, drafts, marginalia, photographs, shopping lists and even furniture – is pleasingly reflective of the expansiveness of her modernism. Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism incorporates a number of little-discussed archival texts and, most significantly, Chapter 1 represents the first major reappraisal of Barnes’s revisions of The Antiphon

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for over two decades, radically challenging previous narratives of the play’s textual history. Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism poses a series of disruptive questions about modernist aesthetics and the politics of reading. How do we reconcile Barnes’s apparently biographical writing with her modernist commitment to impersonality? How do we honour the complexities of traumatic experience without pathologising the subject? How might we differently imagine the relationship between modernism and literary history? And why do we find it so difficult to talk about the pleasures of reading? Through a reconsideration of modernist intertextuality, affect and subjectivity, Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism attempts to answer such questions, producing a series of lively readings of the major works of the period’s most ‘famous unknown’. My focus on Barnes’s affective modernism allows us to appreciate the sometimes compromising but almost always pleasurable attachments that not only mark her work as queer, but bring into being the queerness of the premodernist texts she reads. By performing, reiterating or ‘witnessing’ literary history, Barnes produces the complexities, slippages and perverse relationships that make such a history appear startlingly new.

Biography, modernism and the wound Barnes’s letter to Edwin Muir, written in response to his suggestion that she might apply for a writer’s grant from the Bollingen Foundation, posits writing as an intensely personal endeavour. Yet Barnes was famously resistant to biographical readings of her work. The same author who, her first biographer Andrew Field claims, told critic James Scott that ‘Ryder and Titus, they are my father. Where did the basic story come from? From my life’ also insisted to Scott that ‘the “Me” should not be the point’ (Field, 1983: 185; Barnes to James Scott, 15 April 1971). There would appear to be a central contradiction within Barnes’s textual output: although frequently and productively drawing on her own biography for her fiction, she deconstructs the notions of factual stability and coherent subjectivity on which autobiography appears to rely while, in her letters, consistently and vehemently condemning autobiographical disclosure. This is not, in fact, a contradiction per se, but a compelling tension that might be better understood in the context of Barnes’s attentiveness to the complexities of affect in general and trauma in particular. For Barnes, the injunction on autobiographic disclosure was perhaps considered a mark of modernist correctness: ‘Tom Eliot himself’ she

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notes in 1968, ‘that most written about gentleman, gave orders “no biography”. If someone wants to assess my writings, well and good; my personal life is another matter’ (Barnes to Natalie Barney, 14 August 1968). Barnes was keen to align herself with the axis of high culture she felt best represented by Eliot and Joyce, and, particularly in old age, sought the Eliotic universal in her wish not to be categorised as a lesbian or even a woman writer.5 In this respect, she was perhaps drawn to the ideals of poetic impersonality posited in Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919).6 However, her varying attitudes towards the personal and the biographical indicate the contradictions that, as Maud Ellmann has shown, inhere in the modernist poetics of impersonality. Eliot’s most famous lines in favour of poetic impersonality are notoriously vexed and ambiguous: Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. (Eliot, 1975: 43)

Here, poetic impersonality reads like an act of supreme and fraught selfconsciousness in every sense that the term implies, an act bearing more relation to catharsis than to the cold exercise in classicist objectivity that Eliot attempts to suggest with his careful scientific metaphors. Ellmann has convincingly argued that, while Eliot and Pound both advocate impersonality, they both ‘resist its implications’ (1987: 2). Not only does their theory diverge from their poetic practice, but the theory itself is subject to internal contradictions. Equally, Eliot and Pound often smuggle personality back into their poetics in the very terms they use to cast it out. Eliot, for instance, insists that poetry originates in personal emotion, implying that the author’s subjectivity pervades the text, yet at the same time he deplores this intervention. (Ellmann, 1987: 2–3)

In Barnes’s copy of Eliot’s essays, a tentative question mark sits in the margin next to the claim that ‘The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.’ This question mark, I suggest, figures as a metonym for Barnes’s ongoing interrogation of exactly how the personal should relate to fiction. Barnes’s ‘difficult’ texts have often been deciphered through her biography: Ryder and The Antiphon through the murky details of her early family life and Nightwood through her turbulent relationship with silverpoint artist Thelma Wood.7 Such readings have involved varying degrees of subtlety, with one of the most extreme being Field’s assess-

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ment that ‘the Barnes oeuvre may be said to be one of the best instances of deep auto-analysis outside the Freudian canon in modern English literature’ (1983: 98).8 Interestingly, because the facts of Barnes’s early life in particular are as unclear as her works apparently are, biography and fiction have been positioned in a highly problematic, seemingly self-defeating relationship of mutual clarification. This strangely contradictory movement is seen in Field, who claims that the ‘evidence’ of Barnes’s ‘molestation by collusion’ is in the art, in the original manuscript of Nightwood, which ‘Barnes acknowledged in a letter to Eliot was to be regarded as a semi-autobiographical story’ (1983: 43). Similarly, Barnes’s second biographer, Phillip Herring, remarks that he has lifted material from Ryder for his portrait of Barnes’s childhood (1995: 313–14, n. 2). The significant biographical ‘event’ for Herring, Field and many other Barnes scholars is a variously described sexual trauma that may or may not have been incestuous. Barnes grew up in a polygynous household in the farming community of Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York State, with an eccentric father, Wald, who lived by the doctrines of free love he preached.9 Herring documents the various biographical evidence relating to a sexual trauma apparently suffered by the young Djuna. The specific nature of the violation has been confused or forgotten but it seems that Barnes blamed her father either directly or indirectly: in one statement she apparently claims that he raped her, but elsewhere she claims that he consented to her rape by a neighbour.10 Sexual abuse has also been identified in a series of letters written by Barnes’s paternal grandmother, Zadel Gustafson. Zadel’s letters to the adolescent Djuna include pictures of breasts and mammary-related nicknames such as ‘Cuddlers’ and ‘Pink Tops’.11 While Herring interprets the letters as ‘bawdy’, he is reluctant to see them as evidence of incest (1995: 55). Mary Lynn Broe, however, in ‘My Art Belongs to Daddy: Incest as Exile – The Textual Economics of Hayford Hall’ (1989), reads the correspondence as evidence of an incestuous yet nurturing relationship designed to counter the harmful sexual influence of Zadel’s son, Wald. As Caselli points out, Ryder and The Antiphon ‘are repetitions of a narrative that temptingly offers itself up as biographical and yet fails to work as a key to “disclose” the text’ (2009: 194). While I strongly agree that it is futile and reductive to look for an originary biographical event to ‘disclose’ the texts, I am interested in how these very repetitions, in all their ambivalence, might point to the significance of the trauma structure and so help us read Ryder and The Antiphon affectively rather than hermeneutically. Indeed, the performative emphasis of much recent trauma theory helps us move away from the search for origins. In her

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critique of the approach adopted by Field, Mary E. Galvin writes that, by reading her traumatic childhood as ‘the “real” story behind all her works, Field constructs the story of Djuna Barnes as a pathology’ (1999: 84). Galvin’s connection between trauma and pathology is understandable and, in the case of Field, entirely justifiable. Yet what if this link were not seen as inevitable? Like Ann Cvetkovich, who considers the traces of trauma in sites of ‘lesbian public culture’, I want to find ‘ways of thinking about trauma that do not pathologize it, that seize control over it from the medical experts, and that forge creative responses to it that far outstrip even the most utopian of therapeutic and political solutions’ (An Archive of Feelings, 2003: 3).12 Many of the characteristics of trauma – its tendencies towards unknowability and unrepresentability, for instance – are compatible with the epistemological and representational uncertainties I identify as features of Barnes’s work. And even the overtly medical diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) brings into question the terms in which we understand pathology. This can be seen, as Caruth suggests, in debates concerning ‘how closely PTSD must be tied to certain events; or in the psychoanalytic problem of whether trauma is indeed pathological in the usual sense, in relation to distortions caused by desires, wishes, and repressions’ (1995: 3). In my readings of Ryder and The Antiphon I do not seek to suggest diagnoses for the author or her characters, or to use the texts to elucidate Barnes’s biography. Instead, I consider how these texts complicate – rather than exemplify – our understanding of the processing, communication and possible healing of a traumatic event. What trauma theories lend to my readings of Barnes in Chapters 1 and 2 is their emphasis on how remembering trauma involves a re-enactment and witnessing of something that, paradoxically, did not exist prior to that re-enactment and witnessing. And Barnes’s engagement with performance, theatricality and ‘antiphony’ provide new ways of thinking about these tropes of trauma discourse as much as illustrate their workings. Caselli observes the irony that to read Barnes’s letters as ‘expressions of her intentions and to follow them as instructions not to read her work biographically results in yet another biographical reading’ (2009: 193). However, with particular reference to Barnes’s possibly incestuous correspondence with her grandmother, Caselli also urges us to ‘read personal documents, rather than use them to discover an allegedly stable truth lying “beyond” them’ (2009: 130).13 Barnes’s 30 November 1937 letter to Emily Coleman is a personal document that we might read to better understand the complex relationships between personal disclosure and modernist art found in Barnes’s treatment of trauma. In this letter to Coleman, who had finally come to understand her history of

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sexual abuse, Barnes refers to her ‘innate dislike of parading, or “telling on” the innermost secret’ and suggests instead a mode of creative and collaborative remembering: ‘In exposing it in art, it is lifted back into its own place again, given back to itself, tho also given to the reader, the eye. Only the best reader will understand it, like initiation, which is not for everyone’. Barnes understands her project as an intimate contract between reader and writer: the ‘best reader’ is not a passive recipient but a form of witness. Equally compelling in Barnes’s description is the idea that art allows the ‘secret’ to possess itself: art gives the memory ‘back to itself’. For Barnes, traumatic memory does not exist in an unmediated state: it is brought into the world through the artistic process and the reader’s witnessing, its validity guaranteed by these very conditions or contingencies. Barnes’s statement is suggestive of the theory that traumatic memories are created through the process of testimony and witnessing. The unintegrated and unassimilated nature of the traumatic memory has been stressed since the work of Pierre Janet, considered by many to be the founder of the concept of psychic trauma. More recently, Bessel van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart have described traumatic memories as ‘the unassimilated scraps of overwhelming experiences, which need to be integrated with existing mental schemes, and be transformed into narrative language’ (1995: 176). I want to emphasise that to read trauma in Barnes is not necessarily to read biographically, and does not necessitate a rigid distinction between fictional and non-fictional texts whereby factual stability is located in the latter. Peggy Phelan has written that, with sexual injury, it is virtually impossible to separate the empirically verifiable from the phantasm of the trauma. Sexual trauma tears the fabric of knowledge itself: it is a wound in the system of meaning though which the subject knows the world, knows him or herself. Sexual trauma can never be fully interpreted, but the tear it creates may be mended as it is rehearsed, rewritten, revised. (1997: 95)

Phelan’s implicit connection between a failure in epistemology or representation – ‘the wound in the system of meaning’ – and the compulsion to rehearse, rewrite and revise a traumatic ‘tear’, is suggestive of Barnes’s notion of writing as a ‘bleeding wound’. But for a wound to bleed it cannot be ‘mended’: it must instead stay open. This idea is explicated in further lines from Barnes’s letter to Coleman: You see now why one must be secret? One must not betray that place, or it will heal up, and you’ll know nothing more of it clearly [. . .] and ones [sic] secret book that one day becomes public, but still secret if written as it should

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be. Why did I just say ‘will heal up’? That’s exactly it, it just came out. The wound in the side of Christ?

Read alongside her statements about the ‘initiated reader’, this comment seems less about the dangers of disclosure and more about the importance of feeling the wound itself, witnessing its openness. Caselli writes of this quotation: The revelation of the secret does not imply consolation, but a betrayal that obfuscates clarity. The secret, rather than producing obscurity, preserves clarity of vision, which would be lost once the secret goes public. The wound of Christ needs to stay open as testimony: a healed wound is lost knowledge. (2009: 196)

Caselli is quite correct in her assessment that Barnes’s testimony depends on the openness of the wound. In fact, the wound and writing exist in a symbiotic relationship where the trauma does not exist as such without the articulation of woundedness, and vice versa. This notion of an open wound as simultaneously the condition for and result of testimony is suggested in Barnes’s early poem, ‘Love Song’ (1916), where a ‘weeping mouth’ is also a ‘little wound where grief is spilt’ (The Book of Repulsive Women, 33). The anatomically confused image of the weeping mouth as a wound emphasises the link between affect, communication and trauma. But while Barnes’s epistolary caution that, if a ‘secret’ is written incorrectly, ‘you’ll know nothing more of it clearly’ suggests that revelation ‘obfuscates clarity’, we might also think more carefully about what ‘knowing clearly’ means in this context. Explication, simplification and indeed representation of the wound results, for Barnes, in a lack of clarity: ‘clarity’ can only be achieved through a certain obscurity; to ‘know something’ properly is, perversely, to know that which cannot be made clear. In her letter to Coleman Barnes is, above all, interested in how writing must convey the feeling of the wound, which cannot be ‘clarified’ in representation but must simply be witnessed. Barnes’s wound speaks through its very openness, its continued bleeding. This notion is reminiscent of Freud’s interpretation of the story of Tancred and Clorinda in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, especially as read by Cathy Caruth. In Tasso’s story, Tancred accidentally kills his lover, Clorinda, in battle, and then gashes a tree which streams blood as the voice of the dead Clorinda complains that she has again been wounded. For Caruth, Tancred’s actions ‘evocatively represent in Freud’s text the way that the experience of a trauma repeats itself, exactly and unremittingly, through the unknowing acts of the survivor and against his very will’ (1996: 2). But, even more compelling than this

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illustration of traumatic repetition is the notion of ‘the moving and sorrowful voice that cries out, a voice that is paradoxically released through the wound’ (Caruth, 1996: 2, emphasis in original). Caruth’s emphasis on ‘the wound that cries out’ in Tasso’s story, and its communication of ‘a reality or truth that is not otherwise available’ is a useful corollary for the connections between woundedness and writing made by Barnes (1996: 4). Furthermore, the notion of writing as a wound that bleeds indicates Barnes’s complex understanding of how the personal might relate to fiction. While Barnes’s bleeding wound poetics startlingly evoke notions of self-expression and personality that might seem to be the very opposite of modernist ambitions, they in fact produce a complicated model for the relationship between personal experience, authorial presence and writing. And this complexity might be considered a component of – as opposed to a challenge to – the modernist poetics of impersonality.

‘When the Puppets Come to Town’: Embodied feeling and the subject The performative emphasis of the trauma response, the subject’s compulsion to act out traumatic scenes and the blurred boundaries between self and other produced in this scenario have all caused psychoanalytical work on trauma to converge with the deconstructive critique of the subject.14 Indeed, despite the apparent divergences between theory’s ‘affective turn’ and the poststructuralist neglect of the body it addresses, affect and emotion, as Patricia T. Clough points out, ‘point just as well as poststructuralism and deconstruction do to the subject’s discontinuity with itself, a discontinuity of the subject’s conscious experience with the non-intentionality of emotion and affect’ (2010: 207). While Barnes’s work displays a scepticism about coherent subjectivity and depth psychology that seems to pre-empt poststructuralist thought, she remains committed to articulating the complexities of feeling and embodiment. Recent critical examinations of affect that offer insight into the precise relationships between emotion and subjectivity, between emotion and narrative, and between sensation and cognition, can therefore provide helpful perspectives on Barnes’s treatment of embodied feeling. I want now to illustrate the potential proximities between contemporary theories of affect and early twentieth-century modernism through a focus on some of Barnes’s earlier, often neglected, works. Barnes’s publications prior to Ryder and Ladies Almanack – the two 1928 texts that guaranteed her literary success – encompass prose, poetry, drama

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and journalism. Barnes wrote one-act plays (several of which were performed by Greenwich Village’s Provincetown Players, with whom she also acted), published short stories in the popular journals, wrote poetry (only some of which was published) and worked as a reporter for the New York press. These early works are fascinating in their own right, but I draw on them also to emphasise that Barnes’s preoccupation with the feeling body spanned the whole of her career, which in itself covers a significant portion of the period we now term ‘modernity’. In the New York of the 1910s and 1920s, Barnes wrote a series of self-conscious and stylised celebrity interviews which ‘acknowledge the intrinsic theatricality of the genre’ while suggesting the author’s early rejection of depth psychology and her reservations about personal disclosure (Caselli, 2009: 21). As Douglas Messerli notes, Barnes’s style includes ‘original quotations that make all her “real” figures sound as if they had just stepped from a fin-de-siecle play’ (‘Foreword’, New York, 11). Messerli and others have indeed doubted Barnes’s faithful representation of her interviewees’ comments, rightly recognising their ‘wit’ to be Barnes’s own. As Nancy J. Levine writes: ‘To a certain extent, Barnes invented all the people about whom she wrote’ (1991: 29). Alert to the fashion for muckraking in the New York sensationalist press, what Barnes’s celebrity exposés really reveal is not her subjects’ interior lives but the hermeneutic desires at work in the interview scene itself. Barnes’s playful deconstruction of the interview form is evident in many of the pieces appearing in newspapers between approximately 1913 and 1918 and in magazines such as Charm and Vanity Fair from around 1922 and 1931. In her 1915 interview with the matinee idol Lou Tellegen, Barnes ostentatiously and satirically ‘stages’ the image of the interviewer penetrating hidden depths. The interview is written as a one-act play starring Tellegen and the ‘PEN PERFORMER’ (a journalistic persona repeatedly employed by Barnes) and begins in a ‘vaultlike cellar’ containing a flight of stairs to a small ‘opening in the wall’ through which a light shines, ‘spilling its yellow flood halfway down the stairs’ (Interviews, 153).15 To the right of the opening is Tellegen’s dressing room, and in the ‘near center of the room a chair; in the chair sits LOU TELLEGEN’ (Interviews, 153). The labyrinthine and revelatory dynamics of the description, the move from depth to surface, from dark to light, are parodically suggestive of the hermeneutic ambitions of the interviewer. This parody is cemented, and the discourse of hermeneutics overridden by one of performance, when the Pen Performer emerges at the rise of a curtain which falls again at the end of the interview. The dressing room in which the interview takes place does not emerge as a site of self-revelation but as simply another stage.16

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Barnes’s emphasis on surface and performance has led to a feminist critical focus on female spectacularity in her early journalism.17 Not only does Barnes make a spectacle of the actresses, dancers and other performers she interviews, she also makes a spectacle of herself. Barnes’s spectacularity can be seen most obviously in apparently trivial ‘stunt’ pieces such as ‘My Adventures Being Rescued’ (1914) (New York, 174–9) but also occurs less straightforwardly in ‘How It Feels to Be Forcibly Fed’ (1914), in which she undergoes the force-feeding endured by suffragist hunger-protesters (New York, 185–9). Barnes does not share any of her critics’ anxieties about female spectacularity: while ‘visual pleasure’ may be problematic for some, embodied feeling is, for Barnes, a less fraught and a potentially more interesting area for exploration than the depths of the ‘self’.18 Equally, this is not always an issue that might be divided simply along the lines of gender, as the Tellegen piece suggests. An interest in the performing male body is suggested in Barnes’s interview with boxer Jess Willard, whose body language she describes in affective terms: ‘He moves with a certain solemnity, a sort of balanced tonnage, with a step at once cautious and careless. His hands seem to be embarrassed’ (Interviews, 1985: 137). Granted only the external view (‘seem to be’), Barnes produces a careful reading of Willard’s body: his ‘embarrassed’ hands provide an early example of Barnes’s much-repeated tendency to locate emotions at the surface of the performing body. The lack of concern Barnes shows for depth psychology and interiority in her early works has led some critics to regard it as an address to the crisis of depersonalisation associated with modernity. Tyrus Miller finds within the works of Djuna Barnes, Wyndham Lewis and Samuel Beckett the vision of a general depersonalization and deauthentication of life in modern society. Everyday life, in their view, was being increasingly penetrated by mimetic practices – role-playing, contagious imitation, ‘rhythmic’ forms of association, anthropomorphic ‘animation’ of the object-world, ritualized behavior – previously confined to well-defined spheres in religious ritual, theater, and the arts. [. . .] Late modernism, as it emerged in the late twenties and thirties, both reflected and reflected critically upon this loss of stable, authentic social ground. (1999: 42–3)

Miller claims that Eliot’s notions of depersonalisation were treated ‘skeptically, even satirically’ by Barnes, who effectively rewrote them as ‘shell-shock, psychic regression, and rigor mortis’ (1999: 124, 125). I have argued that Barnes’s reaction to Eliot’s writing on impersonality was decidedly mixed, and that her own attitudes towards personal disclosure further complicate notions of modernist impersonality. However, while acknowledging that Barnes may have been sceptical

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about Eliot’s claims, I wish to explore further how the ‘mimetic practices’ that Miller identifies relate to authenticity and affect; in other words, I am interested in how a performative understanding of subjectivity, the loss of the core authentic self, did not result in aesthetic or affective bankruptcy for Barnes. In her (uncollected) 1917 article ‘When the Puppets Come to Town’, Barnes indeed posits a visit to the puppet show as a means of escaping emotion. Tired of feeling and thinking about feeling, Barnes goes to see ‘Bufano’s marionettes’: ‘They are so impartial. Having no sense of color, a tear means no more to them than a drop of water, a pool of blood nothing more than a pool of rain’ (‘When The Puppets’). The article is a comic piece about the incongruity of performing serious drama with puppets incapable of showing signs of emotion, and in one sense seems to question the value of the modernist ideal of depersonalisation. A similar case might be made for another of Barnes’s New York articles, ‘Surcease in Hurry and Whirl – On the Restless Surf at Coney’ (1917). This article begins with the description of a woman not unlike the ‘exotic’ figures found in Barnes’s short stories: born ‘between two countries’ and ‘between two races’, she is bizarrely seductive, fascinating yet strangely unreal (New York, 275). The woman complains that people are ‘dolls’ and ‘puppets’ for whom she has ‘a sort of gesture of pity which was at the same time the italics of mercy’ (New York, 276). The terms ‘gesture’ and ‘italics’ suggests the stylised performance of feeling found in many of Barnes’s characters of this period and later, and leaves the reader unclear about the status of the woman’s complaint, for she too appears as puppet-like as most of Barnes’s women. Crucially, the woman also complains that Americans ‘do not know how to amuse [themselves] or how to be sad’ (New York, 276). How then, do we square the woman’s complaint about a contemporary inability to feel with the puppet-like quality of Barnes’s representation? As a witty, cold, ethnically mixed vamp, she is a quintessential early Barnesian ‘type’.19 In this article, Barnes suggests that feeling may arise where authenticity and coherent subjectivity do not. While the woman does not figure in the rest of the article, in which Barnes describes Coney Island, the author claims that she remains in her thoughts throughout the visit. During the trip, the tension between feeling and inauthenticity comes to a crisis with the alarming mimesis of a ‘thin little girl like an old woman’ who ‘cackle[s]’as she copies the noises of the crowd and the calls of the sideshow attendants: There is something incomplete in her great, horrifying completeness; she seems to be an outcome of past cries, curses, shouts, laughter, music, dancing,

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hubbub, and merry insolence. She is a little girl who has collected herself from the gutter and molded herself into this saucy, angular body from the refuse of great noises – that are, alas, never grand noises, but the hue and cry of a thousand middlemen making a nickel. (New York, 280)

In Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life, Justus Nieland refers to ‘the sensational dynamics of modernity’s public world’ described in Barnes’s early journalism and claims that Barnes ‘remains aware that Coney’s distractions remain authentic insofar as they expose, while compensating for, an experiential lack’ (2008: 243, 244). Citing the passage above, Nieland writes that Barnes condenses a host of familiar modernist anxieties about a mimetic-sympathetic public sphere whose inauthenticity is, at best, the dialectical diagnosis of modern malaise, sad but true. Carrying within herself an archive of the sensational affects of consumer desire, the girl’s lack tells the truth about a modern loss of authentic experience (Erfahrung). (2008: 244, italics in original)

As potentially troubling as the girl’s mimesis is, I am not convinced by Nieland’s ultimate conclusion that her incompleteness also represents a proto-Benjaminian critique of bourgeois sociality and that Barnes’s ‘inhuman being is primarily social’ (2008: 245). Nieland’s argument – based on the notion that publicness involves depersonalisation in Barnes – might be troubled by the fact that all Barnesian characters would seem to comprise ‘an archive of sensational affects’, including the woman from ‘between two countries’ with whom Barnes began the article.20 To summarise Barnes’s queer performing subjects as critiques of an inauthentic public sphere is to risk obscuring how interesting they can be in their affective complexity: in such a reading they emerge more as symptoms of ‘experiential lack’ and less as explorations of how we might differently imagine and write experience. What occurs as a potentially traumatic mimesis in ‘Surcease in Hurry and Whirl’ is figured somewhat differently in Barnes’s 1918 one-act play ‘Madame Collects Herself’. Here, just as the girl from Coney ‘collected’ and ‘molded’ herself, Madame Zolbo’s very literal self-construction neatly suggests a notion of performative identity. Zolbo prosthetically adopts or otherwise incorporates the body parts and fluids of previous lovers: for instance, the false curls of Michael adorn her head and a pint of blood formerly belonging to Conrad flows in her veins. When Zolbo’s hairdresser and jealous lover stabs her in the heart (actually his heart) with his curling irons, he asks Zolbo to locate her true self – ‘Where are you, Madame, in what spot are you yourself?’ – while the other hairdressers proceed to remove appropriated body parts from Zolbo,

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until she disappears and ‘a blond canary rises up toward the ceiling’ (At the Roots of the Stars, 1995: 65). Yet Zolbo collects ‘herself’ again: another hairdresser notes ‘she grows larger and larger every minute; three men are already lying dead beneath her cage, and she is smiling and making ringlets over her fingers!’ (At the Roots of the Stars, 1995: 66). This comedy, where performativity is emphasised as hermeneutic desire increases, also provides a suggestive image of affective memory: the past and its affections make themselves felt in the present in the most corporeal manner imaginable. This commitment to understanding through the body is again emphasised in an uncollected 1916 article on ‘The Washington Square Players’ where embodied performances of emotion are discussed in a specifically artistic context. In this piece, Barnes is struck by the ‘artificial beauty’ arising from a portrayal of grief by an actor in the Japanese play Bushido: He had lost his son; with fingers touching that head, he sensed the whole absent body, for in his heart his son lived always, and there existed for him no knife that could cut the throat of so great a memory – there was a space below this chin, but it was bodied in duty.

What took comic form in ‘Madame Collects Herself’ and became a more ambivalent horror in ‘Surcease in Hurry and Whirl’ is here related to the specifically traumatic. Just as the memory of Robin in Nightwood is figured as a severed limb that can still be felt by the grieving Nora, here the trauma of loss is felt entirely through the body. ‘Touching’ the physical body is a means of ‘sensing’ a lost body, and the act of touching becomes productively confused with more metaphorical ideas of touching, sensing and bodying. Memory and emotion do not come from cognition in this representation but rather they reside in – as opposed to moving out from – the body. The bodily identification and the focus on touching means that the bodies of father and son become confused; as the father touches his own head he feels another’s lost body, which is also, in his grief, his own. In this extraordinary paragraph in an otherwise light and amusing report on a theatre company, Barnes suggestively describes how distinctions between two subjects are blurred as feelings intensify. Identification and embodied feeling are also explored in ‘How It Feels to Be Forcibly Fed’, where one finds not the cold and depersonalised ‘modernist’ scene of a patient ‘etherised upon a table’ but something more akin to a sentimental tableau in which one is called upon to read Barnes’s body (Eliot, Collected Poems, 1963: 13). Like the ‘artificial beauty’ Barnes finds in Bushido, the scene is staged, performed, self-

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consciously enacted, yet it remains affectively intense. Although Barnes deems it ‘impossible to describe’ the pain of being force-fed, imagining herself ‘gripped in the tentacles of some monster devil fish’, she in fact relates in precise detail the bodily locations of her feelings, from the ‘inner interstices of [her] throbbing head’ to her face, bosom and spine (New York, 177). Barnes’s identification with suffragists, which is somewhat unclear in other pieces on the movement, is effected through bodily sensation:21 I saw in my hysteria a vision of a hundred women in grim prison hospitals, bound and shrouded on tables just like this, held in the rough grip of callous warders while white-robed doctors thrust rubber tubing into the delicate interstices of their nostrils and forced into their helpless bodies the crude fuel to sustain the life they longed to sacrifice. (New York, 178)

With her reference to ‘hysteria’ and ‘helpless bodies’, and her own act of embodied empathy, Barnes seems to be consciously reworking, without irony, the maligned feminised terms associated with nineteenth-century sentimental discourse. All this, however, occurs within the context of Barnes’s own admission that she is ‘playacting’ (New York, 1990: 178). When Levine notes that ‘ “Empathy” has rarely been taken further by any writer’, her scare quotes around the word ‘empathy’ perhaps point to the strangeness of the identification effected in this piece, where a discourse of performance and inauthenticity coexists with a genuinely powerful emphasis on affect (1991: 33). Several critics have attempted to articulate the model of subjectivity in Barnes’s early works, recognising that her dismissal of interiority and deep psychologisation does not necessarily entail a rejection of affect. In Fancy’s Craft, Plumb suggests how the characters in Barnes’s early prose differ from those in the realist and naturalist texts that dominated the American literary scene when she first began to write: ‘Her characters are often types; she combines abstract suggestion with psychological intensity’ (1986: 13).22 While Barnes might be highly sceptical about Freudian notions of depth, she was, as we have seen, still interested in describing the dynamics of emotion.23 Goody has observed that despite the ‘character-typing and deterministic facets’ of some of her early work, the category ‘Naturalist’ is insufficient in describing it (2007: 35): Barnes is certainly closer to Theodore Dreiser than James Joyce in her resistance to deep psychological explanation and emphasis on event, but her avant-garde work is set apart by her stylisation and artifice, the unresolved plot of many of the stories, and the special emphasis on ‘beauty’, ‘cowardice’, ‘sensitivity’ and ‘freedom’ as intensive, affective states. (Goody, 2007: 36)

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It is precisely because Barnes’s oeuvre privileges ‘affective states’ without participating in ‘deep psychological explanation’ that, I suggest, we might turn to more recent theoretical inquiries into the body, emotion and subjectivity to find an affective lexicon for her modernist textual practices. I have described how Djuna Barnes imagines feeling as a bodily experience. In this respect, we might say that Barnes’s work aligns itself with one side of what Sara Ahmed describes as the ‘significant “split” in theories of emotion in terms of whether emotions are tied primarily to bodily sensations or to cognition’ (2004: 5).24 However, it would be a mistake to think that Barnes’s work necessarily reinforces any kind of Cartesian dualism between mind and body: rather feeling relates to the subject in a more complex dynamic of circulation. Rei Terada has discussed how the concept of emotion, while often understood through the trope of expression, actually reinforces the deconstructive position on subjectivity. Identifying a ‘complex of circularity, naturalization, and inversion’ based around the ideology that emotion is ‘something lifted from a depth to a surface’, Terada names the phenomenon of the ‘expressive hypothesis’: The purpose of expression tropes is to extrapolate a human subject circularly from the phenomenon of emotion. The claim that emotion requires a subject – thus we can see we’re subjects, since we have emotions – creates the illusion of subjectivity rather than showing evidence of it. (2001: 11)

While Barnes’s work would seem to challenge the idea that emotion moves ‘from a depth to a surface’, it also suggests that feeling at the surface is what – in a highly relational manner – might define and blur the boundaries of the subject. In this respect, Barnes’s work might profitably be read in the light of work by Ahmed, who refuses to subscribe to either a biological or constructivist position on emotion, critiquing both the ‘inside out’ and ‘outside in’ models associated with psychology and sociology respectively: ‘Both assume the objectivity of the very distinction between inside and outside, the individual and the social, and the “me” and the “we” ’ (2004: 9). Instead, Ahmed suggests that emotions ‘create the very effect of an inside and an outside’; emotions produce the boundaries and surfaces that allow the psychic and the social to be delineated as objects (2004: 10). Yet while Ahmed and Terada have offered theories that complicate our understanding of ‘emotion’, others have sought to emphasise instead a distinction between ‘emotion’ and ‘affect’. Sianne Ngai observes that this distinction originated in the psychoanalytic scenario for ‘the practi-

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cal purpose of distinguishing third-person from first-person representations of feeling, with “affect” designating feeling described from an observer’s (analyst’s) perspective, and “emotion” designating feeling that “belongs” to the speaker or analysand’s “I” ’ (2005: 25). It is not difficult to see how, from such a distinction, we might extrapolate the theory that affect is a form of contact while emotion is subjective and ‘personal’. This theory is nicely summarised by Jonathan Flatley: ‘Where emotion suggests something that happens inside and tends toward outward expression, affect indicates something relational and transformative. One has emotions; one is affected by people or things’ (2008: 12, emphasis in original). While such a view of emotion might be complicated, as we have seen, by the work of Ahmed and Terada, and while I frequently choose to exploit the capaciousness and ambivalence of the word feeling which, as Terada observes, ‘connotes both physiological sensations (affects) and psychological states (emotions)’, certain insights into the particularity of the term ‘affect’ are indispensible for my reading of Barnes’s corpus (2001: 4). Indeed, Massumi has powerfully argued that, while affect is ‘most loosely used as a synonym for emotion’, it should in fact be understood as an ‘intensity’ that follows a different logic from emotion (2002: 27). Emotion is, Massumi claims, ‘the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal’ (2002: 28). While affect is ‘unqualified’ and is not ‘ownable or recognizable’, emotion is, conversely, ‘qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized’ (2002: 28). Massumi’s view echoes Lawrence Grossberg’s distinction that, ‘unlike emotions, affective states are neither structured narratively nor organised in response to our interpretations of situations’ (1992: 81). The term ‘affect’ is valuable because of its emphasis on the body, its less contested independence from subjectivity and cognition, and its association with relational states. Furthermore, as defined by Massumi and Grossberg, ‘affect’ allows me to capture the ways in which Djuna Barnes refuses to organise feeling along narrative or moral lines and the ways in which, in her fiction, feeling functions not as a route to interpretation, but as a radical alternative. But most foundational to the concept of Barnes’s ‘affective modernism’ I develop throughout this book is the notion of affect described in the work of the psychologist Silvan Tomkins and so deftly explored in relation to queer theory by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.25 Many readers who discovered Tomkins’s four-volume Affect, Imagery, Consciousness (1962–92) around the turn of this century, including myself, did so

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through the work of Sedgwick.26 Sedgwick’s turn to Tomkins is partly occasioned because of his elaborate enumeration of specific feelings: his model relies on ‘finitely many’ affects (1992: 108). In Tomkins’s scheme there are a maximum of nine ‘innate’ affects: Surprise-Startle, Anguish-Dread, Anger-Rage, Distress-Anguish, Enjoyment-Joy, FearTerror, Shame-Humiliation and the ‘drive-auxiliaries’ of Dismell and Disgust.27 While these affects, ‘analogous to the elements of a periodic table’, are limited in number, they ‘combine to produce what are normally thought of as emotions, which, like physical substances formed from the elements, are theoretically unlimited in number’ (Sedgwick, 2003: 24, n. 1). Tomkins’s model offers an alternative to some more recent theoretical studies on the affects which, governed by a ‘hypervigilant antiessentialistism and antinaturalism’, offer no consideration of particular affect but rather consider ‘the presence or absence of some reified substance called Affect’ (Sedgwick, 2003: 111).28 Tomkins’s theories are helpful to the reader of Djuna Barnes partly because of the ways in which her oeuvre invites us to dwell on the particularity of feelings: the pains (and unexpected pleasures) attendant to traumatic experience, the ambivalence of shame, the intensity of happiness. While Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism doesn’t simply map Tomkins’s ideas about affect onto Barnes’s fiction, it is informed by his valuable lesson that individual feelings matter and by Sedgwick’s related insight that there must be theoretical room for ‘any difference between being, say, amused, disgusted, ashamed, and enraged’ (2003: 110). So while Shame-Humiliation is (as I shall elaborate in Chapter 3) a paradigmatically ambivalent feeling in Tomkins’s scheme, it is still distinct from Anger-Rage or even Disgust. In her compelling essay on Nightwood, Teresa De Lauretis conceives of the affects in the Freudian schema in which they are subordinate to the drives. De Lauretis sees Nightwood as a ‘sustained meditation on what Freud calls drives’, and understands Robin as bearing an excess of unbound affect, that is affect not bound to an object or to the ego (as narcissism) (2008: 120). In the absence of any psychological explanations for Robin’s behaviour, especially in Nightwood’s bizarre final chapter ‘The Possessed’, ‘the text inscribes in the narrative the figure of sexuality as an undomesticated, unsymbolizable force, not bound to objects and beyond the purview of the ego – a figure of sexuality as, precisely, drive’ (De Lauretis, 2008: 122). But the subordinate role of affect in Freudian psychoanalysis means that it can only figure quantitatively as ‘too much’, ‘not enough’ or ‘just right’; the specific qualities of each affect are lost. Tomkins, however, reverses the psychoanalytical model whereby affects are considered subordinate to the drives: ‘In our view,’ he writes, ‘the primary

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motivational system is the affect system, and the biological drives have motivational impact only when amplified by the affective system’ (2008: I, 4). Tomkins argues that the affect system, not the drive system, ‘is the primary provider for blueprints for cognition, decision, and action’ (2008: I, 13). The affective system is similar to the drive system in that it is ‘activated by invariant stimuli or responses and reduced by invariant stimuli or responses’ but it differs in that any particular affect can be instigated or reduced by ‘numerous invariant’ scenarios or objects (2008: I, 13). One of the most significant aspects of Tomkins’s affect system is this emphasis on the freedom of the object: although certain affects are indeed activated by drives, and so have a limited range of objects, one can, through thinking, ‘enormously extend’ the range of objects of feeling (2008: I, 74). This leads to a uniquely non-determinist appreciation of the affects, a capacious understanding of how flexible and ambivalent feelings can be: ‘There is literally no kind of object which has not been historically been linked to one or another of the affects’ (2008: I, 74). One of the most appealing aspects of Tomkins’s theories for queer projects is, as Sedgwick has emphasised, their nonteleological emphasis. Affects are ‘the basic wants and don’t wants of the human being. They are “ends-in-themselves,” positive and negative. These are primarily aesthetic experiences’ (Tomkins, 2008: I, 12). De Lauretis is just one reader who has noticed the importance of feeling in Barnes’s oeuvre, although, as in this case, the consideration of emotion is generally limited to discussions of Nightwood. Ernst van Alphen (1999) and Victoria L. Smith (1999) have discussed the affective qualities of this novel, with Smith focusing in particular on melancholia. Indeed, a whole host of recent critical works on Nightwood have provided more or less Freudian readings of its inscriptions of melancholia, loss and narcissism.29 Like van Alphen, Carolyn Allen has discussed the affective reading practices associated with Nightwood, constructing a genealogy of post-Barnesian lesbian writing as she discusses texts that focus on ‘affective and sexual exchanges between women lovers’ and in particular enact an erotics of loss (1996: 2). These texts – by Barnes, Bertha Harris, Jeanette Winterson and Rebecca Brown – ‘seduce and inform in re-presenting loss, risk, excess, and retrospective desire’ (Allen, 1996: 2). Allen considers the texts’ dependence on performance by the reader, and emphasises how Nightwood ‘both represents affective intensity in its characters and produces intensity as reading-effect’ (1996: 16). And most recently, AnnKatrin Jonsson has read Nightwood through the lens of phenomenological ethical criticism to argue that the novel subscribes to a

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corporeal ethics that breaks with the view of the self as unitary. What emerges is a body-subject who registers alterity without converting it into a content of consciousness, and a body that is understood as a sensorium, as vulnerability and susceptibility. (2006: 159–60)

This repeated appeal to the significance of bodies, subjects and emotions within particular texts indicates how a consideration of affect in all its impure, contingent and pre-conscious complexity might help us to reassess the major works of Djuna Barnes.

‘Grimly sentimental’: Barnes, emotion and modernist rupture Remarking upon Nightwood’s ‘unbridled emotionality’, Caselli suggests that the novel’s queerness relates in part to ‘its skirting a little too close for comfort to what is possibly the biggest of Modernist no-nos: sentimentality’ (2009: 183, 175). By naming the sentimental, Caselli introduces the discursive context in which modernist engagements with such terms as ‘loss, risk, excess, and retrospective desire’ must be read. By discussing ‘the sentimental’, as opposed to ‘affect’, we are forced to confront a historically specific, maligned, feminised and supposedly anti-modern discourse. In a letter to Coleman, dated 28 December 1942, Barnes reflects upon her work’s imbrications with the sentimental, and suggests a belief that this maligned discourse is never quite as far away as one might like: I started out grimly sentimental – which is silly. Now I would wish nothing better than to write logically & without emotion. Quite impossible for me, of course. I even find in Shakespeare too great a sweetness. I know of no writer as mean as I would be! Proust, amid his icicles, drips sentimentality [. . .] to be impersonal one has also to be emotional – one should not be kicked too much, not too much beaten – or the very body that would revolt finally lies still.30

While sentimentality may be problematic for Barnes, it is in fact unavoidable if the body of her text is to ‘revolt’: her ‘mean’ and ‘impersonal’ modernist rebellion requires that the body can still move and be moved. One of the tasks of Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism will be to consider how the focus on feeling bodies associated with the American popular fiction of the nineteenth century is read and reworked by Barnes. ‘In the wake of Andreas Huyssen’s After the Great Divide,’ writes Tim Armstrong, ‘it is often suggested that modernism is founded on the confluence of two associated hate objects: women, and the sentimental mass

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culture they are said to passively consume’ (2005: 41–2). While the role of female writers within modernism has been secured by a generation of feminist critics, I want to consider how Barnes’s work relates to a culture frequently dismissed not only by the moderns but often by their critics too. In Chapter 2 I discuss Barnes’s modernist reworking of sentimental tableaux in Ryder, and in Chapter 4 I consider how she uses the feminised metaphors of consumption and the discourses of fashion and commodity culture not only to think about happiness but also to suggest a new theory of modernist reading practices. Chapter 3, however, considers the production of shame (in all of its Tomkinsian complexity) in relation to Barnes’s recuperation of values and tropes associated with the sentimental. Modernist attitudes towards emotion often take the form of a continuing attempt to avoid association with sentimentality and romanticism. And while male modernists did not jettison the body entirely from their poetics, they attempted to ensure that the bodies in question were quite different from the apparently female, passive, emotional bodies of the sentimental novel. Harold Segel argues for a ‘modernist preoccupation with physicality’, yet this preoccupation relates to a specifically gendered body (1998: 1): The weakness of the rational compared to the irrational, the weakness of the mind compared to the body, the weakness of the traditional compared with the revolutionary, was ‘feminine.’ By stripping literary language of the ornamentation of syntax, by ridding it of the flab of adjectives and other emasculating parts of speech, language could be made virile, the right tool in the right hands. (1998: 2)31

Ezra Pound’s literary criticism exhibits this interest in the traits of the stereotypically male body – hardness, strength, virility – at the expense of the ‘flab’, softness and weakness of female physicality. The physical attributes are then transferred to the textual body. Writing in 1912, for example, Pound confidently predicts that twentieth-century poetry will be ‘harder and saner [. . .] as much like granite as it can be’: ‘We will have fewer painted adjectives impeding the shock of it. At least for myself, I want it so, austere, direct, free from emotional slither’ (Literary Essays, 1954: 12). And T. E. Hulme uses a similar language when he predicts a turn away from what he sees as an unduly celebrated romanticism to a new classicism, a ‘period of dry, hard, classical verse’ that has ‘nothing to do with infinity, with mystery or with emotions’ (1936: 133). Pound, however, distinguishes between a form of ‘emotion’ that is acceptable, desirable even, and an unacceptable, conservative, feminine and residual quality understood as ‘the emotional’. In ‘The Serious Artist’

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(1913), Pound writes that it is the good poet’s aim to ‘communicate an idea and its concomitant emotions, or an emotion and its concomitant ideas, or a sensation and its derivative emotions, or an impression that is emotive’ (Literary Essays, 1954: 51). Yet, in the same essay, Pound clarifies exactly what the nature of such emotions might be: It is true that most people poetize more or less, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three. The emotions are new, and, to their possessor, interesting, and there is not much mind or personality to be moved. As the man, in his mind, becomes a heavier and heavier machine, a constantly more complicated structure, it requires a constantly greater voltage of emotional energy to set it in harmonious motion. It is certain that the emotions increase in vigour as a vigorous man matures. [. . .] Most important poetry has been written by men over thirty. (1954: 52)

Here Pound differentiates between an emotional, self-involved, effeminate (or at least insufficiently masculine) youth and the ‘vigorous’ emotions that accompany manly maturity. And, despite the metaphors of male vigour, the body is repudiated as it is invoked by Pound, as this most favoured and poetic form of emotion is understood to reside in the machine-like masculine ‘mind’. In a similar vein, Eliot’s criticism retains emotion as a value only on the basis that it is controlled in relation to quantity and kind. Indeed, Eliot’s ‘objective correlative’ and the emphasis on finding external evidence and verbal formulae when representing emotion can be seen as a means of getting past the ‘intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an object or exceeding its object’ which is most appropriate as ‘a subject of study for pathologists’ (Eliot, 1975: 48). The artist, Eliot claims, does not relinquish these feelings but rather finds an external reality to justify them: he ‘keeps them alive by his ability to intensify the world to his emotions’ (1975: 48). In other words, Eliot wants to preserve feeling – and ‘intense feeling’ at that – while avoiding undesirable connotations of excess, irrationality, hysteria and sentimentality. For the moderns, then, the question of feeling is often tied up with an idea of the past and its excesses: the modernist unease about emotion speaks also of a restlessness with the apparently commercial, feminised values of the Victorian age and a desire to ‘make it new’. Thus Pound, writing in 1912, looks back on the nineteenth century with distaste, condemning it as ‘a rather blurry, messy sort of a period, a rather sentimentalistic, mannerish sort of a period’ (1954: 11). And in 1914 Wyndham Lewis calls on his peers to ‘BLAST years 1837 to 1900’, characterising the years of Victoria’s reign and its associated discourses of sentimentalism and romanticism as bourgeois, moralistic and effeminate:

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‘BLAST their weeping whiskers—hirsute RHETORIC of EUNUCH and STYLIST—SENTIMENTAL HYGIENICS ROUSSEAUISMS (wild Nature cranks) FRATERNIZING WITH MONKEYS DIABOLICS— raptures and roses of the erotic bookshelves’ (1914: 18). The understanding of modernism as a radical break or rupture with the immediate past was promulgated by the moderns themselves and has remained a popular means of defining the movement/period. Besides Pound’s truly famous call to ‘make it new’, other mottos of radical novelty have entered popular consciousness, including Virginia Woolf’s ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’ (1966–7: I, 320), and Willa Cather’s ‘the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts’ (1936: v).32 Michael Levenson has referred to ‘the strength of the modernist urge towards dualistic opposition and radical polarities. “Good” and “evil” may disappear from the modernist vocabulary, but the Manichean habit remains’ (1984: ix). Levenson argues that the effect of dualism in modernist rhetoric is to ‘suggest a thorough historical discontinuity’: Victorian poetry has been soft; modern poetry will be hard (Pound’s terms). Humanist art has been vital; the coming geometric art will be inorganic (Hulme’s terms). Romanticism was immature; the new classicism will be adult (Eliot’s terms). ‘We have got clean out of history,’ wrote Lewis. ‘We are not to-day living in history.’ (1984: ix)

While Levenson challenges this modernist self-construction of ‘historical discontinuity’, many early critics reinforced such notions of modernismas-rupture. Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, for example, refer to the modern tradition as ‘a paradoxically untraditional tradition. Modernism strongly implies some sort of historical discontinuity, either a liberation from inherited patterns or, at another extreme, deprivation and disinheritance’ (1965: vi).33 This understanding of modernism has remained commonplace and continues to guide studies of the period: ‘The modern’, as Leo Bersani writes, ‘retains an incomparable aura: that of being spiritually stranded, uniquely special in its radical break with traditional values and modes of consciousness’ (1990: 47–8). Many scholars of modernism have, however, sought to ‘establish the continuity of a movement which repeatedly announced a clean break with the immediate past’ (Levenson, 1984: ix–x). In their respective 1957 studies, Frank Kermode and Robert Langbaum were among the first critics to suggest the indebtedness of the modernists to the poetics of Romanticism, and numerous recent studies have helped provide an increasingly nuanced picture of the manifold connections between nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors and realist and modern-

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ist textualities.34 Many of these studies have also been involved in the project to challenge the notion that sensuality and sensibility were totally or largely eradicated in modernist literature. Feldman includes ‘sentimentality’ in list of ‘very Victorian qualities’ that have, ‘like Poe’s purloined letter, been hidden for all to see on the very surfaces of Modernist works’ (2002: 5–6). Susan Edmunds, who includes a reading of Barnes’s Ryder in her study of the influence of the US Welfare State on modernist fiction, has recently argued that ‘the cultural legacy of sentimental domesticity was not rejected, killed off, or supplanted in this period. Instead, it was rearticulated’ (2008: 10).35 The question of sentimentality’s survival within modernist discourse is drawn up along gendered lines by Suzanne Clark, who contrasts female modernists’ continuation of the sentimental project with canonical male modernists’ denial of its ‘richness and complexity’ (1991: 1). Clark includes Djuna Barnes in a catalogue of female modernists – including figures as diverse as Marianne Moore, H. D., Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy and Kay Boyle – who ‘called upon traditions established by women, the appeal to feeling, their loyalties to the “new woman,” their desire for progress, their allegiance to maternal and comforting forms, but they also participated in the revolution of the word’ (1991: 38). While Clark’s study represents an important reconsideration of the connections between modernism and sentimentalism, and her focus on gender is apposite, her picture of Barnes’s modernism does not quite ring true. For while ‘feeling’ in its most capacious sense is crucial to my reading of Barnes’s work, her writing is queerly opposed to the inherent value of ‘progress’ and the ‘maternal and comforting’. The sentimental tradition indeed assumes a number of priorities that Barnes’s work vigorously challenges: morality, family values, the ‘individual’. While Barnes’s work refuses to follow high modernist orthodoxy in denigrating and repudiating nineteenthcentury popular forms, it equally refuses the comfortable relationship suggested by critics such as Clark. My brief survey of the connections that have been established between modernism and feeling indeed supports Nieland’s astute observation that this relationship is often understood as either a flat rejection of emotion as conventionally understood and expressed, one that takes the form of an inhuman antagonism to sentimentality and rhetoric, or as some late and lamentable revival of romanticism, one of modernism’s many forms of spilled religion. (2008: 1)

Nieland’s work avoids this rather narrow dichotomy through the notion of an exploration of ‘publicness’, a term he uses to ‘describe a range of

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modernism’s encounters with public life in the early twentieth century and to recover their experiental, embodied, and affective dimensions’ (2008: 1). While, like Nieland, I want to think about the ways in which feeling manifests itself in Barnes’s work besides sentimentality, I also want to take into account her specific relationship with the sentimental tradition, a relationship which is in fact neither antagonistic nor enacted in the spirit of ‘revival’. Barnes neither denies nor simply celebrates the ‘richness and complexity’ of the sentimental conventions; rather, her modernist reading of the sentimental produces this ‘richness and complexity’. And Barnes’s relationship with sentimental tradition is, furthermore, synecdochical for her relationship with all literary ‘history’. Djuna Barnes’s work therefore helps us to appreciate the ways in which modernism might be neither a continuation nor a repudiation of the recent past and its potentially embarrassing sentimental attachments. Indeed, several critics have opened up space for a critique of this dichotomy by allowing us to question the terms of modernism’s supposed orientation towards novelty, futurity and originality. Stan Smith has discussed the tensions between ‘origins’ and ‘originality’, arguing that all literary movements create their origins in the present. To be original, Smith claims, is actually to reproduce, and modernism’s originality ‘lies in making the transformative act of translation, adaptation, repetition its real content’ (1994: 6). Equally, Gabrielle MacIntire considers modernism’s looking to the past as ‘both a return and a departure’ (2008: 5). MacIntire writes that Eliot and Woolf ‘disclose a passionate cathection to the past’s abiding presence in part by affirming the past’s profound temporal and spatial proximity – and even contiguity – with the present’ (2008: 5). And Heather Love’s Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (2007) indeed connects the complex temporal mood of modernism with an affective attitude. Love explores the connections between queer melancholia and marginal, backwards-looking texts of modernism by Walter Pater, Willa Cather, Radclyffe Hall and Sylvia Townsend Warner.36 Such a backwardness is, for Love, actually bound up with ideas about the advances of modernity: ‘The association of progress and regress is a function not only of the failure of so many of modernity’s key projects but also of the reliance of the concept of modernity on excluded, denigrated, or superseded others’ (2007: 5). Love’s queer moderns therefore highlight an internal ambivalence in modernism – its dual concerns with old and new: ‘Even when modernist authors are making it new, they are inevitably grappling with the old: backwardness is a feature of even the most forward-looking modernist literature’ (2007: 6). Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism joins

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Feeling Backward in considering what we might learn about modernist textuality and temporality through thinking about affect. Like the authors in Love’s study, Djuna Barnes helps to expose the tensions within some of modernism’s key narratives about itself. Barnes’s looking backwards is, importantly, a simultaneous act of creation in the present: the queerness of history and the queerness of modernity are experienced in the same act, an act that may produce both pain and pleasure. And in order to imagine the dynamic way in which Djuna Barnes’s affective modernism performs and creates the past we may, I want to suggest, find an analogy in the structure of the trauma response.

Traumatic modernism? The anachronistic literary styles performed by Barnes are one of her work’s most striking features. Eliot observed Nightwood’s ‘quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy’, although his description might better fit The Antiphon, which participates in early modern conventions of both a dramatic and linguistic nature (Nightwood, xiv). Readers of Ladies Almanack have noticed its pseudo-Elizabethan language and its debts to chapbooks, almanacs and the eighteenth-century comedy of manners. In the case of Ryder, the most resonant intertexts have been identified as the King James Bible and works by Chaucer, Rabelais, Sterne, Fielding and writers in the sentimental tradition. As I have suggested, the influence of the sentimental in Barnes’s work, along with the gothic overtones that may be found in Nightwood and the early poetry, is of particular importance to Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism: both genres were maligned within modernist discourse and considered to display/produce an excess of affect.37 When T. S. Eliot emphasised the importance of a ‘historical sense’ which involves ‘a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence’ he imagined a modernist writer aware of both his own generation and the ‘simultaneous existence’ of the whole of literature ‘of Europe from Homer’ (1975: 38). One can say with some certainty, however, that this literary ‘past’ did not include the work of authors such as Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe or Caroline Lee Hentz. Barnes’s own historical ‘witnessing’ includes a repetition of such texts from the recent past that fall outside Eliot’s European, Homeric classical order. Barnes’s oeuvre suggests a more inclusive version of the ‘history’ that informed modernism as it invites us to further consider the relationship between past and present. Theories of traumatic witnessing not only provide insight into the mobile nature of

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affect in Barnes’s work: they also offer a suggestive metaphorics for her modernist textuality. The pairing of trauma and modernity is hardly novel. In fact, E. Ann Kaplan notes that trauma is often imagined as ‘inherently linked to modernity’, which is ‘seen to produce basic twentieth-century experiences, such as the catastrophic event and global cross-cultural conflict’ (2005: 24). And, as Ann Cvetkovich points out, because the origins of the current psychic meaning of trauma lie in the nineteenth-century notion of ‘railway shock’, trauma and modernity are, to an extent, mutually constitutive categories (2003: 17). Modernism is commonly understood as the artistic response to the trauma of modernity; a response to the ‘shock effect’ of the ‘metropolitan masses’, the swarming crowds of the new centres of capitalism; or a response to the horrors (and new psychiatric diagnoses) of the Great War (Benjamin, 1992: 160, 161).38 Published as early as 1881, George M. Beard’s American Nervousness, Its Causes and Consequences reflected on the trauma of modern life, suggesting that modernity brings about widespread neurasthenia through its shocks and stresses, from the speed of trains and the noise of the city to the excitements of the popular press and ‘the education of women’ (Armstrong, 2005: 92). Such notions of a traumatic modernity and a traumatised modern subject have guided a number of recent approaches to modernism. In Death, Men, and Modernism, for example, Ariela Freedman considers ‘the quintessentially modern figure of the young dead man’, and sees a response to the war in ‘a new emphasis on witnessing’ she finds in modernist literature (2003: 3, 6). In The Persistence of Modernism, Madelyn Detloff understands modernism as a ‘constellation of discourses about wide-spread loss and violence’ (2009: 4). Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick’s Modernist Women Writers and War considers Djuna Barnes alongside H. D. and Gertrude Stein as writers who offer ‘female civilian points of view’ on war, countering ‘patriarchal or traditional’ narratives to cast war as ‘destructive, perverse, traumatic, and quotidian’ (2011: 1). Goodspeed-Chadwick understands Nightwood as ‘a gendered response to trauma, namely the trauma induced by World War I and contextualised by the identity politics in the years between the two world wars’ and attempts to trace the source of Robin’s trauma, diagnosing her as exhibiting symptoms of ‘shell shock, war-related trauma, and hysteria’ (2011: 31, 52). And in his consideration of ‘late’ modernism, Miller argues for the continuing significance of Theodor Adorno’s ‘diagnosis of a kind of collective shell shock, or more generally, a pervasive neurasthenia in the face of a runaway modernity’ (1999: 42). A more unusual connection between trauma and modernism is made by Walter Kalaidjian in The

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Edge of Modernism, who uses Barnes as an example as he seeks to demonstrate how the ‘formal resources of the poet’s craft’ – including figurative language, catachresis, aposiopesis and anacoluthon – ‘together form a salutary medium for staging traumatic histories in ways that resist the banal spectacle of the image world otherwise governing contemporary consumer society’ (2006: 11).39 And Maren Tova Linnet’s Modernism, Feminism, and Jewishness also considers Barnes as it connects personal trauma to the large-scale traumas of the twentieth century. Linnet argues that in Nightwood Jewishness ‘comes to signal the timelessness attendant on psychological trauma’, specifically the trauma of incest (2007: 140). Perhaps the most repeated connection between cultural trauma and modernist aesthetics is the narrative that modernist writers were attempting to provide order after traumatic crisis. In this account, modernism’s origins are located in the ‘crisis of belief that pervades twentieth-century Western culture: loss of faith, experience of fragmentation and disintegration, and shattering of cultural symbols and norms’ (Friedman, 1991: 97). ‘Art produced after the First World War’, Susan Stanford Friedman summarises, ‘recorded the emotional aspect of this crisis; despair, hopelessness, paralysis, angst, and a sense of meaninglessness’ (1991: 97). The modernists, however, emerged from ‘the paralysis of absolute despair’ to search for and indeed to produce the ‘order and pattern’ absent from culture itself (Friedman, 1991: 97). However, rather than tracing Barnes’s work as either a corrective response or a careful diagnosis of the traumatic experiences that shaped modernity, I want to propose a structural connection between trauma and the modernist relationship with literary history. In recent years the understanding of trauma has been opened up to include not only catastrophes such as war, genocide and wide-scale displacement, but also personal traumas, including sexual traumas and the ‘everyday’ traumas of queer life.40 Post-traumatic stress disorder was first recognised in the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-III), but the definition of PTSD in the fourth edition (DSM-IV) was expanded to include ‘developmentally inappropriate sexual experiences without threatened or actual violence or injury’ (1994: 783). Laura S. Brown’s ‘Not Outside the Range’, originally published in 1991, was influential in challenging the DSM definition of PTSD, in particular the claim that the traumatised person must have ‘experienced an event that is outside the range of human experience’ (DSM III-R, cited in Brown, 1995: 100). While critical appreciation of the salience of trauma theory has led Cathy Caruth to note that traumatic possession by the past ‘extends beyond

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the bounds of a marginal pathology and has become a central characteristic of the survivor experience of our time’, it has caused alarm for some (Trauma, 1995: 151). The critiques of ‘trauma culture’ by Wendy Brown and Mark Seltzer are discussed further in Chapter 1, which also includes a discussion of some of the potential problems that attend specifically to speaking out as a survivor of sexual abuse. Concerns about the danger of extending the definition of trauma have been strongly voiced in the work of Dominick LaCapra and Ruth Leys. Leys suggests that the concept of trauma becomes ‘debased currency’ when applied to both ‘truly horrible events’ and those that might appear less so (2000: 2). And LaCapra claims that trauma has become, at times, ‘an obsession or an occasion for rash amalgamations or conflations (for example, the idea that contemporary culture, or even all history, is essentially traumatic or that everyone in the post-Holocaust context is a survivor)’ (2001: x). Kaplan, on the other hand, points to Julia Kristeva’s connection between military/political trauma and personal trauma in Black Sun, and suggests that this connection is important precisely because ‘there are some who want to reserve the concept of trauma only for large public events, like the Holocaust’ (2005: 5). Although Kaplan’s book is intimately related to 9/11 (her introduction details her own experience of this catastrophe) her main focus is on ‘ “family” trauma, that is traumas of loss, abandonment, rejection, betrayal. These traumas, similar to what T. M. Luhrman has called “quiet traumas” [. . .], or what Deidre Barrett calls “common traumas” [. . .], warrant study’ (2005: 19). Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism readily accepts the value of ‘personal’, ‘family’, ‘common’ or ‘quiet’ traumas as objects of study. In his desire to set limits on the usage of the term ‘trauma’, particularly through his distinction between ‘structural’ and ‘historical’ trauma, LaCapra in fact reminds us of its capacious possibilities. For LaCapra, structural trauma ‘appears in different ways in all societies and all lives’ and may be ‘evoked or addressed in various fashions – in terms of the separation from the (m)other, the passage from nature to culture, the eruption of the pre-oedipal or presymbolic, the entry into language [. . .]’ (2001: 77). Historical trauma, however, ‘is specific, and not everyone is subject to it or entitled to the subject position associated with it’ (2001: 78). LaCapra’s anxiety in distinguishing between the two kinds of trauma is motivated by the belief that, in cases such as the Holocaust or Hiroshima, ‘the distinction between victims, perpetrators, and bystanders is crucial’ (2001: 79). In what follows – particularly Chapters 1 and 2 – I engage with recent work on trauma that fruitfully blurs such boundaries in an attempt to capture the complexities of personal trauma. Indeed, while I do not focus on those traumas LaCapra

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reserves as historical losses, I understand the trauma response to involve paradigmatically the kind of ambivalences he finds, in some cases, so problematic. As understood by Caruth, even the pathology of PTSD cannot be defined by the event itself – which may or may not be catastrophic, and may not traumatize everyone equally – nor can it be defined in terms of a distortion of the event, achieving its haunting power as a result of distorting personal significances attached to it. The pathology consists, rather, solely in the structure of its experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. (Trauma, 1995: 4, second emphasis mine)

In focusing on this structure of experience or reception – Barnes’s belated assimilation of memories, experiences and earlier textual forms – Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism could perhaps be accused of ignoring the specific pains of trauma and domesticising its affective force. Indeed, I hope to show how the trauma response may, at a structural level, be a useful conceptual tool for describing the temporal dynamics of a whole spectrum of affective relationships, including happiness. However, such an approach can help us to imagine some of the ways in which the trauma response might be wrestled from pathologising impulses. And it is an approach that seems especially appropriate in light of Barnes’s rejection of factual certainties and ‘history’ in any reified sense as she favours a more ambivalent and contingent focus on surface affects. Indeed, Barnes herself pre-empts the contemporary expansion of the term ‘trauma’ in ‘The Perfect Murder’ (1942), a short story about the murder of a British woman by Professor Anatol Profax, a dialectologist. Both characters are typical of Barnes’s shorter fiction: he is somewhat repressed and lonely; she mysterious, attractive and possibly dangerous. Significantly, the woman tells Profax that ‘I just died [. . .] but I came back, I always do’; ‘I’m devoted to coming back, it’s so agonizing’; and ‘people are wicked because they do not know that I am a Trauma’ (Collected Stories, 440, 441). The story suggests Barnes’s interest in the structure of trauma as return and, significantly, suggests her belief that the structure might prevail in other narrative scenarios. Profax murders the woman and, when he looks again in the trunk in which he has hidden her body, finds that she has disappeared. But as promised, the woman returns and Profax sees her in a cab alongside his: ‘She too was leaning her face against the glass of the window, only her face was pressed against it as she had pressed it against the confectioner’s! Her hair fell across her mouth, that great blasphemous mouth which smiled’ (Collected Stories, 445). Barnes here incorporates ideas of non-identical

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repetition, as the woman’s traumatic return is a re-staging of the scene in which the two characters first met. Interestingly, the experience is not necessarily or exclusively painful for the woman, whose smile is suggestive of Barnes’s ongoing attempt to capture affective ambivalence within traumatic scenarios. Equally, the trauma structure is connected not only to the woman but also to Profax, whose research on sound, the ‘Holy Grail of the Past [that] has eluded him’, represents a form of creative looking back (Collected Stories, 439). In this sense, Barnes does not dichotomise her perpetrator and her victim, but rather blurs her subjects through the very notion of trauma. Understood in this manner, the traumatic emerges as a productive structure for reading the repetitions that occur within Barnes’s oeuvre, including her performative reiteration of different historical modes. Barnes’s relationship to the literary styles she recuperates cannot simply be understood as simply a form of ‘nostalgia for man’s heritage’, as the early Barnes critic James Scott imagines as he groups Barnes with Joyce and Eliot (1976: 17). Barnes’s work does not suggest a longing for the past, but the idea of a past created within the present and witnessed as if for the first time. As Julie L. Abraham notes, Barnes’s understanding of history has ‘little relation to the conventional distinctions between past and present’ (1991: 253). This sense of history is reflected in both Barnes’s literary style and her representations of feeling. The traumatic structure of belated understanding allows for the notion that the past is created through its narration, thus troubling the distinction between originality and repetition. Trauma’s insistent re-enactments do not just function as testimony to an event but ‘may also, paradoxically enough, bear witness to a past that was never fully experienced as it occurred’ (Caruth, 1995: 151). Barnes’s traumatic modernism does not expose the past as ‘impure’ or ‘potentially fake’ but rather creates it anew through the act of witnessing (Caselli, 2009: 3): the ‘Parcels of lost Perfection’ I consider in Ladies Almanack can, perversely, only be ‘found’ by being ‘read’ or performed (2009: 5). Indeed, in discussing the ‘reparative’ impulse of Barnes’s work (see Chapter 2), I follow Eve Sedgwick in imagining modes of reading that avoid the paranoid drive to expose. Barnes’s witnessing constitutes a generous and generative remembering that can produce both pleasure and pain, and through which the full complexity of bodies (textual and corporeal) can be retrospectively understood. And such performativity, of course, means that her work will always tell us more about the process of remembering than the past itself.41 The notion that traumatic memory is ‘not simply referenced but activated or staged’ is explored in depth in Chapter 1, where I consider the

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ways in which Barnes’s emphasis on ritualised performance allows her to capture the full ambivalence of traumatic experience (Bennett, 2005: 24). In this chapter, which considers Barnes’s late play The Antiphon (1958), the work in which Barnes most directly engages with the question of trauma and sexual abuse, I focus on the question of witnessing. The work of Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (1991) points to how testimony is an event that seeks but may not find a witness: as Cvetkovich summarises, they present testimony as ‘an interactive occasion in which the relation between speaker and hearer is crucial to the narrative, which becomes performative rather than constative’ (2003: 28). The emergence of the trauma narrative, as it is listened to and heard, is ‘the process and the place wherein the cognizance, the “knowing” of the event is given birth to. The listener, therefore, is a party to the creation of knowledge de novo’ (Felman and Laub, 1991: 57, italics in original). I consider Barnes’s representation of this process in The Antiphon, arguing that Barnes herself acts as a witness of literary history, creating anew the Jacobethan revenge tragedy through performance. Chapter 2 further explores the non-dichotomous difference that underwrites the trauma structure in considering how, in Ryder, Barnes re-reads the sentimental novel as she attempts to capture the complexities of childhood trauma. In this sense, notions of traumatic witnessing and modernist witnessing collide: the recent literary past, like a trauma, can only be fully understood through its performative reiteration, which is also a creative act. Through Barnes’s ‘witnessing’ of the sentimental tradition, its queer potential becomes apparent. This chapter also includes a discussion of Ryder’s affective ambivalence and dwells on the inscriptions of pleasure within the novel’s scenes of pain. In this sense, it tentatively begins to challenge the affective associations of the trauma response. My reading of Nightwood in Chapter 3 focuses not on loss, melancholia and narcissism – affective dynamics that have taken centre stage in many of the compelling feminist and queer accounts of the text’s central lesbian relationship – but on Barnes’s less well-explored treatment of shame. Shame is the ambivalent feeling that allows me to move my exploration of negative affect forward. As a trauma that requires initial positive investment, shame encourages my expansion of the paradigm of performative repetition taken from trauma theory to incorporate pleasure and interest into my reading of Barnes’s oeuvre. I also consider the pleasurable shame of Barnes’s modernist performance of disavowed literary forms associated with feeling bodies (sentimental, romantic and gothic novels) and as witnessed by her editor, T. S. Eliot. Recent work on the affects has suggested the potential proximities of

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pleasure and pain and the role of positive affects within traumatic states and scenarios. While my studies of Ryder and Nightwood contribute to this body of work, in Chapter 4 I challenge the apparent orthodoxy that good feelings must always arise in relation to bad ones, and that what we read as pleasures are in fact translations of pain. In my reading of Ladies Almanack I suggest that Barnes’s treatment of happiness, while bearing comparison with the structure of the trauma response (in terms of its temporal dimensions), does not rely on a primary (or indeed secondary) consideration of negative affect. Instead, I see the Almanack as a radical celebration of joy and the pleasures of modernist textuality. The structure of non-dichotomous difference exceeds the traumatic here, providing a means of characterising Barnes’s performance of the past in the present without any negative affective signature. Indeed, in this final chapter I want to emphasise ‘non-dichotomous difference’ at the expense of ‘trauma’. I consider questions of novelty, repetition and affect in relation to Winnicott’s (1975) notion of the transitional object – a theory I contrast with Freud’s rather negative understanding of pleasure in Beyond the Pleasure Principle – and through the logic of vintage fashion and the almanac genre: conceptual frameworks which share a particular epistemological and temporal structure with the trauma response but have no affective similarities whatsoever. The non-chronological structure of Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism allows me to challenge the fitness of a metaphorics of trauma to describe Barnes’s modernism: I end by eschewing a focus on traumatic experience to focus on the ultimately detachable concepts of retrospective comprehension and non-dichotomous difference. While the work of Djuna Barnes can teach us about how and why we might ‘keep the wound open’, it also offers significant forms of delight. Such delight is no less interesting or complex than the negative affects of trauma, pain or shame, but is a constituent part of Barnes’s affective modernism. As is the case with all bodies, the affects that produce and are produced by Djuna Barnes’s literary corpus are various, contingent and unpredictable. Yet allowing ourselves to be touched by her extraordinary oeuvre might, I think, help us to appreciate some of the significant complexities of modernist textuality.

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Chapter 1

‘The Excellent Arrangement of Catastrophe’: Witnessing and Performance in The Antiphon

The eye-baby now you’re pregnant with You’ll carry in your iris to the grave. (Selected Works, 185)1

This arresting image of traumatic memory is voiced by ‘Jack Blow, Coachman’, the estranged son- and brother-in-disguise in The Antiphon (1958), Djuna Barnes’s three-act verse tragedy about the sinister reunion of the Hobbs family. Jack acts part court-jester, part advocate, as he restages the childhood abuses suffered in an unorthodox, polygynous and probably incestuous family home not unlike the one depicted in Ryder and in the author’s own biographies. Jack’s lines are addressed to his mother, Augusta, and come shortly after his meta-fictional reenactment of his sister Miranda’s abuse through the means of ‘Hobb’s Ark, beast-box, doll’s house’, ‘The House That Jack Built’ – a miniature house complete with doll-sized family members (Selected Works, 181). The image of the ‘eye-baby’ is suggestive of the idea that trauma is brought into the world through witnessing: its birth is, perversely, contingent on its being seen for the first time. Jack’s notion of Augusta’s perpetual pregnancy as she carries the image until death also conveys the ceaselessness of the traumatic memory as it is repeated. And significantly, these lines suggest the contagiousness of trauma: Augusta witnesses a testimony of her daughter’s trauma, but such witnessing blurs the boundaries between subjects, and Augusta too takes on the characteristics of the trauma-survivor. Traumatic testimony is thus portrayed as a complicated and complicating activity, producing semblances between victims and witnesses while indeed requiring the combined presence of these distinct subjects. If Jack’s image of the ‘eye-baby’ captures the performative structure of trauma – to witness it is to create it – then the doll’s house allows us to dwell on the question of trauma as performance in a more spe-

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cifically theatrical manner. In this scene Barnes implies the staginess of producing traumatic testimony, and so creates a parallel between the theatrical audience (or reader) and the witness. I have suggested that Barnes’s ‘ideal’ reader is an ‘initiated’ reader who might serve as witness and co-producer of her testimony. And this initiated reading, a readingas-witnessing, characterises equally Barnes’s relationship with literary history. This chapter expands on these insights through the concept of ‘antiphony’, a term that encompasses notions of testimony and witnessing as a stylised, theatrical, affectively complex performance. Antiphony names, among other things, a strategy that enables Barnes to dramatise the testimony of sexual trauma without reifying victimhood or producing a simplified moralistic narrative. Barnes’s antiphony captures the ambivalence and uncertainty of traumatic memory and affirms the importance of the witnessing-position in the production of testimony. In its most general sense, ‘antiphony’ is simply a response or answer. But more specific definitions of ‘antiphon’ relate to ritualised, religious music, including the call and response between two choirs. Barnes in fact glosses the word on 18 March 1958 for a confused Peggy Guggenheim: ‘You ask what the word ANTIPHON means. The Oxford Dictionary: Antiphon, n. Versicle, sentence, sung by one choir in response to another; prose or verse composition consisting of such passages—’. Defined in this way as a collective and conventional performance, antiphony has clear parallels with Barnes’s own representations of affect, which challenge the idea that testimony must take the form of a clear, individualised, realistic narrative. In what follows, the concept of antiphony will be further illuminated by the work of anthropologist C. Nadia Seremetakis, who has studied the antiphonic reciprocity between women in Greek mourning rituals, specifically in the Inner Maniat community. Close examination of the meanings and practices attached to antiphony contribute to an appreciation of the witness’s role in producing meaning. Furthermore, as a formal and stylised performance of pain, antiphony offers an alternative to traditional autobiographical confession and expressive models of emotion. Performative subject positions, theatrical and stylised ritual, affective complexity, narrative ambiguity and a structure of witnessing: such attributes characterise Barnes’s sophisticated treatment of family trauma, but they also offer a way of describing the challenging modernism of The Antiphon more broadly. The complexities of traumatic experience and the structure of antiphony allow us to consider the perverse anachronism and allusiveness of this late play, as Djuna Barnes’s literary repetitions and re-stagings dramatise the role of the reader as witness. Equally, this chapter will show that attention to such

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‘antiphonal’ textual strategies allow us to modify our understandings of the play’s textual history. Critics have tended to read the play’s long revision process as a form of limiting censorship at the hands of Eliot and Muir, and have understood the purpose of textual criticism as one of restoration and clarification. However, Barnes’s engagement with the performativity of the trauma response allows one to question this logic of authenticity, or rather relocates authenticity to surface performance rather than the faithful expression of an originary event. Equally, Barnes encourages us to experience – rather than to resolve – affective and narrative ambivalence. Such ambivalence is, alongside an increased emphasis on performance and theatricality, a powerful and enabling product of the play’s revisions. In her last major work and her fullest engagement with the horrors of family trauma, the affective and structural characteristics of the trauma response become a pervasive feature of Djuna Barnes’s late modernist textual practices.

Beyond victimhood: Trauma testified (and redrafted) The dramatis personae of The Antiphon comprises an assembly of wounded figures, brought together by ‘Jack’ (whose real name is Jeremy) for revenge and reckoning at Burley Hall, the ruined ancestral home of Augusta, and a former college of chantry priests, situated in the fictional English town of Beewick.2 The physical origins of the concept of trauma as wound are evoked in the first line of the play, when Miranda remarks ‘Here’s a rip in nature’ (Selected Works, 82). It emerges that Miranda, now middle-aged, has been abused by her father, Titus, and raped by ‘a travelling cockney thrice [her] age’ at Titus’s arrangement and with Augusta’s acquiescence (Selected Works, 186). Augusta has been repeatedly wounded by her late husband’s dalliances, and is angry not only with Titus, but also with his deceased mother, Victoria, and, less reasonably, with Miranda too. The other Hobbs sons, Elisha and Dudley, are unsympathetic characters who function in the play as a critique of capitalist excess and philistinism: they have also been abused by Titus but harbour equal resentments towards both Augusta and Miranda. The collective witnessing of the past takes place in front of Jonathan, Augusta’s uncle, a genteel and apparently kindly old man who still lives in Burley Hall and who is the only character to remain outside this wounded or wounding circle. When Elisha attacks Miranda as ‘The damned and dedicated “victim”. Just another / Self-appointed increment!’ he seems to invoke a debased version of the logic used in the contemporary critique of ‘wound culture’

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(Selected Works, 176). Mark Seltzer has referred to this phenomenon, which originated, he claims, at the beginning of the twentieth century, as the ‘culture of the atrocity exhibition, in which people wear their damage like badges of identity, or fashion accessories’ (1998: 2). While Elisha and Dudley’s criticism of Miranda is not endorsed by the play as a whole – and their attack may in fact be read as a secondary wounding by failed witnessing – Barnes is wary about the celebration of victimhood, in this sense anticipating the recent cautions against wounded identities. Such cautions include the work of Wendy Brown, who considers the Nietzschean notion of ressentiment – the reactive state in which suffering is reworked in negative forms of action (such as revenge) – to critique political movements, including feminism, which she sees as rooted in ‘wounded attachments’. Brown critiques the fetishisation of the wound, arguing that, ‘in its attempt to displace its suffering, identity structured by ressentiment at the same time becomes invested in its own subjection’ (1995: 70). Barnes remained anxious about the politics of personal disclosure throughout her writing life. This anxiety was exacerbated when the disclosures related to sexual injury, as is evidenced by her claim that she terminated her early career as a journalist by refusing to report on the victims of rape (O’Neal, 1990: 52). Barnes’s concerns about such revelations, and the focus on the victim’s sexuality they might provoke, are suggested by Miranda’s refusal to confess her own (adult) sexual history or to confirm that she has led a life that is debased or in some way fitting for a sexual abuse survivor. A critique of the salacious interest in confession is expressed through Augusta’s aggressive questioning of her daughter: ‘Is it true that you had forty lovers?’ (Selected Works, 204, italics in original). Barnes suggests that confession might lead to the demand for further confession, and is anxious about the paths that this demand might take. In this context, the exchange between Miranda and Augusta half way through the final act is significant: Augusta: You won’t even tell me how you are, or what. Miranda: Trappist – sprung – and of an hard-won silence. Augusta: Nothing else about your history? Miranda: Nothing. Augusta: Nothing at all? Miranda: Nothing at all. (Selected Works, 202–3)

The repetition of ‘nothing’ echoes King Lear, suggesting the impossibility of understanding between parent and child, and thus implies that Miranda’s speech might be pointless as a tool for change. Miranda’s

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refusal to answer may be more empowering than ‘speaking out’: her silence is ‘hard-won’ and therefore valuable in the context of the demand for revelation about her sexuality. In this sense, Barnes seems to pre-empt Foucauldian anxieties about bringing sexuality into discourse, suggesting that the liberation promised by speaking out is no more than an illusion. Equally, announcing one’s status as a victim more generally is treated with some scepticism in the play. When Augusta protests ‘I was a victim’ she is mocked by Elisha’s ‘Oh not that again’, the implication being that she has clung too readily to this identity (Selected Works, 159, 160, emphasis in original). For Augusta, the appropriation of victimhood appears to be inseparable from the fetishisation of psychic wounds and a simultaneous inability to accept her own agency within the family. Yet while Barnes remains sceptical about the celebration of wounded identities, she does not settle on silence as the best option either: The Antiphon demonstrates a serious engagement with precisely how one might testify to traumatic experience, or ‘keep the wound open’.3 Through an emphasis on the experience of woundedness and a self-conscious representation of the performative nature of testimony and witnessing, Barnes ultimately gets beyond the categories of victimhood and ressentiment. Wendy Brown’s summary of ressentiment reads remarkably like the plot of an early modern revenge tragedy: it ‘produces an affect (rage, righteousness) that overwhelms the hurt; it produces a culprit responsible for the hurt; and it produces a site of revenge to displace the hurt (a place to inflict hurt as the sufferer has been hurt)’ (1995: 68). While this pattern of rage, blame and revenge is the stuff of the Jacobethan drama that The Antiphon, with its faux early modern diction, recalls, it is ultimately a scenario that Barnes problematises. Indeed, it may be said that Barnes performs a repetition-with-a-difference of both revenge as a concept and the revenge tragedy as a literary genre. While the play allows the reader to indulge in the affects provoked by revenge through the exploits of the brothers, Barnes goes beyond such ressentiment through the theme of the antiphon. The idea of antiphony is not quite antithetical to revenge but offers an alternative that allows for complex attachments and desires that extend beyond the parameters of revenge. In this sense – and in line with the pattern of non-dichotomous difference that recurs in Barnes’s thinking – antiphony might be understood as revenge reworked, just as testimony might be understood as confession reworked. This structure of non-dichotomous difference (the structure which, crucially, defines the trauma response) marks the subject positions of both Barnes and her chief protagonist, Miranda. And by challenging the dichotomous distinctions between victim and perpetrator/

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witness in both cases, we begin to see a more complex vision of power relations. The sexual abuse of Miranda – who is generally read as The Antiphon’s Djuna Barnes figure – has been singled out as the play’s most significant example of trauma and victimisation. While this focus is entirely justified by the text, some critics have oversimplified Barnes’s treatment of the dynamics of sexual trauma. Louise DeSalvo’s reading, to take an important example, relies heavily on Judith Lewis Herman’s Father–Daughter Incest (1985), a foundational text in the feminist study of incest and child sex abuse. DeSalvo argues that the reader must ‘live through’ Miranda’s ‘terror, fear, and self-loathing moment by moment’ and ‘learn her language, the language of the incest-victim, which simultaneously masks and reveals’ (1991: 301). While pathologising Miranda, DeSalvo reifies her victim status and takes up Herman’s argument that incest is an initiation into prostitution, suggesting that child abuse is the beginning of an endless cycle of victimisation.4 Herman argues that child abuse leads to a ‘life of repeated victimization’ and serves as ‘an early and indelible lesson in woman’s degraded condition’ (1985: 34). Herman’s account is based on the belief (key to many feminist analyses of incest) that it is not only the incest survivor but woman in general whose identity is fixed through patriarchy’s various violences and oppressions.5 Although Herman does account for some variety in the experience of incestuous abuse, for her the result is predetermined: ‘The actual sexual encounter may be brutal or tender, painful or pleasurable; but it is always, inevitably, destructive to the child’ (1985: 4). As Janice Haaken notes, the belief that objective abuse inevitably results in psychic shattering ‘is not so far from the idea that virginal women are “ruined” by early, culturally unauthorized sexual experiences as well as by sexual abuse’ (1998: 76). Although traumatised by her childhood abuse Miranda is in no sense ‘ruined’ – she is depicted as a forceful and articulate woman who has built a successful life among the theatrical elite of Europe. The possible reference to Ibsen’s reworked ‘fallen woman’ play in the doll’s house scene suggests that Miranda’s sexual abuse, although damaging, might not have automatically led to disempowerment and disfranchisement.6 A Doll’s House (1879 [1996]) depicts a middle-class married woman who, when her shameful history is revealed, not only avoids ruin but actively chooses a life of empowered independence outside the family. Nora’s ‘crimes’ ultimately serve as anti-patriarchal pedagogy rather than resulting in victimhood within patriarchy. Barnes’s characterisation of Miranda challenges the inevitable link between unsanctioned sexual activity (whether consensual or not) and a permanent state of sexualised victimhood.

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Just as certain critics have written Miranda’s agency out of the text, narratives of the play’s editorial and redrafting process have tended to replicate this gendered dichotomy between victim and perpetrator(s), whereby a vulnerable Barnes in confessional mode is hampered by the prudish censoriousness and censorship of Eliot and Muir. The earliest complete drafts of The Antiphon in Barnes’s archives at the University of Maryland date from July 1954, and were followed by four further significant stages of redrafting before the play was accepted by the board at Faber & Faber in November 1956.7 The Antiphon was published in 1958, and Barnes made further (relatively minor) changes for the reprint in her Selected Works (1962).8 Eliot assumed editorship in 1954, and Muir became involved in 1955. The editorship of Eliot in particular is described by some critics as akin to the sexual interference of Barnes’s fictional fathers. In her otherwise sensitive analysis of Barnes’s treatment of incest, Mary Lynn Broe makes a direct comparison between Eliot and the figure of the abusive father: ‘The cuts form a “textual masquerade” of the daughter’s painful violation [. . .] by the authority of his pen, Eliot reproduces the incestuous desires of the violating father by his intrusion in the daughter’s script’ (1989: 53). Broe’s comparison is problematic precisely because it risks replicating the ‘Daddy Warbucks essentialism’ that she so accurately identifies as a characteristic of incest discourse, the ‘fixed male hegemony over the powerless woman who lacks agency, maturity, or voice’ (1989: 48). My study of the play’s manuscripts and attendant correspondence suggests that this version of events is in fact an inaccurate representation of the relationship between Barnes and her editors.9 Furthermore, in their emphasis on the violation of penetrating the textual body, critics such as Broe and Linda Curry bring a particular kind of sex-negative politics to editorial discourse, reiterating an understanding of sexuality and sexual abuse most clearly articulated in DeSalvo’s feminist reading of the play – a sexual politics which The Antiphon in fact opens up for critique.10 And, crucially, the desire for narrative clarity implied by the anxious emphasis on textual gaps ultimately obscures a nuanced understanding of the play’s engagement with the complexities of traumatic testimony. In ‘ “Tom, Take Mercy”: Djuna Barnes’ Drafts of The Antiphon’ (1991), Curry emphasises Barnes’s powerlessness in the face of editorial control, blaming Eliot in particular for compromising Barnes’s vision and thus ensuring the critical and popular failure of the play. As Caselli observes, ‘Curry’s argument that Eliot’s and Muir’s excision greatly damage [sic] the play is not sustained by Barnes’s own notes’ (2009: 239, n. 132). Caselli cites as evidence Barnes’s annotation of ‘I didn’t accept much. D.B.’ next to Muir’s ‘But as for my excisions I don’t know

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yet whether Miss Barnes will accept them or reject them’ in a 1955 letter to Eliot (2009: 239, n. 132). Further indication of Barnes’s agency in the editorial process may be found in her letter of 21 February 1956 to Eliot, where she reports a discussion with Muir: ‘He had remarked that the first act needed cutting, in “some of the best lines” because it was “too busy in a static sort of way” – an observation that I thoroughly enjoyed’. Barnes claims to have left ‘some parts of the first act on the cutters [sic] floor, where I saw that perhaps he was right, – in other cases I either removed lines, or rearranged, corrected, or rewrote’. Rather than allowing us to reconstruct Barnes as a bullied or manipulated victim, this archival material might also produce a more dynamic image of editorial relations, in which a gendered dichotomy of power is not central to our reading. It is not, however, Muir’s editorship that forms the centre of Curry’s focus; rather her attention rests on a specific letter from Eliot (dated 10 August 1956) which she claims instigated a final revision from which the play ‘never recovered’ (1991: 287). While Muir’s suggestions for ‘wholesale omissions’ (not mentioned by Curry) relate to the first act, Eliot finds the second act the most in need of cutting (Muir to Eliot, 13 January 1955).11 Emphasising Eliot’s ‘severe demands’ on Barnes to ‘accept his editing and make further cuts of her own’ Curry cites his call for ‘much more drastic cutting, twelve to fifteen pages. Don’t cut anything at the end, but I feel sure that there are pages in the middle that can be disposed of’ (1991: 286–7).12 Curry’s essay focuses on excisions made in this middle section of Act 2, and she places particular emphasis on the importance of an omitted scene where, in his attempt to make Miranda ‘mutton at sixteen— / Initiated vestal to his “cause”!’ Titus Hauled her, in an hay-hook, to the barn; Left her dangling; while in the field below He offered to exchange her for a goat With that old farm-hand, Jacobsen. (Cited in Curry, 1991: 290, 291)

This scene occurs in the undated ‘Early Draft’ and the September 1955 copies, but not in what I deduce to be Barnes’s earliest extant versions of this act, which date from July 1954 (‘First Copy’ and ‘Finished Copy’).13 The scene takes the form of a reminiscence by Dudley, and occurs in the middle of Act 2 before the brothers attack the women. In ‘Early Draft’ the speech is difficult to decipher: as many typed lines are crossed out in ink as are left untouched, and Barnes’s hand-written annotations and rewrites cover the page. One might argue, therefore, that Barnes was unsure about the wording of the scene even at this stage. The lines are

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included in Dudley’s speech in the September 1955 Copy 1 with two additional typed lines at the end which are just legible although Barnes has crossed them out in several times in ink: You know, I’ve seen heifers dangling from an halter Just like that, while he charged the rape-blade in.

In Muir’s Copy 2 from September 1955 there is no direction to drop this scene but in Eliot’s Copy from the same time there is indeed a light pencil ‘x’ through the entire block of lines from Dudley that include the hayhook reference. In the fourth September 1955 copy the hay-hook scene paragraph still exists but the last four lines are heavily altered and annotated in Barnes’s red and green ink. And in the February 1956 typescript, the scene is again heavily annotated. It seems that, regardless of Eliot’s suggestions, Barnes was not entirely satisfied with how these lines were reading, although at this stage she was trying to improve them. Among a file of Antiphon drafts marked ‘April–June 1956 Miscellaneous pages’ there is a page containing the ‘hay-hook lines’ headed ‘(new page – July 31 –56)’ in Barnes’s hand. There is a line across the whole page and Barnes has written ‘decided out’ next to the text. Barnes’s excision need not be seen as forced but rather as a measured decision to delete a scene about which she was unsure from an act that was excessively long. But rather than simply locating Barnes’s agency in this excision, which admittedly still leaves us in the territory of intentionality, I want to challenge Curry’s reading on other grounds. By clinging to the fantasy of an entirely pure, uncorrupted and unequivocally elucidating original text, one risks privileging an image of the play as an unmediated confessional narrative. In this case, textual ‘integrity’ amounts to an impossible confidence in the closeness of the text to the author’s traumatised psyche, a closeness that recovering and reinserting excised material can restore. Curry’s particular focus on the hay-hook scene and attendant lines relates to her wish to clarify the narrative of sexual abuse she sees (quite accurately) as central to the play. I view this intention as misguided because it not only subscribes to a discourse whereby the most unambiguous incest/sex abuse narrative is the most ‘true’, but it also fails to take into account Barnes’s own development of her traumatic theme through the redrafting process. By reinserting the lines she claims that Barnes was ‘forced’ to cut, Curry offers a clarified plot – which equates to a clearer incest narrative – imparting ‘complete and coherent sense’ to apparent discontinuities and ambiguities (1991: 287, 291). The intense controversy surrounding memories of child abuse ‘recovered’ during psychoanalysis or other therapeutic scenarios has meant

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that the terms of the debate have been fixed in the dichotomies of belief and non-belief, truth and falsity. Haaken suggests how ‘layers of gendered and ambiguous meanings’ in women’s recollections of childhood abuse are incompatible with an approach that overlooks the truths contained in even false accounts about the past. Framing the controversy in terms of true and false memory is sorely inadequate because it misses the range of meanings and partial truths that lie between these polarized, absolute categories. (1998: 2, 4)

Referring to the feminist focus on incest in the 1980s, Haaken argues that ‘the ambivalences and complexities of eroticized power relations were anxiously repressed within much of the storytelling that took place in the sexual abuse survivor moment’ (1998: 126). The desire to get to the factual heart of Barnes’s incest story is, troublingly, also a desire to smooth out its powerful ambivalences and explain and contextualise the explosive affect of her dramatic work.14 Perhaps underlying such desires for clarity is an understandable wariness about invoking misogynistic stereotypes of female hysteria. Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray note that in sexual abuse survivor discourse ‘too much’ emotion can be seen as ‘a conscious manipulation, evidence of lack of control, or as simply inappropriately personal’ (1993: 285). Yet Alcoff and Gray argue for the importance of questioning ‘a position that assumes that it always a good thing for survivors to “control” our emotions in regard to our experiences of sexual violence’ and ask the important question: ‘Who benefits the most from such control?’ (1993: 285–6, 286). Similarly, Haaken finds ‘something amiss’ in the contempt for ‘emotional excess and irrationality’ in clinical discourse and notes that ‘at the base of hysteria is a battle for recognition, one that women must wage in a way that does not alienate their audiences’ (1998: 61, 62). Curry indeed links the play’s apparent confusions, discontinuities and excesses – caused, she claims, by Eliot – to the alienation of its audience. Although the play’s early reception was not generally favourable and it has not been widely performed, some of the more positive responses suggest that an audience’s ambiguity about the plot is no barrier to their affective engagement.15 Ivar Harrie, in the audience of the play’s performance in translation in Stockholm, remarks: Yes, the audience really caught on – gradually. After the first act the people were very awed – and a little afraid of showing how lost they felt. The second act has a bewildering – but unescapably [sic] exciting effect. The third act . . . broke down all resistance: there was no alternative but to surrender to the dramatic poem.16

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Harrie’s reaction is cited frequently perhaps because it conveys a common experience in those who value Barnes’s play: his comments suggest that one is not affected by The Antiphon because one fully comprehends the narrative, but rather that feeling might, in some unexpected way, stem from bewilderment. Critical attempts to address sexual trauma in The Antiphon have not only located meaning in the clarity of the plot, but have misrepresented the play’s redrafting process as merely a series of forced excisions. Curry ignores the wealth of lines that were added or changed throughout the play’s history when she claims that if the 300 lines removed from the final version of the play could be reinserted ‘the original Antiphon would emerge as the beautifully coherent and poignant tragedy that its author had envisioned’ (1991: 298).17 Curry finds it regrettable that, due to the excisions, ‘the audience has to get most of its information from Jack’s crystal speech in the dollhouse scene of act 2’ (1991: 291). However, this shift in emphasis moves us from the realm of the revelatory – from the constative narrative of ‘what happened’ found in the hay-hook scene – to the realm of the suggestively performative. The re-enactment of the trauma within this play-withina-play is a compelling feature of Barnes’s text and one that benefits from such centrality. After Augusta has played with dolls representing her dead husband and his mistresses, she, and the rest of the cast, are forced to witness anew the events of the past, which are linguistically re-staged as the characters look into the doll’s house. Horrific images of the ‘fighting shadow of the Devil and the Daughter’, and Miranda ‘Dragging rape blood behind her, like the snail’ are witnessed as performances within the house as opposed to being narrated as completed actions (Selected Works, 185). In his ‘crystal speech’ Jack gives a more factual account of events, where the narrative has been put into the past tense, and we are told that Augusta submitted to having the sixteen-year-old Miranda ‘Tipped’ to the ‘travelling Cockney’, Bridgid-Matilda’s brother, who was procured by Titus (Selected Works, 186). However, even in this more blunt narrative of the traumatic event, Jack notes the performative dimension of traumatic memory in the image of the ‘eye-baby’ with which I opened this chapter. The doll’s house scene and Jack’s lines within it allow Barnes to explore the notion that trauma is not merely exposed but rather created through its telling. And significantly, just as this scene gains prominence through revision, the theatrical emphasis becomes increasingly evident elsewhere in the play throughout the redrafting process. As with the role of the brothers – whose speech becomes increasingly stylised and opaque and whose actions become increasingly disturb-

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ing as they capture the affective complexity of the family scenario – The Antiphon’s revisions are significant and positive changes.18 Just as the play’s history of composition and redrafting should not be understood exclusively through the category of absence, neither should obscurity or opacity be confused or equated with absence in the case of Barnes’s representation of trauma. In his essay on Barnes, Kalaidjian focuses on excisions and gaps as signs and symptoms of trauma in themselves: in Antiphon [sic], the latent trauma of incest leaves its trace variously in the linguistic distortions and gaps that punctuate the verbal character in the play; in the extensive editorial cuttings that both Barnes and Eliot made to the explicit presentations of the event; in the pattern of censorship marking the history of its stage productions; and in its general silencing in the reception of Barnes’s oeuvre. (2006: 162)19

Unlike the feminist readings I discuss above, Kalaidjian’s reading appreciates that meaning does not depend exclusively on narrative clarity, but in stressing the role of ‘gaps’, ‘cuttings’, ‘censorship’ and ‘silencing’ he represents trauma as functioning only as a negative shade in the play. Despite its status as a category that undermines representational certainty, trauma functions not merely as absence in The Antiphon, but makes itself felt in multiform ways in both the corporeal and textual body. The excision of the hay-hook scene does not only or exclusively create a gap (indeed, it functions as such only if one knows of its original existence), but rather it changes the nature of Barnes’s treatment of the trauma. It is in some of the apparently ‘obscure’ passages of The Antiphon that the affective force of traumatic memory is impressed on the reader, through the complexity and ambivalence of Barnes’s writing rather than words not written. Consider, for example, this affecting speech by Miranda: The salt spilled, the bread broke. Unmuzzled bone Drew on the hood of flesh, entombing laughter: Tongues came forth, and forth the hissing milk Its lashing noose, and snared the gaping mouth. A door slammed on Eden, and the Second Gate, And I walked down your leg. (Selected Works, 194–5)

The sinister domesticity of images such as the spilled salt and broken bread impart a certain unheimlich feeling to the reader, and the image of bodily horror that follows suggests the Kleinian notion of the trauma of birth. Yet these bodily images also suggest a threatening sexuality – the

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‘unmuzzled bone’ and ‘hood of flesh’ imply a grotesque representation of both the act of conception and the act of birth. The experiences of Miranda before and during her birth and later as a sexually abused child apparently robbed of ‘innocence’ (‘a door slammed on Eden’) are mapped onto each other to illustrate the confused, overdetermined, traumatic memory, where image precedes narrative clarity. To equate a proper ‘understanding’ of the play with factual clarity is not problematic simply because this might be to mislocate the text’s affective charge: rather, in our rush to avoid charges of hysteria, we might be failing to consider the disruptive potential of emotional excess and what this demands in the reader/audience. Writing on trauma in American modernist drama, Michael Cotsell notes that hysteria is ‘a kind of acting, a heightened (frustrated) substitute for volition and recognition’ (2005: 94). Might not urgently disavowing the hysterical be a mistake in a dramatic work that takes as its theme the call for recognition? Might we do better to dwell on or ‘witness’ this affective excess instead? The stylised communication of affect, which occurs without full contextual or external ‘evidence’, is integral to the idea of antiphony and the rituals of testifying and witnessing that the play as a whole proposes. Instead of looking to provide another, apparently less obscure version of the narrative, I want to consider what kind of response, recognition or antiphony is being asked of the audience. Barnes’s scepticism about disclosure, her fears about victimisation and the sense one has from reading her work that the most clear or realistic narrative is not always the most expressive have something in common with recent queer approaches to the questions of incest, sexual abuse and trauma. Cvetkovich has emphasised the value of obscurity and digression, arguing that the work of Margaret Randall and Dorothy Allison, while showing a commitment to ‘truth telling’, actually ‘demonstrates how imaginative work that may bear an oblique relation to the actual event of sexual abuse can ultimately be more “healing” than an explicit rendering of the event’ (2003: 94). While The Antiphon names rape and abuse, its focus is on the complexities of telling and witnessing as much as on these acts themselves. And crucially, like the texts chosen by Cvetkovich, Barnes’s play ‘point[s] to healing as a process that engages the body and consists in rituals of performance that defy simple notions of disclosure’ (2003: 95). The ‘queer healing practice’ identified by Cvetkovich provides an alternative to the approaches to sexual trauma found in the work of critics such as Judith Herman, and emphasises the performative structures I find central to Barnes’s work (2003: 88). Djuna Barnes finds an alternative to disclosure and ‘narratives of innocent victims’ in her sophisticated understanding of the performative

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nature of testimony, the role of witnessing and the potentially therapeutic value of repetition and ritualised violence (Cvetkovich, 2003: 4).

Writing trauma, performing testimony: The Antiphon as theatre As early as 1919, in her one-act-play ‘Three from the Earth’, Barnes’s scepticism about the politics of revealing family secrets is matched by an emphasis on performance. In the play, which has a clear resonance with The Antiphon, three brothers visit a stylish and theatrical older woman, Kate. The brothers’ aggressive approach to revelation is suggested by the ‘from the earth’ metaphor: one brother, John, announces that ‘We go down on the earth and find things, tear them up, shaking the dirt off’ (At the Roots, 73). It is revealed that John is Kate’s son (and also, it is implied, the product of an incestuous union), but the performative nature of this revelation is suggested by its meta-fictional context: the evidence is a photograph, inscribed to ‘little John’, of Kate playing the Madonna in ‘an amateur theatrical’ (At the Roots, 79, 77). Although this early drama ultimately ends in disclosure, the meta-fictional element provides an alternative, more dynamic model of revelation than the ‘digging’ of the three brothers. The fact that two kinds of texts are used to access the ‘secret’ suggests the centrality of the act of telling (or restaging) memories and implies that remembering might be a performative rather than a constative process. While critics have been largely sceptical about the role of the theatricality I find so important to The Antiphon, the significance of the work’s dramatic form is noted in a 1991 essay by Meryl Altman.20 Emphasising The Antiphon’s self-referentiality and the role of the gallery as a vantage point for spectators within the play, Altman suggests that this significance resides chiefly in the suitability of drama for Barnes’s ‘final anatomy of the deceptions and manipulations women and men practice upon those closest to them’ (1991: 275). While Altman is correct in acknowledging the importance of performance to The Antiphon, her emphasis on deception promotes a somewhat puritanical understanding of drama. Although the tropes of masking and concealed identities are used (by Elisha, Dudley and Jack), I understand these devices rather differently. Barnes emphasises the staginess of Jeremy’s role as Jack, and the pig and ass masks worn by Elisha and Dudley do not so much disguise them as form part of a ritualised re-enactment of a traumatic event. Indeed, Altman’s defence against the charges of Barnes’s antitheatricalism itself relies on an anti-theatrical concept of drama: Martin

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Puchner notes that the ‘antitheatrical prejudice’ first identified by Jonas Barish comes back to a limited number of obsessions: ‘the immorality of public display, of arousing the audience, and, most importantly, of those who professionally practice the art of deception’ (2002: 1). Barnes’s theatricality relates not to the manipulation of any of these apparently negative associations, but rather to her recognition of performance as an appropriate means of testifying to and witnessing hurt. In this respect, Barnes’s choice of form is powerfully connected to her traumatic theme. An emphasis on deception is problematic because it reinscribes the play into the dynamics of hiddenness and exposure associated with the kind of confessional narratives that Barnes attempts to avoid and presupposes the objective reality that the trauma structure brings into question. And like trauma, where origins are created through repetition, Barnes’s emphasis on acting as reality forecloses the celebration of originality. Performing and re-staging events allows for a focus on the process of remembering rather than the revealed, already remembered event. In her urgency to problematise the truth claims associated with ‘looking back’ at sexual abuse, Haaken stresses the usefulness of privileging ‘the verb over the noun – remembering as opposed to memory’ (1998: 14, emphasis in original). In Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art, Jill Bennett makes the distinction between narrative and traumatic memory, connecting the performative nature of remembering trauma with a non-narrative communication of affect. Bennett claims that traumatic memory offers a realm of secondary imagery in which affective experience is ‘not simply referenced but activated or staged in some way’ (2005: 24). The idea of memory being ‘staged or activated’ – clearly suggested by The Antiphon’s doll’s house scene – reflects the psychoanalytic understanding of the trauma narrative as testimony to an absence, ‘to an event that has not yet come into existence’ (Felman and Laub, 1991: 57). Before this process, writes Laub, the trauma – as a known event and not simply as an overwhelming shock – has not been truly witnessed yet, not been taken cognizance of. The emergence of the narrative which is being listened to – and heard – is, therefore, the process and the place wherein the cognizance, the ‘knowing’ of the event is given birth to. The listener, therefore, is a party to the creation of knowledge de novo. The testimony to the trauma thus includes its hearer, who is, so to speak, the blank screen on which the event comes to be inscribed for the first time. (Felman and Laub, 1991: 57, italics in original)

While indicating the performative dimension of testifying to a traumatic event, Laub stresses the importance of the witness, the listener. By structuring her work as a play with an implied audience, and by including a

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significant play-within-a-play, Barnes emphasises the role of reception or witnessing. While several direct statements about the family background and abuse were ultimately excised, the revision process saw the inclusion of further details that capture the performative aspects of traumatic testimony and witnessing. In its published form, The Antiphon’s theatrical qualities are apparent from the opening stage direction, which points to its metafictional setting. With its gallery, balustrade and arched doorway, the old hall’s architecture forms a kind of stage set, complete with theatrical and circus accoutrements, which, as Jonathan Burley later reveals, belong to Miranda. Miranda is an actress and ‘wardrobe mistress’ and her brother Jeremy is disguised as a clownish figure who refers to himself as ‘Jack’ and claims to have first met Miranda in Paris (Selected Works, 210). Both Jack and Miranda wear theatrical costume: in a line only added in the September 1955 revision, Jack says ‘In the shutting down of Paris, we took off / In whatsoever part we had been playing’ (Selected Works, 131). But in the undated ‘Early Draft’ the opening scene and stage direction contain fewer references to the theatre.21 There is ‘a layfigure in uncertain military, bandboxes, musical instruments and stands’ and although there are references to ‘carnival gear’ there is no mention of stage costumes or Miranda’s theatrical career. By July 1954 there is a greater theatrical emphasis in the opening stage direction and description of Miranda and Jack. The stage direction includes a reference to the ‘parts of stage costumes’ strewn over the balcony rail, and for the first time Barnes mentions her carnivalesque, mythical stage-upon-a-stage: ‘the divided halves of what was once a merry-go-round griffon’ (‘First Copy’, Act 1). Miranda’s dress is now described as ‘a costume suitable for the last act of a tragedy’ and Jack enters the stage theatrically holding his hat above his head ‘as though expecting audience in the gallery’. By September 1955 Miranda’s costume is described even more explicitly as ‘obviously of the theatre’, the line that will remain in the play (‘Copy 1’, Act 1). While Barnes’s principal ‘testifiers’ are performers from the play’s first incarnation – in ‘Early Draft’ Act 1 Jack is already jester-like, ‘ducking and bowing’ – this tendency is exaggerated through revision. Equally, the role of the audience becomes more significant during the redrafting process. In a letter of 28 September 1955, Barnes explains to Eliot her decision to include a group of travellers specifically to provide an audience (or group of witnesses) for Augusta.22 Barnes also adds meta-fictional references to an audience during her revision of the lines at the beginning of Act 1 when Jack wonders where their uncle Jonathan is, and worries that he alone will see and hear Miranda’s testimony. There is no mention of the testimony as a ‘scene’ with its absent ‘actor’

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and ‘audience’ until September 1955 (Selected Works, 83),23 although by July 1954 Barnes has modified the speech to include the line ‘My hands will have to be your clamour, lady’ (‘First Copy’, Act 1). In his copy of the September 1955 version, Muir recommends the cutting of these lines, but while Barnes acquiesced with a number of his suggestions – reducing Jack’s speeches in the first act and excising references to an Aunt Elvira (a narrative existing in increasingly vestigial form from the undated ‘Early Draft’) – she kept this significant line about the importance of an audience.24 The doll’s house scene, where abuse is re-staged with puppets, is a classic piece of meta-theatre in the vein of early modern revenge tragedy. With its stylised affect, theatricality and emphasis on response, the revenge tragedy shares some of the major characteristics I identify in antiphony. While Barnes’s emphasis on witnessing takes the play beyond the revenger’s ressentiment, she perhaps realised the value of this genre as an alternative to confessional narrative. While the doll’s house scene exists in all drafts of the play, it takes greater prominence through excision of the hay-hook scene and other references to abuse. The prop itself is mentioned earlier in later versions: in the ‘First’ and ‘Finished’ first acts of July 1954 Jack tells Burleigh (sic) that his luggage is ‘a kind of ark’ to which Burleigh replies ‘Noah’s?’ but by September 1955 (Copy 1) Jack suggests to Burley: This luggage that you mention Could it be, good sir, or could it not? A beast-box, say, a doll’s house, or an ark?

Equally, Jack behaves in the manner of a malcontent in an early modern revenge play, enraptured by the theatrical nature of his own plotting: Do I unplot my head by plucking hairs? Or throw my lines away between my teeth? (Selected Works, 93)

These meta-fictional references increase through Barnes’s revisions, and the references to ‘unplot my head’ and ‘throw my lines away between my teeth’ were not added until the ‘First Copy’ of September 1955. The showiness of revenge tragedy is echoed in the ritualistic dancing and speech of the brothers and in the stagey deaths of Miranda and Augusta. Both women are killed when Augusta brings a ringing bell down on Miranda and they fall ‘across the gryphon, pulling down the curtains, gilt crown and all’ (Selected Works, 223). This theatrical death is reminiscent of the kind found in early modern dramas such as Middleton’s

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Women Beware Women (1657), where characters fall through trap doors and are shot with flaming gold arrows. In Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon, John Kerrigan notes that the avenger’s killings are ‘distinguished from common murder by the sign, the evidence, of their fittingness. Hence the impulse to display, where the murderer’s urge is to conceal’ (1996: 17). In this sense the revenge tragedy situates emotion and trauma not in a private or personal realm but – through the act of performance – in the public and theatrical sphere. Kerrigan suggests that the meta-fictional nature of revenge tragedy is perhaps intimately related to its responsive or reactive nature, with the phenomenon of ‘self-reference’ in much Renaissance revenge tragedy owing much ‘to the effect of the inherited scenario [. . .], to that sense which revengers have of being characters in others’ plots’ (1996: 206). And Kerrigan’s study puts a rather different gloss from Wendy Brown et al. on the question of victimhood and wounded identities: for him, revenge tragedies create a morally complicating resemblance between victim and perpetrator as the revenger ‘transforms his enemy into the kind of victim he once was’ (1996: 6). Indeed, performance is crucial to Barnes’s discussion of abuse partly because it allows for empathic identification between characters as they act out each other’s roles. This kind of identification between victim and perpetrator provides a challenge to the kind of models of victimhood endorsed by critics like DeSalvo. Central to this strategy is Miranda’s occupation as both an actress and a ‘wardrobe mistress, tiring many parts’: she both performs and enables others to perform (Selected Works, 210). Miranda and her mother have exchanged clothes and rings, and by reminding her mother of this inter-generation cross-dressing Miranda brings Augusta ‘back to pleasant thoughts’ – she wants to ‘pretend we’re girls again; let’s play’ (Selected Works, 210, italics in original). As James Scott (1976) notes, in the third act Barnes seems to rely on a double meaning of the word ‘play’.25 In the course of the act, Augusta’s enthusiasm about an imagined lost youth and ‘innocence’ occurs while she acts out the role of her daughter. Both kinds of play seem to be intimately related and Augusta’s imagined nostalgia for her own lost youth is also in part an imagined nostalgia for the time before her daughter was raped and abused. The idea of imagined nostalgia is important, as the idea of acting removes the emphasis from any real originary event, thus emphasising the particularity of the affective scenario occurring in the present tense of the play. When Augusta swaps shoes with Miranda and says ‘Love puts forth her foot; let’s to the opera’, she hopes to play the part of Miranda as a performer (Selected Works, 198). The identificatory process is reciprocal: Miranda imagines the idyll and the subsequent

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destruction of Augusta’s childhood.26 The emphasis on ‘playing’ has the function of allowing for the imagination of certain affective scenarios without the assumption of specific identities. Through a process of empathic identification the two women explore their feelings about their individual and collective trauma. This comfortable and productive overlapping of self and other means that Miranda and Augusta do not assume the polarised identities of victim and perpetrator. Despite its emphasis on performance, Barnes’s play has been read as displaying the kind of anti-theatricalism understood by many as ‘constitutive’ to modernism and modernist drama (Puchner, 2002: 1). Julia A. Walker (2005) has argued that key modernist figures such as T. S. Eliot and George Santayana were sceptical about theatricality because they saw meaning as a function of verbal signification alone. Many of Barnes’s early reviewers focus on the poetic qualities of her verse drama, making a (modernist) distinction between the apparently mutually exclusive categories of the literary and the dramatic to categorise The Antiphon as an anti-theatrical ‘closet’ drama. Richard Eberhart distinguishes between ‘outer drama’ and ‘inner verse drama’: the former being ‘theatrical and brittle’ and the latter ‘enriching as poetry but ineffectual dramatically’ (1958: 619). Unsurprisingly, Eberhart places Barnes’s play in the second category, claiming that it is ‘better as a poem, a verse play for reading, than as a verse play for production’ (1958: 620). Similarly, Lionel Abel (2003) charges The Antiphon with indecipherability and claims that it is really a closet drama rather than a play. Barnes herself was inconsistent on the subject of the play’s suitability for performance, yet even if the work was written primarily as a closet drama, its poetry does not suggest a distrust or devaluing of theatrical qualities, but rather incorporates them at the level of theme and language.27 As Caselli observes, The Antiphon demonstrates ‘the tension between drama and literature (between showing and telling), which in [Barnes’s] work estranges the mimetic conventions dominating both fields and draws attention to the inherently spectacular quality of language’ (2009: 218). While the play includes specific references to the theatre, it also includes such theatrical uses of language as nursery rhymes and proverbial and literary citations. Furthermore, the distinction between poetry and theatricality implies a dichotomy between inside/outside and public/private that the play calls into question. Sarah Bay-Cheng suggests that Barnes was not necessarily a closet dramatist, but ‘wrote with theatrical ambivalence’: ‘Startling acts of violence punctuate otherwise verbose plays, but she derives dramatic power precisely from this contrast’ (2005: 129).28 But while Bay-Cheng suggests a more dynamic relationship between poetry

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and drama than either Eberhart or Abel, she ultimately reinforces this opposition through linking the private with poetry and the public with theatre: ‘The negotiation between the private and the public – the solitary experience and public displays – ultimately universalises the content of her plays’ (2005: 129). For Bay-Cheng the private therefore becomes a metaphor for the public: ‘Barnes uses the motifs of family betrayal and sexualised violence to articulate the broader concerns of a modern era’ (2005: 129). Thus modernist priorities are reinforced as they are complicated by Bay-Cheng, for whom Barnes’s mixing of the two apparently distinct modes of theatricality and poetry ultimately serves to align The Antiphon with the impersonal. A similar equation between poetry and privacy, theatre and publicness, is voiced by Donna Gerstenberger, who deems the play a failure on account of the ‘intensity and difficulty of the verse’, but praises Barnes’s attempts to use verse drama to describe an ‘intensely personal experience’ (1968: 122). For Gerstenberger this is remarkable because of the preconception that verse in drama ‘is tied to the public or ritual world’ (1968: 122). Gerstenberger speculates that ‘the difficulty which seems inherent in developing interior character in verse plays’ might have led to ‘an emphasis on public or exterior worlds’, thus making the very distinction which, I suggest, Barnes collapses in her theatrical communication of psychic trauma (1968: 122). The Antiphon conveys an ‘intensely personal experience’ (which does not necessarily amount to a biographically accurate experience) not through realistic character presentation or realist narrative but through the formal and ritual methods more conventionally associated with ‘public or exterior worlds’. As Cvetkovich’s focus on trauma and lesbian public cultures implies, theatrical and public rituals can be essential in the communication of pain, performing trauma by formal means that challenge dichotomies between public and private, individual and society, self and other. When Jack discusses details about Miranda’s life in Paris he also speaks of the theatre: performance and biography, acting and self, are kept in close proximity. If Miranda has already turned the hall into a stage (she has left her theatrical props, ‘bonnets, flags and boxes’) when she first talks plainly about the house and her mother, Jack turns the testimony into a double act, playing the role of clown or jester, rolling the hat up and down his arm (Selected Works, 95). Jack’s advice to Miranda about speaking is also a kind of stage direction: Whip up your splendours and your consternations, Stand to the trumpets and the terrors, Give tongue for tongue, All the tapestries have thrown their spears! (Selected Works, 112)

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Rather than a vulnerable turning-inwards, then, it is suggested that testimony about the past might look more like a rather camp piece of theatre, where stylish performance precedes values such as sincerity, honesty and solemnity. The image of tapestries that have thrown their spears suggests a theatrical tableau of stylised and collective action, where agency is not located at the level of the individual but rather as part of the work of art itself. Miranda and Jack’s double act shows that testimony does not have to be a solitary experience but, as I shall explore further, can in fact take the form of a collaborative public performance.

Ritual and repetition: Performing the past Ritual It is evident that Augusta has come to understand something of her daughter’s project when she observes the ‘excellent arrangement of catastrophe’ towards the end of Act 3 (Selected Works, 219). The term ‘excellent arrangement’ evokes ideas of a musical score or dance and is suggestive of the ways in which Barnes refers to formal structures of expression – often non-linguistic in nature, although normally described through her complex verse – in her representation of characters’ affective exchanges. When Burley claims that Miranda is ‘fond of carnivals and all processions’ he suggests how she exploits the possibilities of theatricalised ritual in its broadest sense (Selected Works, 95). Processions are ritualised public performances that may relate to different affective scenarios – the funeral procession, to take an obvious example, is a formal performance of grief. Indeed, in a miscellaneous, undated draft of the exchange in which the phrase ‘excellent arrangement of catastrophe’ occurs, Barnes has headed the section ‘Funeral oration’, emphasising the structure of organised ritual.29 In The Antiphon, Barnes uses a variety of ritualistic performances – the mass, music, dance, nursery rhymes – to communicate and produce affect, and to suggest possible healing practices for the traumatised subject. In ‘A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry’ (1928) Eliot describes ‘the ceremony of the Mass’ as ‘the consummation of the drama, the perfect and ideal drama’ (1951: 47). As Walker writes, the Mass realises Eliot’s ideal because it locates meaning in the Word; it uses ritual and the incantatory power of language to evoke a particular emotion (much like the objective correlative); it demands that one’s personality be subordinated to tradition; and – most

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important – its conventions adequately regulate the performers’ and participants’ self-expression. (2005: 80)

Barnes not only shares this belief in the dramatic function of language, but in The Antiphon she relies on an incantatory and ritualised performance of feeling that recalls the Christian ceremony of the Mass. In her copy of Eliot’s Selected Essays, Barnes has highlighted a reference to the ‘Art of the Mass’ in ‘A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry’, and her own (non-religious) fondness for the ceremony is suggested by the fact that on 20 May 1971 she signed a petition to ‘save the Catholic Mass’ sent by the translator Cristina Campo: ‘Enclosed, signed, the paper you sent me regarding the proposed “disposal” of the Gregorian-Latin rites – what atrocious audacity’. Written in verse form, The Antiphon also obeys the formal convention of the three dramatic unities which, as Eliot notes, are observed by the Mass. Louis F. Kannenstine suggests the Mass-like quality of Barnes’s play when he claims that The Antiphon ‘taps the origin of modern drama in rituals of the medieval Christian church’ (151). A religious and ritualistic element is suggested by the play’s setting: Burley Hall is referred to ‘metaphorically’ as ‘The Abbey’, but we are told that it was in fact once a ‘college of chantry priests’ (Selected Works, 95). ‘Chantry’ suggests precisely the kind of performance suggested by Eliot: the word originally referred to ‘singing or chanting (of the mass)’ or ‘incantation, enchantment’ (OED). The theme of ritualised music in the manner of a chantry is of course also suggested by the word ‘antiphon’.30 Jack refers to how he has invoked the ceremony of the Mass to encourage Miranda to speak effectively and stylishly in response to her abuse. He claims he looked on Miranda as ‘launched catastrophe’ and cried ‘Mass, mass, piano and piano!’ (Selected Works, 112). ‘Mass’ is an oath deriving from the Catholic ritual (specifically a shorter version of the oath ‘by the mass’) and ‘piano, piano’ a musical direction and a call for gentleness. Barnes uses the terminology of Mass and music to suggest that Miranda’s ‘response’ might be more powerful if governed by certain conventions. Miranda, it would seem, has taken Jack’s advice, and her speeches within the play suggest the importance of evoking feeling within conventional frameworks. Altman (1991) is correct in noting the significance of a particular speech addressed to Augusta by Miranda towards the end of the play. The speech in question is worth quoting in full: Rebuke me less, for we are face to face With this the fadged up ends of discontent: But tie and hold us in that dear estrangement

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That we may like before we too much lose us. As the blacksmith hammers out his savage metal, So is the infant hammered to the dance. But if not wrapped in metric; hugged in discipline, Rehearsed in familiarity reproved; Grappled in the mortise of the ritual, And turning in the spirit of the play. Then equilibrium will be the fall; Abide it. (Selected Works, 213)

As Altman notes, the speech suggests the importance of form and convention: it points to the necessity of a ‘formal, “disciplined” solution, a “metric,” a “ritual,” a “dance,” avoiding and “reproving” the “familiarity” of conventional wisdom, conventional realistic presentation’ (1991: 283). Miranda’s speech invests affect in the ritual itself: through the ‘dance’ the nature of the women’s relationship is communicated and established. The speech suggests that the two women are held in place by the conventions of the performance, which is not merely restricting but also promotes a certain comfort or pleasure – they are ‘hugged in discipline’. Yet the idea of ritualised performance expressed here allows for a certain movement and freedom as it provides a restrictive method of communication: Miranda seems to suggest that a kind of stylised emotional representation will keep the women locked together in a strange dance in which the ambivalent and even paradoxical nature of their relationship can be explored. The idea of a formal dance allows different positions to be occupied consecutively, all within the same ritual. Ritualistic performance, where formal regularities are guiding principles, allows Barnes’s subject to convey, and indeed transform, her own feelings and her relationship with other bodies. Unlike Eliot’s notion of the Mass, which deals mainly with the question of expression, C. Nadia Seremetakis’s anthropological study of Greek antiphonic mourning rituals emphasises the role of the respondent or witness and points to the possible healing properties of the performative process. Seremetakis notes that antiphony has been described as ‘a prevalent pattern of Greek lamentation from antiquity to the present’ (1991: 100). Her understanding of antiphony is pertinent to a consideration of Barnes’s work partly because it proposes a realm of affect that does not depend on the notion of an individual disclosing an already known and coherent narrative about her already known and coherent self. Seremetakis stresses that the lament performance depends on the ‘interpenetration of collective and individual poetic creation’ and therefore cannot be treated ‘only as an individuated psychological or

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literary artefact’ (1991: 3). The antiphonic lament performance is not just a means of expression but a transformative process through which such categories as self, narrative and emotion materialise. Seremetakis argues that a central referent of lament narrative is the ritual process of performance itself. It is within this enclosure that biography, emotions, and local history should be understood. The laments are reflexive interventions in a ritual process where self and sentiment are invested and constructed. (1991: 7)

The concept of antiphony described by Seremetakis offers an alternative to the unselfconscious confession of personal history that Barnes so strongly resists. Seremetakis makes a clear distinction between the ritual-performative context of the transmission of personal narrative and ‘biographical case histories’, claiming that the Maniats ‘do not present biography in the form of confession, or journalistic profile, or as an objective collation of facts; rather their life history narratives are the components of a total, spatially and temporally bounded, multimedia performance’ (1991: 7). In The Antiphon, the affective impact of past events is not conveyed merely by an ‘objective collation of facts’ but also, like the Inner Maniat mourners, through ritualised performance. Often when Augusta remembers particular experiences, her sons perform the affective dimension of these discrete narratives through rituals of music, dance and phrasing. This turn to ritual to intensify and validate narrative correlates with the way in which Seremetakis’s lament singers cannot attain the proper emotional intensity and reality outside of the antiphonic structure and thus outside of the ceremony itself. When Augusta reminisces about her favourite son, Jeremy (who is of course present but disguised as ‘Jack’), Barnes uses ritual to augment and modify the narrative. Augusta’s ‘one and happy memory’ of her hunting trip ‘all alone together’ with Jeremy in the Catskill mountains is accompanied, expanded and perhaps challenged by Jack’s performance of a nursery rhyme: Hunter, hunting hunter, Turns the tiger to a rabbit’s skin To wrap his mama Bunting in. (Selected Works, 133)

Nursery rhymes feature prominently in Barnes’s play and emphasise the uncanny nature of her family history, invoking yet perverting the notion of childhood ‘innocence’. When Elisha steps up to Augusta and, ‘tapping her with his closed hand’, asks ‘Who killed Cock Robin?’ Barnes

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conveys the atmosphere of malice, blame and reckoning in an economic and impersonal manner (Selected Works, 141). While the bleakness of her theme emphasises the dark, macabre element of nursery rhymes, their humorous and comforting elements endure. The combination of death and new life, cruelty and nurture found in the Baby Bunting rhyme perhaps communicates the ambivalence of family life more effectively than Augusta’s autobiographical narrative. The image of wrapping the mother in a rabbit skin suggests both smothering and protection, malice and care, and Jack’s substitution of ‘mama’ for the more conventional ‘baby’ emphasises the family’s distorted relationships. Equally, Barnes’s reworking of the rhyme changes the metre, thus interrupting the soothing rhythm of the original. Barnes’s reference to the tiger, from which emerges a rabbit skin, takes the Blakean symbol of experience and posits it as the origin for a gentler creature, destroying the stable boundaries between innocence and experience and violence and victimhood.31 Repetition In much psychoanalytic discussion of trauma, repetition is treated as a symptom of disturbance that must, through the creation of a narrative, be prevented. The essential repetitiveness of traumatic memory is famously stressed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Caruth notes how, for Freud, ‘the experience of a trauma repeats itself, exactly and unremittingly, through the unknowing acts of the survivor and against his very will’ (1996: 2). Trauma is indeed figured as a painfully unremitting and unwilled repetition in the image of ‘eye-baby’ that Jack claims Augusta will henceforth ‘carry to the grave’. Laub argues that the ‘ceaseless repetitions and reenactments’ of trauma relate to the fact that the traumatic event took place ‘outside the parameters of “normal” reality’ and so has ‘no beginning, no ending, no before, no during and no after’ (Felman and Laub, 1991: 69). Laub claims: Trauma survivors live not with memories of the past, but with an event that could not and did not proceed through to its completion, has no ending, attained no closure, and therefore, as far as its survivors are concerned, continues into the present and is current in every respect. (Felman and Laub, 1991: 69)

Laub proposes a therapeutic process of constructing a narrative and ‘re-externalizing the event’, which can ‘take effect only when one can articulate and transmit the story, literally transfer it to another outside oneself and then take it back again, inside’ (Felman and Laub, 1991: 69, emphasis in original). While The Antiphon shares Laub’s emphasis on

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articulating trauma in the presence of another, I think we might distinguish between his notions of ‘event’ and ‘story’ and the more ambivalent articulation suggested by Barnes, where ‘repetitions and reenactments’ of traumatic experience seem to serve some therapeutic function in themselves. The conventional understanding of repetition and trauma governs DeSalvo’s reading of The Antiphon, which maintains a hygienic distinction between normal/abnormal and healthy/unhealthy behaviours. DeSalvo sees Miranda’s re-enactment of past trauma as an undesirable but inevitable symptom of her identity as a victim of sex abuse: ‘Like every victim of incest, Miranda has internalized a sense of worthlessness, a compulsion to repeat the degrading experiences that gave her both the only attention she has had as a child and the only power she had known’ (1991: 304). But in her longer work, Conceived with Malice, DeSalvo emphasises the therapeutic value of an apparently different kind of repetition, the writing and revising process for Barnes: ‘Working and reworking the story of her life gave her a certain mastery over her trauma [. . .] This was a necessary stage for her healing’ (1994: 255). For DeSalvo, certain kinds of repetition – the re-enactment of sexually violent and traumatic events and the bad feelings associated with them – can only be the sign of a pathology, yet the therapeutic value of confession, where Barnes may situate herself as someone who has had things ‘done to her’, is taken for granted. The distinction here may be related to the temporal difference highlighted by Laub: only when Barnes re-externalises and historicises what has happened through creating a narrative can healing begin. By re-enacting violence, however, she is trapped within the endless cycle of unwilled repetition. DeSalvo thus makes the distinction, identified by Cvetkovich, ‘between “working through,” the successful resolution of trauma, and “acting out,” the repetition of trauma that does not lead to transformation’ (Cvetkovich, 2003: 164). Cvetkovich critiques this distinction by pointing not only to its apparent tautology (‘good responses to trauma are cases of working through; bad ones are instances of acting out’) but also by emphasising that performativity or ‘modes of acting out’ are a crucial resource for responding to trauma (2003: 164). Even Richard Espley, who, inviting us to dwell on the play’s obscurities, implicitly critiques the ‘working through’ model suggested by the work of DeSalvo and Ann Marie Wagstaff, relies on this distinction between good and bad repetitions. Espley argues that in such feminist biographical studies the ‘literary artefact becomes “scriptotherapy”, and its very annunciation of trauma renders it a healing triumph’ (2006: 189). Espley accurately identifies the utopian connection between

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speaking out and healing, yet he ultimately dismisses the play’s therapeutic value by focusing on the kind of repetitions that might be classed as ‘acting out’ rather than ‘working through’, such as Elisha and Dudley’s violence, and Augusta and Miranda’s deaths. The distinction between the two seems largely to be one of negativity versus positivity: the ‘hopelessly bleak plot rather questions attempts to celebrate the play as a brave rejoinder to patriarchal abuse and repression’ (Espley, 2006: 190). The play’s redemptive qualities are thus discounted because Espley cannot imagine any healing practices that incorporate negative affect. Like DeSalvo’s work, Espley’s essay ultimately treats the ritualised repetition of violence as an essentially bad, if inevitable, response to trauma. Cvetkovich, conversely, considers the possibility of a ‘queer healing practice [that] would turn negative affect or trauma on its head, but by embracing rather than refusing it’ (2003: 88–9). Cvetkovich discusses a controversial performance by the rock group Tribe 8 that included the lead singer, Lynn Breedlove, cutting off a strapped-on dildo with a large knife while performing a song about sexual abuse survivorhood. For Cvetkovich, this performance is significant because it ‘blurs the distinction between pro-sex practices, sexual violence, and incest survivorhood in order to reveal that their intimate connections may be productive rather than a cause for alarm’ (2003: 86). Cvetkovich challenges the view that ‘acting out’ trauma is necessarily harming (or a sign of harm) and suggests the ‘ambivalent power of repeated, and especially ritualised, violence to heal and/or perpetuate an original trauma’ and claims that the ‘violence’ of the performance can be understood as a ‘ritualized repetition that transforms earlier scenes of violence’ (2003: 87). Barnes’s use of the doll’s house scene to re-enact the trauma of abuse is important not just because it captures the performative dimension of traumatic memory but because it also involves a potentially therapeutic repetition of violence, especially for Augusta, who, placed in front of the house by Elisha, sits cross-legged and childishly plays with it. Seeing Titus shrunk and ‘tamed’, nothing but ‘a chip, a doll, a toy, a pawn’, is a source of painful pleasure for Augusta as she plays with a ‘stick hung with dolls’ of Titus’s mistresses (Selected Works, 182, 181, italics in original). This re-enactment is even more significant for Augusta because the stick in question seems to be the one with which Titus terrorised his family: Was this the stick that leapt me, gentlemen? Where now the stallion yard lay beating on the turf Its whistling vent? So proud of it he was He asked to be but laid beside it in the grave. (Selected Works, 182)

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The phallic implications of Titus’s fetishised stick are clear: it is an animal’s pizzle, which was historically used as a whipping instrument.32 The stick that Augusta wields is therefore a symbol of the patriarch’s sexual (and non-sexual) violence. In the act of possessing this stick (and feeling empowered) Augusta is re-enacting the scene of violence from the perspective of the family’s abuser. As a violent ritual involving identification with a perpetrator, Augusta’s actions might be compared to Tribe 8’s dildo-cutting. Both rituals, while locating power in the phallus, appropriate it in such a way that the association between phallus and penis is ultimately challenged. Most importantly, the acts fuse aspects of sadism and masochism in a way that defies simple notions of victimhood: ‘The violence of castration’, Cvetkovich notes, is directed as much at Breedlove herself ‘as it is externally, refusing any simple division between the subject and object of violence’ (2003: 86). As puppet-master, Augusta acts as Titus, appropriating his power, while participating in – and sharing – his humiliation. Her actions point towards the ambivalent but possibly therapeutic value of ritualised repetitions. An even more violent performance occurs just before the doll’s house scene when Dudley and Elisha don animal masks and enact a ritualised form of abuse of their mother and sister. The animal masks – of a pig and an ass – are, as I have suggested, less to do with deception and more about an affectively ambivalent and stylised mode of performance, containing elements of humour and cruelty. Indeed, the introduction of the masks to the scene by Barnes in September 1955 (in Copy 1) represents part of her ongoing attempt to make the brothers’ role increasingly stylised. In their earliest incarnation the masks are those of a kite (worn by Elisha) and a wolf (worn by Dudley). The masks produce caricatures rather than anonymity: the stage direction that they wear the masks ‘as if the playthings would make them anonymous’ suggests that their identities are indeed obvious (Selected Works, 175). The brothers perform the abuse that they have, one assumes, witnessed during their childhood, as Augusta is made to dance like a puppet and Miranda is put into a sexual position: Slap her rump and stand her on four feet! That’s her best position!’ (Selected Works, 176)

This scene became more sexual through Barnes’s revision, with the earliest drafts making no reference to Miranda being on all fours (a fact that challenges critical narratives of a playwright whose desire for frankness about the incestuous implications of her work was hampered

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by a prudish editorial team).33 This stylised re-enactment of abuse is disturbing because it does not provide ‘mastery’ for the women involved, yet it points to the complexity of emotions related to sexual violence – Elisha is weeping as he mauls Miranda. Importantly, the brothers were also victims of Titus’s abuse, and their appropriation of his role again imparts a sadomasochistic element to the play. Although the therapeutic value of such a violent repetition is not immediately clear, it should not be automatically dismissed because of the disturbing nature of the scene and the presence of negative affect. Instead, Barnes offers the reader a morally ambivalent, symbolic repetition that cannot be simply classified as ‘reworking’ yet relates powerfully to her project of communicating the complex mixed feelings within abused and abusive families. By suggesting that trauma is a performative structure whereby the past is witnessed as if for the first time in the present, I have understood Barnes’s play to challenge the rigid (and value-laden) temporal distinction between originality and repetition. This temporal logic is carried through at the level of Barnes’s own textual performances: just as The Antiphon enacts a traumatic past, it also enacts the literary past in the present through its ceaseless repetitions of both Barnes’s own work and the literary canon more generally. Kannenstine claims that, stylistically speaking, The Antiphon ‘look[s] back’ not only to the medieval Christian church, but to ‘the forms of Greek tragedy and early closet drama, and most directly revives the tone and grandeur of Elizabethan drama with a nod at the Jacobean tradition as well’ (1977: 151). I think that this ‘looking back’ in a literary, linguistic and stylistic sense relates to the more personal ‘looking back’ that the play takes as a theme. In her roughly typed ‘Notes toward a definition of The Antiphon’, dated ‘circa 1960’, Barnes stresses the importance of the play’s opening scene and adds: ‘It is as if the moment of this time were also in past time’. This double time frame captures not only the structure of traumatic memory but also tells us something about Barnes’s relationship with literary history. Kannenstine’s argument that The Antiphon represents an ‘effort to recapture the oral grandeur’ that Barnes apparently associated with pretwentieth-century theatre relies on an understanding of the past, originality and repetition that Barnes does not seem to share (1977: 142). Literary allusions and archaic forms and language do not function in the somewhat nostalgic manner that Kannenstine suggests: indeed, Barnes’s treatment of the past positively discourages nostalgia, despite readings that consider the play as a critique of modernity’s universal decay.34 While The Antiphon suggests an anti-American bias in the characterisation of Elisha, Dudley and Titus, Barnes’s representations of the past

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contest claims of any original great culture that could be destroyed by war or modernity. Barnes’s rendering of the past and Europe’s cultural heritage is theatrical and camp rather than respectful and elegiac. The ruined Burley Hall may contain ‘broken statues, man and beast’ but also includes humorous touches such as a ‘dressmaker’s dummy, in regimentals’ (Selected Works, 81, all italics in original). The idea of decayed grandeur is deflated by the theatrical paraphernalia filling the hall, the ‘flags, gonfalons, bonnets, ribbons and all manner of stage costumes’ (Selected Works, 81). And rather than serving as a solemn token of a lost grandeur, the ‘battered gilt mardi-gras crown’ suggests the carnivalesque of the Rabelaisian jester king (Selected Works, 81). Equally, the highmodernist engagement with myth is undermined by the figure of the half gryphon. The gryphon (or griffin) is a mythical creature dating from antiquity with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle, but in Barnes’s play its fairground origins as ‘a car in a roundabout’ add to the carnivalesque mood (Selected Works, 81). And the integrity of the original is called into question by Barnes’s architectural pastiche. The ‘ruins’ of the old family seat are a postmodern blend of different styles: the ‘paneless Gothic window’ contrasts with the classical ‘ruined colonnade’ (Selected Works, 81, 82). Although Kannenstine suggests that Barnes’s literary repetitions have a chronological and progressive aspect (she ‘taps the origins’ of modern drama and, it is implied, follows the historical high points of the form), it could be argued that The Antiphon, like Ryder and Ladies Almanack, offers a patchwork of allusions that bear resemblance with the postmodern architecture of Burley Hall. By depicting a theatricalised version of the past that incorporates its variousness, Barnes suggests that it is through repetition or ‘witnessing’ that the past may be truly read. Repetition and performance become the means by which culture, art and memory materialise. However, through the concept of ‘witnessing’ Barnes’s relationship with the past may be understood as distinct from parody, satire or Caselli’s notion of ‘collusion’. Although Barnes acknowledges the impurities of the past, these impurities are not ascribed a negative value and so may be read but not satirised. Equally, Barnes’s repetitions do not allow for a stable position on the past because this past can only be read through repetition in the present. I therefore would question readings (such as those by Louise DeSalvo and Penny Farfan) that ascribe an element of critique to The Antiphon’s repetitions.35 Caselli’s focus on ‘adulteration’ and ‘travesty’, which are not ‘opposed to a past able to work as origin or purity’, comes closer to articulating Barnes’s complex relationship to literary tradition. Caselli claims that Barnes’s ‘references and sources are never treated as a way of reshaping tradition (even

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when this implies fragmentation, as in Eliot’s poetry) but as a form of collusion with a past which, far from nostalgically pure, is tainting and compromising’ (2009: 197). Yet the act I term ‘witnessing’ is a generative form of recognition, a way of making the past in the present, and an affectively complex mode of reading which escapes the more paranoid vocabulary of ‘adulteration’, ‘travesty’ or ‘collusion’. The performative nature of memory is not suggested only by Barnes’s use of theatrical tropes, but by a more general, proto-Butlerian notion that the act of repetition creates that which it would seem to repeat, that the original memory does not exist without this repetition. But while Butler’s work on gender performativity emphasises the salience of parody – we are able to realise that something’s (that is, gender’s) coherence is fallacious through a series of (failed) repetitions – in the case of the trauma structure this logic is somewhat different. The traumatised subject has no ideological investment in maintaining or exposing the fiction of the original; rather her remembering makes the difference between past and present, original and repetition, beside the point. In this sense, Barnes’s modernist repetition of the past is not motivated by any satirical, parodic or expositional drive in relation to literary history. Witnessing is not a revelatory act but a more affectively complex form of recognition. This is suggested by The Antiphon’s series of repetitions from Barnes’s own corpus: the play repeats the characters, the family structure and the stories that Barnes had been telling throughout her career – most notably in Ryder, but also in the short fiction and one-act plays of her youth, such as ‘Three from the Earth’ and ‘A Passion Play’ (1918). Equally, the play contains a series of linguistic echoes from earlier works. For example, the phrases ‘I, with the single, she, the compound eye’ and ‘dial without hours’ are repetitions of ones used in Ladies Almanack to describe, respectively, Evangeline Musset and the sundial in her garden (Selected Works, 38, 12). James Scott finds allusions to Nightwood (he claims that the name Sylvia, featured in The Antiphon, is a reference to the little girl in Barnes’s 1936 novel) and ‘Kurzy of the Sea’ (through a reference to a mermaid) (1976: 129). Dudley’s reference to Miranda as ‘Queen of the Night!’ also functions as a self-conscious reference to the author’s most famous work (Selected Works, 131). Such repetitions function as invitations to Barnes’s reader, and point to the play’s pervasive structuring device of antiphony. This repetition only provides pleasure for the initiated reader: such referentiality only works – and importantly only exists as such – if it is recognised, received and remembered by the reader. In other words, for Barnes’s literary past to exist, it must be witnessed in the present.

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Witnessing as antiphony When Augusta throws herself over the doll’s house, beating it in anger and distress, these feelings are compounded by the fact that she has become a spectacle for some ‘stray travellers’ who have climbed into the gallery (Selected Works, 186). Yet if, as Bay-Cheng (2005) argues, Barnes makes watching the spectacles of violence and pain difficult or problematic, she also invites and requires our witness and antiphony. As Altman observes, the characters in The Antiphon ‘seem to fear both that someone is listening and that no one is listening’ (1991: 277). Barnes’s play thus dramatises how traumatic experience ‘simultaneously defies and demands our witness’ (Caruth, 1996: 5). But like much contemporary psychoanalytical work on trauma, The Antiphon ultimately suggests that testimony is dependent on the listener as much as the speaker. This antiphonic structure is implied in Dori Laub’s insistence that ‘testimonies are not monologues; they cannot take place in solitude. The witnesses are talking to somebody’ (Felman and Laub, 1991: 70–1, emphasis in original). Augusta comes to realise that she has been brought to Burley Hall to witness, that her presence is required for testimony to be produced. When Miranda makes an eloquent request to be heard, Augusta realises (with horror) that she must be the other to the speaking subject: ‘Oh my God! / To everybody I’m the other person!’ (Selected Works, 167). It is Jack, however, who truly grasps the necessity of acting as witness to his sister’s testimony and simultaneously points to the role of The Antiphon’s own audience. At the beginning of the first act, Jack notes Burley’s absence and, realising that Miranda has ‘no audience at all’, tells her that his ‘hands will have to be your clamour, lady’ (Selected Works, 83). Jack suggests the legal and juridical significance of the witness during his musings on justice: he claims that when he saw a judge drastically ‘abandon justice’ the ‘astounded air’ did not ‘gag up the verdict’ (Selected Works, 93). Jack’s comments make the point that justice is not ‘out there’ and that testimony cannot ‘take place in solitude’ but is in fact produced by witnessing. Seremetakis identifies the role of antiphony in establishing truth claims in her study of Inner Maniat society: antiphony is ‘a prescribed technique for witnessing, for the production/reception of jural discourse, and for the cultural construction of truth’ (1991: 100). The understanding that truth claims are indeed dependent on ‘the emotional force of pain and the jural force of antiphonic confirmation’ produces an emphatic shift from Western legal discourse, where ‘truth’ is established by a rigorous examination of the facts (Seremetakis, 1991: 120). Seremetakis notes

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Louis Gernet’s description of ancient Greek law as a ‘system of conventions in which the signifier tends to absorb the signified’ (Gernet, cited in Seremetakis, 1991: 102). As Seremetakis explains, Gernet’s analysis locates the construction of proof not ‘in the recovery of a referential situation in an inquiry; rather, truth lies in the ritualization of gestures and discourse that establish the authority of the witness as a guarantor’ (1991: 102). This location of authenticity and authority in the act of ritual itself seems better suited to an analysis of the witnessing called for in The Antiphon than the twentieth-century legal discourse favoured in some studies of incest and sexual abuse. Such a shift from an expressive to a performative model of meaning keeps in focus the insight that the factual specifics of abuse are not the most important part of Barnes’s text. Barnes does not locate significance in self-knowledge and a clear understanding of the past (values associated with confessional discourse) but rather emphasises the value of the ritualised performance of affect, a rhetorically powerful poetics and, crucially, the presence of the witness. While the juridical function of the witness is clear, the value of antiphony as described in the play is more various and complex. Augusta frequently uses a lexicon of economics to describe what she imagines Miranda to require. At the beginning of the third act she describes her daughter as My hoard of me, remission, recompense. See how she darkens; how compounds me. But does she not breathe short of ransom? (Selected Works, 190)

While it seems that Augusta might understand that her role as witness involves a transformation for both herself and Miranda, ‘ransom’ is too crude to sum up the notion of antiphony, as is the reckoning suggested in Augusta’s reference to the ‘nice matter of the closed account!’ (Selected Works, 219). Jack gets closer to defining the diverse roles and subject positions implied by Barnes’s exploration of antiphonic witnessing when he remarks: The scene is set but seems the actor gone. No tither, weeper, wait or cicerone; No beadle, bailiff, barrister, no clerk (Selected Works, 83)

The term ‘actor’ denotes the performative dimension of the antiphonic relationship, while ‘bailiff’, ‘barrister’ and ‘clerk’ suggest the range of juridical requirements of a witness. A ‘tither’ collects something she is

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due but which belongs to another, suggesting how the witness takes on another’s pain. The term ‘weeper’ implies the affective dimension of the relationship – the witness must not only feel the pain of the other but echo it in a choral response. The ritualistic aspect of this response is implied by the fact that the noun ‘weeper’ is usually only applied to someone weeping in a formal sense: one specific definition is ‘a hired mourner at a death-bed or funeral’ (OED). A ‘wait’ is an observer or watchman and, significantly, hired ‘waits’ provided a formal, ritualised and musical response to what they saw: one definition is a ‘watchman attached to the royal household who sounded the watch, etc., by the blowing of a pipe, trumpet, or other wind-instrument’ (OED). A ‘cicerone’ is a guide who can explain ‘antiquities and curiosities’, which points to the interpretative role of the witness (OED). And a ‘beadle’ is a herald, who brings the testimony into the world so that the traumatic event can be known. The layered and complex responsibilities of the witness are suggested in Seremetakis’s description of the Greek etymology of antifónisi (antiphony): Antiphony can refer to the construction of contractual agreement, the creation of a symphony by opposing voices. It implies echo, response, and guarantee. In Greek, the prefix anti- does not only refer to opposition and antagonism but also equivalence, ‘in place of,’ reciprocity, face-to-face. (1991: 102, emphasis in original)

While Bonnie Kime Scott notes that one definition of ‘antiphon’ is ‘the sympathetic vibration of strings on musical instruments’, Seremetakis’s description is even more suggestive because it incorporates the idea of difference within agreement, of the different and opposing notes within a symphony (Scott, 1993: 27). Although antiphony incorporates opposition, it also implies a turning-towards, an agreement or symphony resulting from an opposing call and response. Antiphony therefore corresponds to the non-dichotomous difference I observe as a persistent structure in Barnes’s thinking. As a repetition and a response, an echo and a reply, an opposition and an agreement, antiphony allows Barnes to capture the complexities of the witness’s role. Seremetakis describes how, during the mourning ritual, a soloist who ‘attains the deepest intensities of pain’ is accompanied by a chorus that ‘generates antiphonic responses’ (1991: 99). Equally, Laub describes the moment when the witness truly hears as a kind of musical response: he writes of the sudden, extra-linguistic ‘illuminations’ when he hears a ‘subtle melody’ from the traumatised subject (Felman and Laub, 1991: 63). Occasionally the melody will be lost, but at other times, he writes,

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I seize upon it and echo it in my response. I simply indicate that I know it, and thus make myself known as one who knows. The patient may dismiss it or pass over it in silence; yet there are times at which it is as though a chord is struck and an internal chorus, a thousand voices are set free. The other melody, that subtler music, then emerges, suddenly resounding loud and clear. (Felman and Laub, 1991: 63, emphasis in original)

During this process, Laub claims, the patient ‘names himself and asks against all odds for a reciprocal identification’ (Felman and Laub, 1991: 63). Thus Laub seems to characterise the moment of witnessing the trauma as both an antiphonal moment outside narrative or language and a moment of initiation. It is this kind of reciprocity that Miranda seeks in The Antiphon. Furthermore, it is also the kind of ‘initiation’ that Barnes demands of her audience, and in which she participates through her modernist witnessing of literary history. Miranda makes several speeches that elucidate the particularities of her desire for an antiphonic response. Towards the end of the play she yokes the values ‘purchase, governance, and mercy’ to ritualised economics of affect: ‘careful sorrow and observed compline’ (Selected Works, 214). The word ‘compline’ continues the play’s allusion to Christian (specifically Catholic) ceremony, but the explicitly musical emphasis in Seremetakis and Laub is reflected in Miranda’s observation that As the high plucked banks Of the viola rend out the unplucked strings below – There is the antiphon. (Selected Works, 214)

The proximity of the words ‘plucked’ and ‘unplucked’ suggests the transformation and reparation effected by antiphony. The ‘plucked accord’ is, for Miranda ‘the day, day fit for dying in’ (Selected Works, 214). While Miranda’s ‘unplucked strings’ speech is imbued with a certain elegiac quality, at the end of Act 2 she discusses antiphony with a greater urgency. Prior to the doll’s house scene Miranda makes a complex and rhetorically impressive speech about the importance of listening, hearing and feeling. The speech begins with the apostrophe ‘Hear me’, directed at Augusta and also, implicitly, at the audience too. Miranda wonders ‘if’ Augusta will actually hear ‘when’ she hears her testimony: she wants her to listen to her ‘spinning sorrows’, to see her ‘bitter vision’ and to be affected (Selected Works, 167). The difficulty of witnessing is suggested by the reference to the ‘infinitely distant, pining voice’ that Augusta, it

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is implied, must strain to hear (Selected Works, 167). The notion that the voice and the ‘sorrows’ of which it tells might be in the listener’s ear, ‘on the glacier of the eye’ or ‘the shutter of your heart’ suggests the corporeality of the act of witnessing (Selected Works, 167). To witness, it is suggested, entails taking on the other’s pain – it must be felt within the body. The speech continues: If the unleashed hand of Cicero, your hand Spreads to his creeping octave, on your wall, And having writ ‘non nobis’ in your script Moves on, then under the listing of the veil Either other head, empalmed, incline. Find her, if you find her, turn her: Stroke out misfortune’s fortune. (Selected Works, 167, italics in original)

The ‘creeping octave’ suggests the idea of a musical response and, specifically, the wish for a sympathetic chord. The reference to ‘non nobis’ picks up the allusion to Cicero and the idea of sympathy and community, of feeling not for or as oneself alone. This sympathy, the notion of feeling with, is also expressed as a physical act in the line ‘Either other head, empalmed, incline’. A vocabulary of moving and moving towards – inclining, empalming, turning, stroking – suggests the kind of affective response entailed in antiphony. Equally, ‘non nobis’ is significant as another example of religious ritual, referring to the short Latin hymn expressing humility. Miranda’s speech thus outlines the ritualised and embodied affective response she desires from her witness. Barnes considers the failure of antiphony, however, in Miranda’s almost biblical proclamation that He who, for fear, denies the called response Denies the singing and damns the congregation!’ (Selected Works, 208–9)

Miranda’s pain is exacerbated through its denial by Augusta, who repeatedly refuses to accept her own part in Miranda’s abuse and expresses her anger at the demands placed on her by the ritual of witnessing: I tire of all the downward obsequies, Lauds, canticles, requiems and masses; The upraised finger pointing zero— (Selected Works, 195)

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Augusta’s failure to meet pain with pain, sorrow with sorrow, and her rejection of the performative rituals that are required in the witnessing scheme Barnes proposes, are indeed depicted as a form of inaction that adds to Miranda’s hurt. When Miranda uncovers her mother’s face and finds that she has not been moved to tears, that the required response has not been displayed, she reveals her anger and hurt: What! not weeping after all! I had suspected it. There are, they say, strange cattle in a tear Go on another business than our own; And grazing, pull our sorrow up. (Selected Works, 204)

But while expressing her hurt at Augusta’s (lack of) response, Miranda also suggests affect’s ungovernable qualities. While ritualised performances – ‘lauds, canticles, requiems and masses’ – are central to the antiphonic structure of the play, there is still a sense that tears, as ‘strange cattle’, might wander from their owners, and produce grief in unexpected, and unmanageable, ways. The concept of antiphonic witnessing proposed by Barnes allows for and indeed demands an affective engagement with her play. However, such an engagement does not require an understanding of the precise details of the abuse suffered by Miranda or, more significantly, a biographical translation. Barnes knew that the history of her traumatic childhood was paradoxically transformed and created by its telling. My reconsideration of Barnes’s redrafting process indicates that her excision of certain factual details produced a valuable narrative complexity irreducible to a straightforward victim’s confession. This increased complexity is matched by an increased emphasis on the salience of theatrical metaphors, performance and ritual. Ritualised performances of affect offer a different kind of testimony from that found in conventional survivor discourse, a testimony that challenges received ideas about the value of disclosure. The incantatory nature of the play wrestles traumatic memory from the order of narrative coherence and the demands of factual sufficiency and offers it up to the reader/witness on the condition of a demanding initiation. This initiation is matched by Barnes’s own role as an initiated modernist witness, performing both literary history and her own writing past in a manner that is not parodic but allows us to read the past as the present. It is in Barnes’s final major work that the trauma structure is most pervasive. Yet while The Antiphon is Barnes’s bleakest, most disturbing work, the play still engages the reader’s sense of humour, and provides a certain pleasure through its wilfully anachronistic and extravagant verse. In 1954 Barnes

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claimed to have spent ‘three, considering, happy years’ on the play – a comment that must be weighed against her later claim to have written The Antiphon ‘with clenched teeth’ (Barnes to T. S. Eliot, 15 July 1954; Barnes to Willa Muir, 23 July 1961). As we shall see, such mixed feelings are crucial to Barnes’s exploration of trauma in her earlier attempt to articulate the experience of abusive family life. By turning to Ryder, I think we can begin to appreciate the full ambivalence of Djuna Barnes’s affective modernism.

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Chapter 2

Djuna Barnes Beside Herself: Mixed Feelings, Sentimental Modernism and Ryder

Like Proust, the reparative reader ‘helps himself again and again’. (Sedgwick, 2003: 150)

Sophia, the grandmother in Djuna Barnes’s 1928 best-selling family chronicle Ryder, covers the walls of her salon with ‘multitudinous and multifarious crayons, lithographs and engravings’: images of the people and things she has both loved and abhorred in her public and private lives (Ryder, 13).1 This image of irreducible besideness, of a multiplicity of narratives, texts, relations and feelings, is suggestive of the richly ambivalent reading experience provoked by Barnes’s novel: apparent contradictions need not be resolved but sit in productive tension. In suggesting that Ryder resists any totalising reading, I want to challenge the critical impulse to decode the novel in a singular manner through reference to the author’s biography, an impulse that has tended to guide those addressing themes of trauma and sexuality in the novel. In Ryder, auto/biography and fiction sit beside each other in a non-dichotomous relationship, a relationship that can attributed in part to the slippery distinction between ‘reality’ and ‘imagination’ that, as we have seen in the case of The Antiphon, characterises the trauma response. And just as Ryder offers fascinating insights into the affective complexities of childhood trauma, it is also characterised by a playful and pleasurable ‘witnessing’ of the literary past. I am interested in how traumatic witnessing sits beside Barnes’s repetitions of literary history, how the complex affective relationships to trauma that her novel imagines provide a critical language for describing these repetitions, in particular her generative performances of the nineteenth-century sentimental tradition. Focusing on affect as a relational, additive and impermanent phenomenon allows us to consider experience and feeling beyond the boundaries of the stable, coherent subject often demarcated by biography. Such an

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approach contrasts with hermeneutic strategies that seek to decisively untangle the novel’s many narrative, aesthetic and affective threads through biographical investigation or Freudian psychosexual decoding. Any clarity that might be produced through such strategies comes at the cost of disavowing the complex relations between pleasure and unpleasure we find in the text and is often reliant, I would suggest, on reading Ryder’s rich play of affect, sensation and experience through a rigidly organising moral schema. Readers who wish to reveal an autobiographical incest narrative beneath the pleasurable humour of Ryder must focus on the ‘coded silence’ of a work that troubles the concept of coding and relies on the principle of textual abundance, or besideness, rather than the principle of lack or absence. By considering affect rather than biography or ‘fact’, we might capture the way that pleasure and pain sit beside each other in Ryder. And this approach might help make sense of the apparent disjunction between what we think we know about Barnes’s family history – that it was physically abusive and psychically damaging – and the often happy experience of reading her fictional family chronicle. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has taught us about the powerful and liberating distinction between ‘reparative’ and ‘paranoid’ reading, and the contrasting reading practices I articulate in this chapter are informed by her insights. The terms ‘paranoid’ and ‘reparative’ correspond respectively to the paranoid-schizoid and depressive ‘positions’ described by the object relations psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, and are imagined by Sedgwick as ‘changing and heterogeneous relational’ critical stances (2003: 128). Sedgwick suggests the salience of the word ‘beside’ in an attempt ‘to explore some ways around the topos of depth or hiddenness, typically followed by a drama of exposure’ that characterises the reading practices associated with the paranoid position (2003: 8). Sedgwick’s spatial language is helpful because it is precisely this emphasis on depth that has governed previous readings of Ryder’s engagement with traumatic family history. And, indeed, the surface relations implied by the term ‘beside’ are crucial to understanding why Ryder resists such hermeneutic impulses. While Sedgwick’s paranoid reader is governed by a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, the desire of the reparative impulse is ‘additive and accretive’ (2003: 124, 149). Indeed, Sedgwick even includes Djuna Barnes in a list of writers who demonstrate the reparative impulse in their excessive, affectively various, disorientating and ventriloquistic texts. The ‘additive and accretive’ habits Ryder displays are both pleasurable and pedagogical for the reader, as Barnes invites us to delight in the narrative and affective multiplicity of Ryder, to experience its traumatic horrors and its bawdy humour.

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Ryder’s combination of humour and pathos might be better understood if we read the novel alongside Barnes’s other significant publication of 1928, the blithe Ladies Almanack. Considering the Almanack’s terrific Evangeline Musset beside Wendell Ryder, as a kind of intertextual sibling rather than a polar opposite or a corrective figure, helps us to register our mixed feelings about the abusive patriarch. And a principle of besideness indeed governs representations of Wendell within Ryder, as narratives of his birth and life proliferate. Crucially, Ryder interrogates the models of coherent subjectivity and narrative integrity upon which the ‘auto/biographical’ family chronicle would seem to depend. Barnes participates in the meta-fictional playfulness of the picaresque genre and explores the ways in which texts and lives constitute each other. Furthermore, Ryder draws our attention to forms of bodily contact and bodily process that suggest the porousness and contingency of subjective boundaries. The modes of reading subjectivity and experience I will elaborate in the first half of this chapter have a particular significance when applied Ryder’s Chapter 24, ‘Julie Becomes What She Had Read’, which has been subject to intense biographical speculation and psychosexual interpretation. In this chapter, Wendell Ryder’s young daughter (often read as the author herself) has a traumatic dream about the death of another young girl. I want to consider the affective complexities of Chapter 24 in relation to its compelling intertextuality: specifically, its relationship with the sentimental fictions of the previous century. As a form of fiction that deals with childhood trauma (including death, illness, separation from family members and abuse by adults) and emphasises an embodied form of reading, the sentimental novel is a crucial cultural resource for reading Ryder. The ‘sentimental modernism’ of my title of course recalls Suzanne Clark’s (1991) book of the same name but, as I have already suggested, my understanding of Barnes’s modernist entanglements with sentimentalism implies a quite different relationship between the two terms. Barnes’s modernism is neither a continuation nor a repudiation of the sentimental project, but a form of processing by which the complexities of these earlier texts are retrospectively understood. Barnes offers a generative, transformative and non-dichotomous reading of the sentimental novel that allows us to witness its queer possibilities. This queerness resides in the way sentimental fiction gestures towards the complex sexualities invested in childhood and invites our recognition of the traces of pleasure that might be found in even the most painful and traumatic scenarios.

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Reading for the Sense; or, ‘Reach not beyond the image’ The principle of ‘besideness’ I identify in the description of Sophia’s wall in fact stands in tension with a model in which depth is the privileged route to knowledge of the subject. On the one hand, Barnes teases her reader to plumb the depths of the text and uncover the ‘secret’ of Sophia: Indeed, Sophia’s walls, like the telltale rings of the oak, gave up her conditions, as anyone might have discovered an they had taken a bucket of water to it, for she never removed, she covered over. At forty these pictures were an inch deep, at sixty, a good two inches from the wall; the originals were, as she herself was, nothing erased but submerged. ‘This is the secret of the amusing woman,’ she said to her son Wendell, who was to become in the end her only courtier, the last of the ears open to her fading wit. (Ryder, 13)

Yet this palimpsestic notion of life-writing – and the concomitant idea that biographical secrets are not lost but rather buried, accessible only to the penetrating reader – is challenged by our experience of reading both this passage in particular and the novel more generally. Barnes provides the reader with an exhaustive inventory of the texts on Sophia’s wall, and those which the narrative designates as ‘beneath’ are actually, on the pages of the novel as we read them, ‘beside’ one another, forming, as Barnes’s narrator puts it, ‘a conglomerate juxtaposition, and under all smiling in forlorn inevitability, Beatrice Cenci, Shakespeare and the Divine Dante’ (Ryder, 14). The image of the smiling faces of the figures at the bottom emphasises their paradoxical besideness: by noting their facial expression, Barnes encourages us to read them as if they are at the surface. And Sophia’s papered wall also sits ‘beside’ a more conventional visual display of family history: the ‘twelve oval framed engravings’ of her father’s forefathers which he regards with pride as they hang in a linear and (it is implied) chronological arrangement along the corridor (Ryder, 7). This reverential, teleological and patriarchal approach to biography is challenged by Barnes’s novel, but its inclusion is important: it is not replaced or erased by Sophia’s wall, but rather the two approaches are set in relation. Many readers have emphasised Ryder’s autobiographical qualities and have succumbed to the obvious temptation to read the work as a novelised depiction of Barnes’s family life. This has at times involved an undertheorised conception of the relationship between life and text in which critics assume the existence of a singular, stable biographical truth that is revealed (or hidden in order that it might be revealed) by the novel.2 While Anne B. Dalton (1993) attempts to decode the novel

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to find Barnes’s hidden incest narrative, Herring ‘take[s] the liberty’ of using Ryder to fill in missing details in his biography of Barnes (1995: 313, n. 2). Despite this shared biographical emphasis there has been, as Susan Edmunds points out, disagreement ‘about where and how to locate the factual’ in Ryder (1997: 219). This difficulty in determining the biographical facts of the novel is perhaps not surprising if we consider Ryder’s challenge to the existence of definitive truths about lives that can be explained by single, progressive narratives. My focus on besideness and multiplicity therefore represents a challenge to readers who wish to extract from the novel a singular biographical and narrative truth and, in doing so, often emphasise what is missing, hidden or silent. An unequivocal example of child abuse, where the sharply defined figures of perpetrator and victim can be identified, is a crucial missing or hidden piece of information for Dalton who, in a similar manner to the early feminist critics of The Antiphon discussed in Chapter 1, attempts to impart narrative and moral clarity to the text. In a footnote to an article focusing on Ryder’s hidden incest narrative, Dalton imagines a missing document that might provide textual stability and align fiction with supposed biographical fact. Dalton notes that the drafts to Ryder have been lost, which ‘is unfortunate since drafts of Nightwood and The Antiphon reveal a great deal about Barnes’ struggles to write about sexual abuse’ (1993: 177, n. 10). And Marie Ponsot argues that Barnes’s reader should focus on the ‘obscure’ passages surrounding Julie, the apparent Djuna figure of the novel. A significant area of focus for Ponsot and Dalton is therefore Chapter 24, which Ponsot describes as follows: It begins and continues with a dream, nightmare, and vision flowing in Julie’s mind, and ends in an absolutely abrupt leap to brief realistic dialogue between Sophia and Wendell, who are suddenly beside Julie as she sleeps. It’s not the beginning, but the end, of an event Ryder nowhere describes. If we ask, ‘What happened?’ we get no answer. That blank enlivens the question and makes it, though hidden, central to the novel. (1991: 97)

Ponsot goes on to argue that the big piece of information this chapter contributes is in the shape of a nothing: a gap in the action, an important gap, a gap that corresponds to a gap in the consciousness of Julie, who is the speaker of most of the chapter. (1991: 102)

In focusing on perceived gaps in the narrative, Dalton and Ponsot are acknowledging the history of enforced silence by victims of sexual abuse, and so their projects (Dalton’s in particular) are lent urgency by

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the imperative to uncover hidden abuse. While this is an important, if not unproblematic, focus for feminism, Dalton and Ponsot’s emphasis on hiddenness and factual specifics seems to ignore the novel’s challenge to such a mode of reading. Like Edmunds I take issue with such biographical and Freudian feminist readings of Julie’s dream partly because I find such methodology remarkably similar to that which I identify as the object of Barnes’s critique. Edmunds reads Ryder as a critical engagement with the US welfare state’s reform projects, and indeed suggests the similarities between ‘the appeal to fact, the exposure of secrets [.  .  .] and the self-appointed mission of correction’ in some Barnes criticism (Dalton is her key example) and ‘the self-authorizing strategies of the Progressive reformer’ that Ryder critiques (2008: 61). I find such strategies problematic simply because they are irreconcilable with the theory of reading that Ryder proposes. Unlike the depth model that Barnes often invokes in order to reject, her work resists explanation in absolute terms and encourages the preservation rather than the reconciliation of ambivalence. By focusing on what is hidden and unspoken in Ryder, the intricacies at the surface of the novel become invested with a kind of negative value: they must be disregarded or distrusted in order that we might discover the real meaning of the text.3 Buried beneath such surface play, it is suggested, is the biographical truth of the novel: a narrative of a child’s abuse at the hands of her father. Dalton argues that Barnes’s ‘fantastic range of styles’ may have been meant ‘consciously or unconsciously, to deflect attention from the passages relating to sexuality and sexual abuse’ (1993: 166). Instead of focusing on such ‘gaps’, I am interested in how the complexities of ‘sexuality and sexual abuse’ are present at the very surface of Barnes’s playful text. We might better appreciate why ‘gaps’ are not necessarily loci of meaning in Ryder by understanding that for Barnes the issue of hiddenness or textual lack is connected to the problem of censorship. Dalton claims that Barnes adopted the practice of ‘encoding’ material about ‘taboo experiences such as lesbianism and the sexual abuse of children’, deliberately making her work ‘indecipherable and impenetrable’ in order that she might escape censorship (1993: 163). Not only does Dalton’s linkage of child abuse and lesbianism under the heading of ‘taboo experience’ seem inaccurately monolithic, but her argument is also problematic in the case of a text where sexually frank, even bawdy, material may be found at the very surface. Indeed, Ryder did not escape censorship, and Barnes’s polemical Foreword paints a picture of textual sufficiency and completeness interrupted by forced expurgation: ‘Where such measures have been thought necessary, asterisks have been employed, thus making it matter for no speculation where sense, continuity, and beauty

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have been damaged’ (Ryder, vii). The reader’s hermeneutic impulse is therefore contained to precise points where context makes it clear that the asterisks stand in for bawdy comedy rather than serious (biographical) information, and ‘speculation’ elsewhere is discouraged. In forcing her reader to note ‘the havoc of this nicety’, Barnes implies that, were it not for censorship, Ryder would be entirely self-present and complete (Ryder, vii). Furthermore, Barnes shows a keen awareness of how factual sufficiency and narrative stability are fetishised by the biographically minded, truth-seeking reader. While playing Beethoven on the piano, Wendell’s son Elisha speculates that the composer ‘had something to do with his father’: It was said that the story lay somewhere bitten into a razor blade, but the razor could never be found. Was that the secret place in his father, not telling, hiding it forever, hinting the story and hiding the proof? (Ryder, 221)

This unorthodox biographical document – the razor blade on which Wendell engraved the fanciful story of his conception by Beethoven – remains a tantalising mystery for Elisha and renders him a somewhat ‘paranoid’ reader. Barnes deftly invokes the common biographical theme of the seductive, elusive piece of information that promises a secret, definitive truth. The missing document that promises to reveal all is the significant biographical fetish that is satirised in Orlando (also published in 1928) when Woolf’s narrator reveals that the most crucial evidence relating to the time of Orlando’s career ‘when he played a most important part in the public life of his country’ was burnt in the tumult of revolution (2000: 74). Here, the ‘truth’ about Orlando has a specific but inaccessible location, and what is lost or absent is deemed the most important and illuminating information: ‘Just when we thought to elucidate a secret that has puzzled historians for a hundred years, there was a hole in the manuscript big enough to put your finger through’ (Woolf, 2000: 74). Significantly, the most important event in Orlando’s life – his ‘death’ and subsequent rebirth, the seven-day slumber from which he awakens with an ‘imperfect recollection of his past life’ – also lacks documentation (Woolf, 2000: 39). The importance of the episode in question seems to correspond to its obscurity: ‘Yet it is dark, mysterious, and undocumented; so that there is no explaining it. Volumes might be written in interpretation of it; whole religious systems founded on the signification of it’ (Woolf, 2000: 38). What is ‘dark, mysterious and undocumented’ is therefore what, through speculation and hermeneutic inquiry, produces the most biographical narrative. Woolf

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and Barnes, both engaged in modernist ‘life-writing’ projects that blur the boundaries between subject and text, display an acute awareness of the hermeneutic drives associated with certain reading practices. Such a degree of sophistication, I suggest, renders problematic Dalton’s speculation about a missing document that will unlock the secrets of Ryder. Ryder does not simply negate or parody such a focus on the secret, hidden or lost, but offers a different reading model. The novel’s reader, unlike Elisha, has already been told the story of Beethoven and the razor blade, which in fact sits beside another narrative of Wendell’s narrative. In Chapter 6, Wendell’s mother Sophia narrates the first version, which itself undergoes a kind of textual multiplication. The first explanation, that Sophia became pregnant by her Latin teacher, has possible biographical sources (Barnes’s grandmother Zadel became pregnant at sixteen by her tutor, Henry Budington) but serves equally as a literary allusion (to Fielding’s 1749 novel Tom Jones, which Barnes identified as an intertext for her work).4 Sophia’s second explanation of Wendell’s conception indeed relates back to the figure of Beethoven, whom she claims impregnated her in a dream: I was in the temple of music and saw one coming toward me in a long robe, his hands behind him. His large head was set about with lank grey hair, and I knew him to be Beethoven, for the likeness of him was on every pillar in that temple. (Ryder, 36)

There is no single, authoritative narrative about Wendell’s conception but rather different interpretations of the same event that sit beside each other in a horizontal rather than vertical relationship. And the teleology commonly inscribed in narratives about lives is eschewed as cause and effect become redundant in Barnes’s scheme of overdetermination. The value of searching for a stable biographical referent outside the text is challenged in Chapter 47, the title of which – ‘Going To and Coming From’ – points to its multi-directional network of textuality. In this chapter, Wendell is asked to explain his polygynous lifestyle to the authorities, but attributes the paternity of the children to a character of his own invention named ‘Arthur’. With his red hair and beard ‘like a prophet’s’, Arthur is similar enough to Wendell to suggest Barnes’s playful over-representation, whereby she offers different versions of the same characters (Ryder, 214). In Wendell’s narrative, Arthur tells his wife a story (a story within a story within the novel), which he suggests takes place in Patagonia, but when his wife suggests that this is too far away he notes that ‘the same thing took place in Sparta’ (Ryder, 216).

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When she objects to the setting ‘among the heathen’, he suggests ‘the country of Connecticut’, which meets with her approval and is of course the setting for Barnes’s novel and the Ryders’ home (Ryder, 216).5 Arthur then begins the story of two women, Molly and Eva, who form a parallel with Amelia and Kate and, it is implied, with Arthur’s wife and another woman. Such infinite substitutability in both setting and characters suggests the difficulty in locating specific factual referents outside of the text: we are told so many different versions of narratives that extracting a single truth becomes unthinkable. The expositional and hermeneutic drives associated with a particular kind of biographical reading are challenged by Barnes’s blurring of the distinction between subject and text, a distinction upon which conventional biographical reading and writing might be thought to rest. It is not merely the case that Wendell, like all the major characters in Ryder, is represented by ‘a conglomerate juxtaposition’ of texts and as such cannot be understood by one narrative alone; rather, Barnes suggests that such texts do not reveal or record Wendell but in fact create him. In Chapter 10, the mock-Chaucerian ‘The Occupations of Wendell’, Wendell Ryder speaks as ‘Dan Wendell’. Mediated through Barnes’s medieval pastiche, Wendell speaks about himself in a way that suggests the importance of identification and imagination in his self-fashioning, as he thinks of himself by thinking of others: For at my every turn, and every touch, I do within me see another man (Ryder, 57)

His self-imagining is idealistic and romantic, as he (mentally) performs a number of identities: A king in robes, a swineheard with a sty, A pickpocket, a beggar and a priest (Ryder, 57)

That these fantastic identities have their basis in literature is suggested later in the chapter in the Canterbury-esque ‘Tale’ told by Wendell. Here Barnes underscores the importance of reading in particular to imagination, identification and self-fashioning: And when this passed, he to his books y-stored For he would live both heren and abroad, In China now, in Persia now, and now No place at all that common knightës trow; In Íreland, in Greenëland and Wales,

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A traveller in mind of hills and dales He had heard tell of. (Ryder, 58–9)

The interdependent relationship between texts and selves is further emphasised by the similarities between Wendell’s literary-inspired identifications and those of Cervantes’s Don Quixote in the novel that began the picaresque tradition Ryder continues. In the first chapter of Don Quixote (1605–15), Cervantes describes how his hero ‘gave himself up to the reading of books of knight errantry’ (31). Reading leads to action and self-fashioning as Don Quixote decides, to paraphrase the title of Ryder’s Chapter 24, to ‘become what he has read’, ‘following in every way the practice of the knights errant he had read of’ (Cervantes, 1986: 33). Barnes’s invocation of the picaresque genre (and the simple fact of her intertexuality in this context) suggests the importance of reading in creating a subject, thus complicating any naive conceptions of the relationship between lives and texts. Barnes’s picaresque family chronicle therefore seems to resist the direct and singular relationship between image and referent and the concomitant narrative coherence that is implied by ‘decoding’. Dalton provides, I think, a false narrative coherence when she argues that the ‘aetiology of Julie’s dream is real – resulting from the father’s abuse’ (1993: 168). Such a teleological reading of the narrative has been countered by critics identifying the characteristics I understand as central to Barnes’s representational ‘besideness’. Edmunds argues that, in keeping secret the exact relationship of Julie to what she sees as the novel’s increasingly prolific narratives of a virgin’s violation, ‘Barnes denies her readers access to a “real” originary event to which the figural play of her text might be referred and through which it might be contained’ (2008: 62). In an essay that considers Ryder as a performance of ‘narrative drag, a kind of literary cross-dressing’, Ann Martin argues that Barnes presents ‘an excess of signification through a layered performance of personae’ (2000: 106).6 While this ‘excess of signification’ makes Barnes’s novel inhospitable to readings that think in terms of aetiology, affective readings allow traumatic experiences to be understood in quite different terms. Rather than focusing on factually coherent ‘incidents’, at which we can only guess and, in guessing, risk inscribing a simplistic and even moralistic narrative, Barnes’s text points us in the direction of affects: the feelings and sensations that are not hidden but sit beside – and often in tension to – each other on the surface of the text. As we shall see, this mode of reading applies particularly to the text’s key affective tableau, the dream sequence of Chapter 24, but it challenges

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more generally the assumption that the dream is the ‘royal road to the unconscious’, the site where hidden psychological secrets might be uncovered. While biography and Freudian psychoanalysis might value highly the information about selves that can be gained from dreams, the meta-fictional picaresque literature that influenced Ryder does not treat them in exactly the same way. For example, the playful ending of Don Quixote sees the characters try to distinguish themselves from their literary counterparts in a text within the text. Don Quixote’s complaint that ‘any other Don Quixote and any other Sancho Panza are a mockery and a dream’ functions as a joke in a text where dreams and ‘reality’ prove impossible to distinguish (Cervantes, 1986: 927). Ellen M. Anderson reads Don Quixote as ‘one of the earliest and most complex examples of fictional life-writing’ and a text in which ‘history, story, dream and enchantment are not semantic opposites but neighbours in a spectrum of experience’ (1992: 173, 178). Barnes’s picaresque, fictionalised auto/ biography suggests a similar ‘spectrum of experience’, where dreams and fantasies sit alongside other kinds of narratives, providing alternative but no more or less privileged versions of events or experiences. The multiple narrative functions of dreams are suggested in Chapter 20, ‘Amelia Dreams of the Ox of a Black Beauty’, where the dream serves as a response to the birth of her child, who is black: Now it was, peradventure, an effort, naïve in its way, no doubt, and circuitous, as is the way of a woman who would set a mighty wrong to rights, to get the black man the attention of the Lord, and a place in his mercies, she having been troubled of the way Wendell said of her last, ‘It’s black.’ It was also, perhaps, and who can deny but that she had justice on her side, an effort to retake Wendell in his own colors. Further than this, surely no mind can go, remembering that Amelia was a girl, country-born, all the days of her life, and well rounded in restrictions. (Ryder, 98)

The narrator seems to provoke a psychosexual reading of the dream with her ironic comment that ‘Further than this, surely no mind can go’ and her use of arguably crude Freudian symbols such as a ‘great keyhole’, towers and of course the ‘great fair ox of a Black Beauty’ himself (Ryder, 97, 98). However, such symbols are anything but hidden and indeed suggest a parodic approach to psychosexual coding where, it is implied, every mind can readily go. Instead, the other explanations offered for the dream – which encompass the social, political, and judicial – are at least as convincing as the Freudian approach.7 Rather than positing the Freudian psychosexual interpretation as the way to read dreams, Barnes suggests a number of alternatives to sit beside this approach. And equally, because dreams need not always or only be read

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as keys to the unconscious, dream sequences might sit beside other kinds of narratives rather than maintaining a hierarchical position in relation to ‘lesser’, non-psychological narratives.8 Sophia’s ‘dream’ of Wendell’s conception represents just one part of a ‘spectrum of experience’ standing beside different versions of the same event. The figure of Beethoven is at once a spectral image and a ‘real’ and recurring figure who makes things happen in the narrative. Just as he is known by both his repeated image on the pillars and his actual physical features, the ‘large head’ and ‘lank grey hair’, the ghostly and corporeal combine in the act of conception and reproduction: he ‘melted into [Sophia] on [her] human side’ and, as Wendell puts it, Sophia ‘cohabited with a mirage and brought forth a son’ (Ryder, 36). To try to distinguish the ‘real’ from the representational, fictional or spectral would be a rather laboured and reductive way to read such a passage, and a more useful approach is suggested by the narrator of Ryder’s opening chapter, who warns us in the authoritative but benevolent voice of the King James Bible, to ‘Reach not beyond the image’ (Ryder, 3). The narrator tells us to ‘Go not with fanatics who see beyond thee and thine [. . .] – thy life and the lives that thou begettest, and the lives that shall spring from them’ (Ryder, 3). Instead, we are guided towards ‘lesser men, who have for all things unfinished and uncertain, a great capacity, for these shall not repulse thee, thy physical body and thy temporal agony, thy weeping and thy laughing and thy lamenting’ (Ryder, 3). As Tyrus Miller observes, these opening lines cut ‘against the grain of modernism’s desire to bring to speech the wordless “depths” of meaning’, and indeed serve as an introduction ‘not just to Ryder but to [Barnes’s] whole career as a novelist’ (1999: 167). Barnes warns against hermeneutics and the search for grand narratives, against cosmic certainties and universal truths, and advocates instead a focus on the bodily, the affective, the immediate and the uncertain. Like the more famous narrative of the virgin birth, the value of Sophia’s story might be dependent on a suspension of disbelief: proving the factual ‘truth’ of the story is not the point. Barnes indeed expresses her investment in phenomenology at the expense of epistemological certainty in decidedly religious tones: ‘For some is the image, and for some the Thing, and for others the Thing that even the Thing knows naught of; and for one only the meaning of That beyond That’ (Ryder, 4). It is by resisting the desire to know ‘That beyond That’ that we might, I suggest, better appreciate the complexity of experience as it is communicated in the novel. Part of the value of the affective focus that I want to bring to Ryder is that, unlike much psychoanalysis in the Freudian tradition, it involves an emphasis on ‘the Thing’ itself. Silvan Tomkins, considering the

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significance of interocular experience and noting the taboo on mutual looking, writes: Psychoanalysis, surprisingly, had little to say about this taboo. It generated the concept of the eye as a symbol for the penis, as in the classical interpretation of the Oedipus myth. This, we think, underestimates the role of the eye itself in sexual experience. (2008: II, 374)

Through such a mode of theorising we might read the complex representations of experience at work in Ryder without thinking in terms of depth and hiddenness and without relying on a system of singular substitution, where one thing stands for another. A similarly useful theoretical conceit for the kind of reading I am articulating is provided by Jill Bennett, who has discussed the concept of ‘sense memory’ as a way of appreciating representations of trauma without searching for specific facts and events. ‘Sense memory’ or ‘deep memory’ is a category borrowed from the Holocaust survivor and poet Charlotte Delbo who identified it as an alternative to ordinary or ‘common’ memory, which takes the form of intelligible narrative (Bennett, 2005: 25). Sense memory, which for Delbo ‘registers the physical imprint of the event’, does not narrate a specific event or ‘reflect on past experience – although it is undoubtedly motivated by such experience – but rather registers the lived process of memory’ (Bennett, 2005: 25, 39). Sense memory is not therefore a mode that lends itself to questions of aetiology, it ‘does not make a claim to represent originary trauma – the cause of the feeling – but to enact the state of experience of post-traumatic memory’ (Bennett, 2005: 40). As I have suggested, Barnes’s novel avoids the simple narrative movement from cause to effect by offering many versions of the same event. And in Chapter 24 in particular, narrative coherence is eschewed in favour of a mode of representation, centred around the affects, which preserves the ambivalence of traumatic experience. I want to turn briefly to a section of the novel in which affective reading is posited as a response, perhaps even a reparative, to the dead-end of biographical investigation. In Chapter 43, ‘Timothy Strives Greatly with a Whore’, Wendell’s son repeatedly harangues the unnamed whore in an attempt to find out if she has repented for her transgressions. The whore refuses Timothy’s inquiries with her insistent ‘no’, leading him to despair: ‘God’s trouble! [. . .] wherein shall I find you! (Ryder, 185). The whore is never ‘found’ and the chapter ends with a powerful response to such anxious questioning in the shape of Timothy’s perturbing yet humorous fantasy of one hundred laughing women: ‘And they all turned over on their backs and laughed, and the sound was everywhere and

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even, that no one took more cadence to herself than her sister’ (Ryder, 189). This choreographed laughter is the culmination of the teasing, comic ribaldry with which the whore had set the tone of the chapter, and offers not individualised psychology but a collective representation of affect, providing a different but no less significant reward for the reader than that granted by the satisfaction of the hermeneutic impulse. The failure of biographical certainty, in both Timothy’s inquiries and the novel as a whole, is not therefore a source of disappointment. The women’s laughter is no mere compensatory response to epistemological failure but rather serves as a powerful alternative to depth psychology. ‘Bargain not in unknown figures,’ the narrator of Chapter 1 advises; ‘Let thy lips choose no prayer that is not on the lips of thy congregation’ (Ryder, 4). In Ryder, like The Antiphon, Barnes suggests that individual subjectivity should not be privileged over collective forms of expression and, as in the sentimental fictions that Barnes asks her readers to remember throughout Ryder, feeling may be understood within certain conventional frameworks. Yet equally, Ryder points to particularities of bodily manifestations of feeling, as when our narrator proposes: Yet think not, when thy stays creak and thy lachets loosen and thy hands go forth in grief, that they are as the man who weeps beside thee, without altering of his breathing, or loosening of his belly strap; for it is given some to come out of their skins, and for others to dwindle therein, and thou art not the one to wonder on such matters. (Ryder, 4)

The affective emphasis of Ryder challenges received ideas that associate life-writing with a hermeneutic impulse centred around supposed factual lacunae and ‘obscure recesses’. Rather than leading her reader along the route of making sense, Barnes encourages her reader to just sense.

Sponges, urns and grotesque bodies: Ryder beside Musset If a ‘conglomerate juxtaposition’ of texts and narratives constitute the eponymous protagonist of Barnes’s Ryder, an equally abundant juxtaposition of feelings governs the reader’s response to this character. The understanding of Wendell as simply an abusive father, towards whom one may feel only rage or disgust, is troubled by the way that identifications in Barnes’s text often work along the lines of non-moralistic, non-narrative bodily contact. Extending my focus on besideness, I want to think about how subjects in Ryder are read through a kind of touching, often related to the reader’s own bodily response of laughter. I am interested in how Barnes’s focus on bodies and the relationships between

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bodies makes it difficult to entirely repudiate Wendell. Similarly, the ways in which the bodily activities of the sexually promiscuous protagonist might be read beside those of Dame Evangeline Musset, heroine of Barnes’s Ladies Almanack, also render our feelings about Wendell significantly complex. The mixed feelings provoked by Wendell are suggested by Barnes’s illustration to ‘Going to and Coming From’ (Figure 2.1), which also adorns the front cover of the major 1990 Dalkey Archive reprint of the novel. The picture shows Wendell’s fictional doppelganger Arthur holding his wife and, if we match it to the description in the text, represents him protectively shielding her from the sun. However, as Irene Martyniuk suggests, the illustrations in Ryder are often at cross-purposes with the text. Read independently, the protective gesture of the larger male figure could also be taken as an image of a man about to strike a woman: although the man is smiling, the position of the outstretched arm in the drawing is somewhat ambiguous. And indeed, the image of the tall corn sheaves among which the figures sit recalls the phallic crops of Ryder’s ‘Rape and Repining’ chapter, and so brings male violence to mind (although these crops are indeed rather withered and dry). Furthermore, the beckoning arm might be interpreted as a welcoming gesture to the reader, as a visual representation of a benign narratorfigure offering up a particular scene for our contemplation, or as a more self-satisfied gesture indicating the kind of god-like grandiosity exhibited by Wendell. When situated above the novel’s title on the cover of the book the image immediately suggests an illustration of the novel’s protagonist, Wendell Ryder. The biographically minded reader might also read the illustration as a representation of Wald Barnes, which might in turn provoke a reading which stresses the possibility of violence or grandiosity in the scene. The figure in the illustration is therefore at once Arthur (and so a character within a story within the novel), Wendell (as a character within the novel and a fictionalised version of Wald Barnes) and also, perhaps, Wald Barnes. The principle of besideness on which Ryder works means that none of these readings need be privileged, and the confusion between the different (and apparently multiplying) textual figures challenges any assumptions of a single coherent biographical referent outside the text. Furthermore, the figure incorporating all of these subjects is open to contradictory affective interpretation. Our mixed feelings about Wendell are produced in part by Barnes’s participation in the picaresque genre, which encourages us to meet the hero’s bathetic fall, sexual promiscuity and irresponsibility with laughter and affection rather than outright condemnation. Indeed, the treatment of incest in picaresque novels often lacks moral gravitas,

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Figure 2.1 ‘Going To, and Coming From’, Ryder. © The Authors League Fund, as literary executor of the Estate of Djuna Barnes.

most famously in the comic incident of accidental incest in Tom Jones. But moreover, the carnivalesque and grotesque elements of picaresque fiction lead to an emphasis on bodily functions. By turning her attention to the bodily rather than the discrete body, and to processes and activities rather than identities, Barnes suggests a model of physicality

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that extends beyond the boundaries of a single autonomous subject. The representation of Wendell’s body in grotesque terms contrasts with the Renaissance, humanist concept of the body which shores up the notion of the autonomous individual and emerged at the same time as what subsequently became conventional ideas about the biographical subject. Bakhtin argues that: Contrary to modern canons, the grotesque body is not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world. (1984: 26)

This is contrasted with the Renaissance model, in which: The ever unfinished nature of the body was hidden, kept secret; conception, pregnancy, childbirth, death throes, were almost never shown. The age represented was as far removed from the mother’s womb as from the grave, the age most distant from either threshold of individual life. The accent was placed on the completed, self-sufficient individuality of the given body. (Bakhtin, 1984: 29)

Barnes’s medieval story-within-a-story in ‘The Occupations of Wendell’ refuses to hide the ‘unfinished nature of the body’ and instead maintains a bawdy preoccupation with orifices, telling of those who Do glut their livers, their pylorus swell or of the banquet doth the turdë tell, And rown in the belly’s dark alway And secrets of the supper all bewray, For man hath at both endës got a door (Ryder, 65)

An equally Rabelaisian tendency manifests itself in Barnes’s frankness about Wendell’s sexual exploits and their attendant bodily substances, as is expressed in the image of the sponge he keeps on his saddle as a ‘nose-gay’: In other words, a sponge of fibers soft Which well before, and well behind he oft Hither and thither about his bum y-swoped (Ryder, 61)

Wendell’s body is unfinished, messy and defined by its actions: it is not ‘self-sufficient’ but opens up towards the world and the reader, who responds to it by opening up her body in laughter. The openness of Wendell’s body shifts the emphasis from identity and individuality

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to an embodied performance that touches the reader with its bawdy humour. However, despite the comedy surrounding such activity, both Wendell’s irresponsible promiscuity and heterosexual reproduction more generally are subject to direct criticism in Ryder. The dangers of childbirth for women are emphasised frequently, and women’s ‘unequal’ experience ‘impaled upon a death that crawls within’ is related to the ‘Horrid Outcome of Wendell’s First Infidelity’ (Ryder, 77). The selfishness of Wendell’s polygyny and the unequal pleasure of heterosexual sex are suggested in the conversation between ‘the Sisters Louise’: ‘ “He paints a rosy picture,” retorted her companion, “of polygamy for—” she stressed, “the man—” ’ (Ryder, 39–41). Indeed, Sheryl Stevenson argues that Barnes parts company with Bakhtin’s carnivalesque by questioning Wendell’s (and implicitly Bakhtin’s) positive view of the grotesque body, challenging the masculine celebration of a ‘ “rosy” physicality’ by focusing on the female perspective (1999: 86). However, although this female perspective is clearly an important part of Barnes’s critique, even the pain caused by male promiscuity, polygamy and childbirth does not erase the significant laughter generated by grotesque bodies in the text, including female ones such as the (originally expurgated) image of KateCareless, ‘the buxom contralto from Cork’, freely urinating in the street (Ryder, 81). The critique of Wendell’s sexuality is not only complicated through bawdy comedy but also by the similarities between his bodily activities and those of Evangeline Musset in Ladies Almanack. The Almanack, generally read as a roman à clef either satirising or celebrating the lesbian community of Barnes’s expatriate Paris, is a digressive chronicle of the sexual adventures of Musset and her ‘ladies’, who are apparently based on Natalie Clifford Barney and her coterie. Several critics have noticed that Barnes’s two texts of 1928 speak to one another, and Andrew Field’s claim that Barnes announced ‘I am writing the female Tom Jones’ has been understood by Cheryl Plumb (1986) in reference to Musset, while Stevenson thinks it refers to Ryder (Field, 1983: 127, italics in original).9 It is unclear from the particular passage in Field’s biography to which text the comment relates: attempts to locate the referent in the quotation become especially problematic because the short title of Fielding’s novel is also the name of his protagonist and, as Stevenson notes, Field’s biography treats titles inconsistently.10 But more importantly, what this confusion ultimately suggests is the significant and complicating similarity between Musset and Ryder. Plumb reads Musset as Ryder’s ‘descendent’: her ‘messianic zeal in converting women to her creed parallels Ryder’s espousal of his procreative philosophy, but

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because she advocates love of woman for woman, her actions parody his; therefore she “goes beyond” him’ (1986: 91). I read Musset as a complex (but unambiguously sympathetic) character whose constantly shifting identity parodies both specific definitions of lesbianism and the more general taxonomical impulse directed towards lesbian sexuality. But while the performative lesbian sexuality that Musset embodies is quite distinct from Wendell’s credo of polygamous pantheism, she is still evangelical about sex. And although Wendell’s sexuality is problematic, and Musset’s wholeheartedly attractive, making her both a parody and an improved version of him, I want to suggest that the relationship between these two characters is quite fluid and complex, and better characterised by the word ‘beside’ than ‘beyond’. While I prefer to imagine the two characters as intertextual siblings, both ‘birthed’ in the year 1928, even Plumb’s notion of Wendell as a kind of textual father to Musset, a heterosexual prototype for a more palatable and lesbian sexual promiscuity, makes it difficult to dismiss him as a straightforward satire on the irresponsible Wald Barnes. Musset’s parodic relation to Wald/Wendell is suggested by stylised gestures that reveal the comic theatricality of the kind of masculine identities found in Ryder: ‘“It shall be done, and done most wily well”, said the Dame, buckling on her Four-in-hand, and clapping her Busby athwart her roguish Knee’ (Ladies Almanack, 31). Yet in one sense Barnes’s characterisation of Ryder leaves no room for further parody through Musset, and views like those of contemporary reviewer Eugene Jolas (in the transition review of Ryder) at once point out and miss the point about Wendell’s comic and hyperbolic performance of masculinity: ‘Ryder will go down in American literature as the archetype of the imaginative, swashbuckling super-male’ (Jolas, cited in Kannenstine, 1977: 41). Despite the obvious differences implied by Wendell’s patriarchal heterosexuality and Musset’s lesbianism, both characters overperform to the extent that they enact a destabilising and subversive drag. Rather than reading Musset as a simple parody of Ryder, I want to consider the consequences of the ‘parallels’ that Plumb also suggests, and the possibility that Wendell and Musset might sit beside one another in a non-dichotomous relationship that combines elements of pastiche, parody and kinship. And this relationship has important consequences for the reader of Barnes’s Ryder. The precarious space occupied by both Musset and Ryder, both individually and jointly, is suggested by similar descriptions in each text. In Ryder, Barnes describes Wendell, who has just brought his second (concurrent) wife home, ‘standing as he was born, one foot on one side and the other foot on the other side of the trap door of the loft’

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(Ryder, 87). This image is echoed in Ladies Almanack, in an annotated illustration that describes how Musset ‘stepped out upon that exceedingly thin ice to which it has pleased God more and more to call frail woman’ (Almanack, 2). As Dame Musset steps out on thin ice, reaching out with a phallic pole in one hand and a muff in the other to rescue the ‘frail’ women who have fallen, her precariousness is clearly of a different kind from Wendell’s, and of a kind that indeed parodies and subverts Wendell’s patriarchal position. However, the unstable positioning of Evangeline and Wendell is suggestive of their individual slipperiness and the slippery relationship between them, the latter slipperiness indeed contributing to the former. Just as Musset might make us laugh at Wendell, might we not experience some residual – and perhaps uncomfortable – affection for him? The laughter we share with Wendell (as opposed to the satiric laughter directed at him) is uncomfortable partly because of what we think we know about Wendell’s ‘real-life’ counterpart, the apparently abusive Wald Barnes. The picaresque resonances and cross-references to Ladies Almanack do not cancel out the biographical element of Ryder, but rather sit alongside it and create a challenging ambivalence in the reading. Besides the parallels between Wendell and Evangeline, Barnes’s two 1928 publications share a network of images based on two objects: the sponge and the urn. Musset, who is in the ‘Hall of Fame’ for her prodigious sexual talents, leans ‘upon a lacrymal [sic] Urn with a small Sponge for such as Wept in her own Time and stood in Need of it’ (Almanack, 9). This image serves as an amalgam of three in Ryder, one primarily bawdy but with unhappy implications, one primarily unhappy but with inescapably bawdy and humorous overtones, and one that appears in the context of a will, but a will so bawdy that it became peppered with the censor’s asterisks. The first is the reference to the sponge Wendell keeps on his saddle as a ‘nose-gay’, a symbol of and incitement to virility. The second is an illustration of two weeping women holding a giant urn-shaped pair of underpants, which accompanies the chapter on death in childbirth, ‘Midwives’ Lament, or the Horrid Outcome of Wendell’s First Infidelity’ (Figure 2.2). That these underpants are another kind of urn is made clear by the third pertinent reference from Ryder, when Sophia’s ‘Last Will and Testament’ includes a request for a ‘weeping Greek or Athenian surmounting all, leaning on a lachrymal urn, draped in the folds of a double-skirted cloak of grief’ (Ryder, 78, my emphasis). Read together, this cluster of images around urns and sponges offers a representation of Wendell Ryder, his sexual adventures and their consequences, which invites both reproach and laughter. That they are linked through and to a line in the blithe Ladies Almanack

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Figure 2.2 ‘Midwives’ Lament, or The Horrid Outcome of Wendell’s First Infidelity’, Ryder. © The Authors League Fund, as literary executor of the Estate of Djuna Barnes.

further emphasises the ambivalence of Ryder and the difficulties of aligning negative biographical knowledge of Wald Barnes with an often pleasurable reading experience. It is also significant, I think, that the line in Ladies Almanack – ‘a lacrymal Urn with a small Sponge for such as Wept in her own Time and stood in Need of it’ is a comic and happy

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image posing (rather unconvincingly) as a description of sadness, thus challenging the tendency to reduce or ‘resolve’ ambivalence on the side of the negative, as if bad feelings were always the ‘real’ feelings behind ‘surface’ pleasures. Furthermore, the sponge and the urn are objects that might help us think about the difficulty of creating clear and delimiting boundaries between emotions, bodies and subjects. The ‘lachrymal urn’ is filled with tears that come from without, but while the tears originate from outside the urn they must fit the already fixed shape of the urn’s body. The sponge represents a more complex affective model, because its form, contours and texture are changed and defined by affect that comes from without. The sponge soaks up the tears and shapes itself accordingly yet its porousness means that its contents can seep out into the world. The sponge is an affected and affecting body: its boundaries are defined by its processes and its relationships to other objects. The concepts of the body’s relation to affect represented by both the urn and the sponge are more complex than the psychic and social models of emotion critiqued by Sara Ahmed, which characterise feeling as moving from the ‘inside out’ and from the ‘outside in’ respectively. Instead, Ahmed suggests, emotions indeed ‘create the very effect of an inside and outside’ and help constitute ‘the psychic and social as objects’, producing the boundaries between the individual and the social (2004: 10). Barnes’s sponge in particular suggests the boundary-producing qualities of affect: Ryder’s subjects and readers might be thought of as sponges, changing shape in response to different affective exchanges. Moreover, by spreading images of sponges and urns across Ryder and Ladies Almanack, Barnes suggests how affects circulate between texts, bodies and subjects to create challenging relationships and surprising identifications.

‘Julie Becomes What She Had Read’: Re-reading the sentimental novel The affective reading practices and embodied, relational models of subjectivity I have articulated thus far have a special significance in the case of the traumatic and playfully inter-textual dream sequence of Chapter 24, ‘Julie Becomes What She Had Read’. This complex scene – in which Wendell’s daughter Julie dreams of the death of little ‘Arabella Lynn’ – offers a re-reading of a key nineteenth-century sentimental trope. Barnes alludes to this quintessential scenario of an ‘innocent’ young girl’s death in Chapter 27, when Sophia, reading aloud to the Ryder family, excises the ‘harrowing’ demise of ‘little Emily’:

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‘Ah, ah, indeed, here little Emily gives up the Ghost,’ said Sophia, and turned to the next chapter. But that night, Julie on her breast, she read the death scene by the light of a round kerosene lamp, going word for word over the harrowing details, Julie’s eye going over, too, but slowly, ‘ “and here,” said Emily, “take the needle from me, it is too heavy!” and she closed her sweet violet eyes and breathed no more—’ And the darkness pulled at the lamp and at Julie and tore her away from her beloved while yet she lay upon her breast. (Ryder, 122)

This scene would seem to allude to Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868–9), where the exemplary invalid Beth March must eventually give up on her sewing because she can no longer lift the needle. But more crucially, Barnes focuses on the sentimental tableau of the virgin’s death to suggest the particularity of the reading experience. Sophia skips the death scenes because Wendell weeps ‘like a woman’, fulfilling the stereotypical role of the over-emotional, self-indulgent (and feminised) reader of sentimental fiction (Ryder, 122). But for Julie the death scene is significantly affecting and the identification intense: she is ‘pulled’ and ‘torn’ by reading of Emily’s death. In Ryder, reading is the means by which Julie comes to know and process her own trauma. Equally, by (re-)reading the sentimental novel, by ‘witnessing’ it through her own sentimental performance, Barnes allows us to see its strangeness as a form in which sex, death, trauma and childhood become queerly connected. Barnes turns to the nineteenth-century sentimental novel precisely because, in her reading, it becomes a genre that enables her to express the full complexities of traumatic experience. But we might equally say that the logic of belated understanding that characterises the trauma response, the way in which trauma is experienced only through repetition in the present, provides a description of Barnes’s own relation to this apparently ‘outdated’ form. Significantly, in their appeals for the clarity of biographical fact, both Ponsot and Dalton neglect to mention the title of Chapter 24. And what Julie ‘had read’ is, of course, sentimental fiction. Indeed, Arabella Lynn, the dying girl in Julie’s dream, recalls in name Gabriella Lynn, the heroine and narrator of Caroline Lee Hentz’s sentimental Bildungsroman, Ernest Linwood (1869). Beginning with James Scott’s 1976 reading, Barnes’s attitude towards the sentimental in Ryder has been summarised as broadly parodic and antagonistic. Kannenstine refers to digressive tendencies that halt the ‘forward movement’ of Ryder’s plot, and which enable Barnes to signal ‘the death of the social or domestic novel of generations that had dominated the nineteenth century’ (1977: 36). Caselli also sees Ryder in opposition to the nineteenth-century novel, noting

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the sentimentality and the realism savagely mocked in Anna de Grier’s letters coveting Austen-like parsonages; the opportunistically Whitmanesque American multiplicity of selves boasted by Wendell (who ‘date[s] / from a sentimental period’ [. . .]); and the innocents’ deaths in the literature [. . .] read by Julie. (2009: 199–201)

And Edmunds describes Ryder as an ‘(anti-) domestic’ novel where ‘grotesque attachment to the ideals of polygamy, promiscuity, idleness, and freethinking at once parodies and overturns inherited conventions of sentimental domestic fiction’ (2008: 40).11 As my Introduction makes clear, literary critics have historically emphasised a gulf between sentimental and modernist aesthetics. In Sensational Designs, Jane Tompkins argues that such a separation accounts for twentieth-century critics’ failure to ‘appreciate the complexity and scope of a novel like [Harriet Beecher] Stowe’s’ (1985: 125). Tompkins seeks to establish that sentimental works are ‘complex and significant in ways other than those that characterize the established masterpieces’ (1985: 126, emphasis in original). I want to suggest that Barnes’s modernist novel seeks not merely to parody sentimental aesthetic values and aesthetics but to witness what was ‘complex and significant’ in that denigrated form. Barnes’s first specific engagement with sentimental fiction occurs in Chapter 9: the title ‘Tears, Idle Tears!’ is, I think, more a reference to William Dean Howells’s caricature of sentimental fiction in The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) than to Tennyson’s poem. In Howells’s novel, Tears, Idle Tears is a sentimental text fabricated by the author and dismissed as ‘a famous book with ladies. They break their hearts over it’ (1986: 217). Ryder’s ‘Tears, Idle Tears!’ deals with the separation of two family members (Amelia and her sister Ann as Amelia prepares to leave England for America and marriage to Wendell): a common scene in the sentimental fiction dominating the US literary market between 1840 and 1880. In one sense Barnes is suggesting the weaknesses of sympathetic identification in the sentimental tradition. She mocks sentimental narrative strategies by reducing Ann’s concern for her sister to hysterical catastrophising and by encouraging the reader to maintain a satirical distance from the frequent displays of weeping. Yet the scene is not exclusively satirical and fails to replicate Howells’s sexist dismissal of the value of tears. While Barnes pokes fun at the language of sentimental tradition and its clichés (‘There, there, my poor dear, you can be sure of nothing but death and rent-day, and it never rains but it pours, and it were better never to have been born [. . .] and it’s better late than never’ (Ryder, 44)) she also suggests a female resistance in such scenes, staging the subversive potential of female affection as a counter to the reproductive demands of the family. Ann’s care for her sister involves

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a subversive, feminist element, and an implicit critique of the family: ‘a place for everything and everything in its place! Tis what has ruined the lives of all women since the first came up out of a man with his rib sticking in her side!’ (Ryder, 44). The sisters argue and laugh as well as cry in their farewell: through Barnes’s modernist ‘performance’, dispute, difference of opinion and affective ambivalence are all ‘witnessed’ within the sentimental scenario. As I have suggested, the dying child in Julie’s dream is a common figure in much sentimental fiction, where her death is often depicted as a beautiful, redemptive and spiritual event. It is through her engagement with this narrative trope that Barnes suggests both the limitations of sentimental ideology and its subversive potential; its rigid moral dimensions and the destabilising feelings and attachments it provokes. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Little Eva, after assuring her family and friends that they too can become angels and giving them the ‘long, golden brown curls’ she has cut from her head, dies peacefully with a ‘high and almost sublime expression’ on her face (Stowe, 1998: 294, 303). The death of the equally innocent and virtuous Beth in Good Wives (1869), the second volume of Little Women, is depicted in similarly satisfying terms. None of Barnes’s characters display such absolute innocence, and Arabella’s need to ask forgiveness before death, requesting that her mother leaves her ‘to my solitude, that I may set my soul to its most necessary order’ functions as a disingenuous attempt to fulfil generic criteria (Ryder, 107). When the narrator asks that the ‘dear reader’ pause to consider if Arabella’s death is not for the best because ‘What foul demon might have weakened that structure had it reared into full womanhood?’ the tone is deeply ironic (Ryder, 108). This irony does not necessarily come from the fact that Arabella has already been sexually abused, as Dalton suggests, but relates equally to Barnes’s critique of any moral scheme that might encourage the reader to privilege childhood innocence above all else. As she questions the integrity of the ‘individual’, Barnes challenges prescribed identities of ‘bad’ perpetrator and ‘good’ victim. Barnes’s diffuse model of subjectivity – as witnessed in the representation of Wendell – means that the relationship between Julie and Arabella need not necessarily be explained in the language of clinical psychoanalysis as a pathological ‘splitting off and dissociation within the daughter’s psyche’ (Dalton, 1993: 167). The subjectivities of Julie and Arabella undergo further diffusion when the narrator notes that ‘Julie is many children’ and writes of Arabella: ‘A thousand children now is she, her sins tenfold multiplied [. . .] fearfully she starts and throws the coverings from her fevered limbs, and moans, “Accuse me not, it was not I, nor

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I, nor I!” ’ (Ryder, 106, 107). The syntactic and semantic parallels with Chapter 17, ‘What Kate Was Not’, suggest a mode of representation that goes beyond the borders of the discrete subject, akin to the relationship between Wendell and Musset discussed above. The repeated refrain ‘Is this not she [. . .]?’ echoes the earlier repetition of ‘Might Kate-Careless not have been [. . .]?’ and similar images are used to consider the characters of both the worldly Kate-Careless and the apparent Julie-figure, Arabella (Ryder, 106, 88). Both Kate and Arabella have an ‘aureole of curls’ and Arabella’s angelic status echoes Kate’s ironic description as a possible ‘symbol of virginity’ who is ‘adored and honoured and revered as only angels are revered, honoured and adored for their unity of pale locks’ (Ryder, 106, 89). The conventional victim position of the incest narrative is complicated through Arabella’s shared characteristics with Wendell’s mistress: by confusing the figures of virgin and whore, Barnes critiques the manipulative practice of engaging sympathy through moralistic characterisation. Exploring the conventional dichotomy between the demonised paedophile and innocent child victim, Bennett calls for ‘an approach that pursues the exploration of traumatic memory not as a scientia sexualis in which moral or medical classification precedes representation, but as open artistic inquiry’ (2005: 28). Such an approach is evident in Barnes’s work, and in one respect marks a point of departure between Ryder and the sentimental tradition, where a specific emotional response to coherent narratives of pain and suffering is posited as the moral ideal. The most famous example of this link between sympathy, story and morality is perhaps Harriet Beecher Stowe’s entreaty for an emotional yet rational response to her representation of slavery: But, what can any individual do? Of that, every individual can judge. There is one thing that every individual can do, – they can see to it that they feel right. An atmosphere of sympathetic influence encircles every human being; and the man or woman who feels strongly, healthily and justly, on the great interests of humanity, is a constant benefactor to the human race. (1998: 452, emphasis in original)

Glenn Hendler sees Stowe’s affective imperative to ‘feel right’ as a continuation of the Anglo-American culture of sensibility originating in the eighteenth century, where sentiments were aligned with reason contributing to ‘a moral and proper repertoire of feelings’ (2001: 2). In contrast, Barnes’s ambivalence about events and characters suggests an attempt to avoid a fixed moral orientation towards the representation of trauma. However, through her re-reading of the genre Barnes also suggests

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that this ‘moral and proper repertoire of feelings’ might be just one side of the sentimental coin. For although Little Eva’s death serves to reify and celebrate childhood innocence, it is also emblematic of the ways that pain and pleasure cohabit the pages of sentimental fiction. Barnes’s modernist witnessing of the sentimental novel allows us to appreciate that readers have always found enjoyment in apparently traumatic scenes and that childhood, as realised by Stowe and others, is a rather queer state. Ann Douglas has famously suggested the not insignificant pleasure of Eva’s ‘essentially decorative’ death scene (1988: 4). Douglas claims that Eva’s sainthood is ‘there to precipitate our nostalgia and our narcissism’, encouraging a self-indulgent response in her readers, who ‘bestow on her that fondness we reserve for the contemplation of our own softer emotions’ (1988: 4). For Douglas, the Little Eva plot also provides ‘historical and practical preparation for the equally indispensable and disquieting comforts of mass culture’ (1988: 5). The description of Eva’s death chamber is in fact a gloriously kitsch celebration of purchasable pleasures, providing an aspirational shopping list for the materially minded reader: The windows were hung with curtains of rose-colored and white muslin, the floor was spread with a matting which had been ordered in Paris, to a pattern of his [St Clare’s] own device, having round it a border of rose-buds and leaves, and a centre-piece with full-blown roses. The bedstead, chairs, and lounges, were of bamboo, wrought in peculiarly graceful and fanciful patterns. Over the head of the bed was an alabaster bracket, on which a beautiful sculptured angel stood, with drooping wings, holding out a crown of myrtle-leaves. [. . .] The graceful bamboo lounges were amply supplied with cushions of rose-colored damask, while over them, depending from the hands of sculptured figures, were gauze curtains similar to those of the bed. [. . .] In short, the eye could turn nowhere without meeting images of childhood, of beauty, and of peace. (Stowe, 1998: 291–2)

Stowe not only sets the scene for religious martyrdom and childhood innocence preserved, but her eye for interior design and colour coordination provide aesthetic and sensual pleasure to the reader. As tragic early death meets with a heady consumerist desire, the reader delights while weeping for Eva. The interior decor in ‘Julie Becomes What She Had Read’ is decidedly less appealing. Instead of Eva’s roses, myrtle and matching marble vases, Arabella descends the stairs ‘past the potted, odoriferous cyclamen’ (Ryder, 106). This rather shabby interpretation of the sentimental scene is one of Barnes’s more directly satirical statements about the genre, providing a bathos that perhaps critiques Stowe’s glamour. Pleasure in this otherwise distressing scene is, I’ll suggest, located rather differ-

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ently, but Barnes does offer a more generous and generative reading of the material pleasures of the sentimental death scene in Chapter 14, ‘Sophia’s Last Will and Testament’. Here, Sophia’s instructions for her burial function as a re-reading of the Victorian obsession with the aesthetics of death. Sophia (herself a Victorian) wants to be buried in fine jewellery, beside a photograph of her husband dressed as a Moorish noble and she in a ‘basque with shoulder-knots of lace and brazil braid’ (Ryder, 79). She describes in detail the coffin she has chosen, noting its materials and dimensions, and requests: ‘About, upon and around the coffin, a fretwork, chiselled deep, representing calyx, stamen and pistil, and neatly disarranged closed books, with a frieze at head and foot, portraying the convolvulus at hazard with the hawk’ (Ryder, 78). Sophia’s clear delight in such preparations reflect the morbid pleasure in death found in Victorian literature and the specific obsession with flowers, costume and furnishings found in sentimental fiction. However, through Barnes’s repetition of this trope, the queerness of the Victorian obsession can be fully ‘read’. ‘Calyx, stamen and pistil’ relate specifically to the reproductive function of flowers, and so emphasise the gendered and sexual undertones of flora in nineteenth-century death scenes. In Eva’s death chamber, flowers are used to symbolise an unrealisable innocence, but Barnes’s re-reading suggests that flowers might actually function as signifiers of the sexuality they are anxiously called upon to disavow. The connections between sex and death are emphasised further by Sophia’s plans to be buried with her husband in a sexual pose.12 The specifics of this are unclear because of the censor’s asterisks, but these excisions suggest the bawdy implications of the scene. Thus the pleasure attributed to death scenes acquires a specifically sexual frisson, with Barnes’s exaggerated emphasis making clear what Stowe perhaps knew all along: that death can be made sexy. The unexpected eroticism of sentimental scenarios has been explored by Marianne Noble, who explores how the ‘Calvinist association of violence with love’ governs understandings of sexuality in this context (2000: 61). While she claims that Eva’s ‘passing is not tinged with the erotic [.  .  .] [r]ather, fantasies of wounding appear to be most fully eroticized in Uncle Tom’s Cabin when projected onto suffering black bodies’, Noble understands Eva’s death as a ‘blissful reintegration with totality’ and, furthermore, recognises fundamental connections between sentimentality and masochism (2000: 138, emphasis in original): Like masochism, sentimentalism can be read, broadly, as a quest for a state of union, or plenitude. And like masochism, sentimentalism describes a world in which pain is an avenue toward achieving that desired state of oneness. When

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providential theories of pain are read in the context of sentimental affirmations of sympathetic suffering, the result is an implicit link between pain and a mystical pleasure of transcendent union. (Noble, 2000: 62)

The mixture of pleasure and pain that Noble reads as paradigmatic of sentimental fiction (but would nevertheless remain unacknowledged, one assumes, by nineteenth-century readers) is rendered explicit in Barnes’s reworking of the genre, in which erotic suffering is projected onto the bodies of young girls. Barnes’s witnessing of the mixed feelings relating to sexuality in sentimental culture is, crucially, linked to her representation of the affective ambivalence of sexual trauma: the sentimental novel therefore becomes an appropriate medium for acknowledging the combination of pleasure and pain relating to Julie’s experience. Dalton may be quite correct in claiming that, in Julie’s dream, ‘the narrator’s simultaneous rage, shame and guilt [. . .] are reminiscent of the dynamics among many survivors of incestuous abuse’, yet I would argue that the affective dynamics of the novel are more complex still, including a spectrum that extends beyond ‘rage, shame and guilt’ (1993: 168). Work on the affects has convincingly demonstrated the ambivalent nature of these negative feelings themselves. Tomkins emphasises the profound ambivalence of shame in particular, as ‘an act of facial communication reduction in which excitement or enjoyment is only incompletely reduced’ (2008: II, 361). For Tomkins, shame is a negative affect that is itself dependent on the pre-existence of a positive affect, specifically interest, excitement or enjoyment.13 Furthermore, Tomkins has drawn our attention to the ways in which psychology has ‘exaggerated the dependence of the affects upon their activating stimuli’ (2008: I, 74). When read in Freudian terms, the representation of positive affect in a traumatic context, particularly one relating to incestuous abuse, is problematic. But if we follow Tomkins in considering the independence of affect from object, and the propensity of affects to combine in unexpected ways, then such representations of pleasure need not be explained away or urgently disregarded. Julie’s distress in the dream sequence is clear as she suffers ‘the tortures of the damned [.  .  .] in all ages, all times and all bindings’ (Ryder, 106). Yet sensual pleasure and warmth are suddenly offered in juxtaposition to these images of distress: ‘All is snatched up again and leans, all voluptuous sixteen, from the flowery casement, her young bosom warm to the warm sun’ (Ryder, 109). Warmth and pleasure intensify in an image which need not be decoded psychosexually, but rather suggests, through a language of movement and temperature, a feeling of sexual climax: ‘Down she looses her hair

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as though it were the molten sluices from the gorged parapet melting in the noonday heat, flooding the garden, covering the roses with a web of brightness’ (Ryder, 109). Tomkins stresses that ‘Positive affect has been invested in pain and every kind of human misery, and negative affect has been experienced as a consequence of pleasure and every kind of triumph of the human spirit’ (I, 74). Conventional narratives of child abuse, with their set subject positions of victim and perpetrator and their predetermined connections between event and emotion, cannot account for this pleasure. Barnes’s re-reading of the sentimental novel not only emphasises the potential for eroticism within scenes of suffering, but also allows us to appreciate the complex models of subjectivity implied by the genre’s focus on sympathetic identification. Chapter 24’s equal concern with the identification provoked by reading and the question of inter-familial eroticism points to the potentially unstable and unsettling qualities of sympathy implied by sentimental writers but only fully articulated in recent literary criticism. In States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel, Elizabeth Barnes argues that in popular American narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the post-revolutionary and antebellum family serves as the model for social and political affiliations: ‘In American fiction and nonfiction alike, familial feeling proves the foundation for sympathy, and sympathy the foundation of democracy’ (1997: 2). Yet crucially, sympathy proves that feeling cannot be controlled, hence the preoccupying theme in American literature of the ‘distinction between licit and illicit love, exemplified in a score of stories about incest and seduction’ (Barnes, 1997: 3). ‘Far from subverting the goals of national union,’ Barnes writes: incest and seduction represent the logical outcome of American culture’s most cherished ideals. In holding up the family as a model for socio-political union, sentimental rhetoric conflates the boundaries between familial and social ties. The result is a confusion of familial and erotic attachment: one learns to love those to whom one already feels related. (1997: 3)

Through its focus on inter-familial eroticism in a sympathetic scenario, Ryder reiterates and elucidates a trend in sentimental fiction, indicating the potential proximity between familial and sexual love. Furthermore, besides witnessing the incestuous elements of sentimental narratives, Ryder picks up larger trends relating to the acts of sympathetic identification found in the popular literature of the previous century. Elizabeth Barnes writes that ‘if sentimental literature attempts to teach us anything, it is that psychological boundaries are permeable and that

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“selfhood” is a distinctly relational construct’ (1997: 76). The unstable and relational notion of selfhood I have identified in Ryder is brought to the fore in Barnes’s treatment of the affective ties between Julie and Arabella. The pleasures of sentimental fiction are inextricably linked to the act of sympathetic identification which, through the question of what this means for the relationship between subject and object, provide an important point of comparison with Barnes’s affective project. Sympathy in sentimental culture is, Hendler argues, ‘an emotional response to reading or seeing an expression of another’s feelings. It is thus at its core an act of identification’ (2001: 3). Hendler identifies two strands of sympathetic identification in sentimental scenarios: as the reader is asked to feel like the protagonist ‘in a way that maintains a degree of difference between subject and object of sympathy’ she is also asked to feel with the protagonist, to partially ‘submerge his or her identity and experience in the emotions of the fictional figure in order to transform partial sameness into identity’ (2001: 5). Hendler claims that the experience of sympathy is a potential threat to identity because, ‘even in its most conventional manifestations’, it is ‘predicated on a loss of self; it is in some sense depersonalising’ (2001: 123). This ‘depersonalised’ sympathy is shared by Barnes’s model of affect, which suggests that emotional engagement with a text has always already involved a degree of confusion about the distinction between subject and object. While Barnes’s more radical model of subjectivity means that her representation of feeling depends on an even less reified distinction between self and other, her modernist reiteration allows the reader to reflect on the complexities inherent in the sentimental form. In sentimental literature, sympathetic identification has a specifically moral element, and works on the basis of a clear distinction between good and bad. Elizabeth Barnes claims that sentimentality can be defined by the intention ‘to both represent and reproduce sympathetic attachments between readers and characters’, with sentimental narratives offering examples of sympathetic bonding in their storylines as models for the readers’ own response (1997: 5). This relates to the concept of ‘feeling right’, because sympathetic identification with a ‘good’ character always seems to lead to moral improvement for the sympathiser. Elizabeth Barnes gives a famous example of this in Senator Bird’s ‘awakening of sympathy’ in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but the sentimental canon includes such genre-defining examples as Katy’s relationship with Cousin Helen in Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did, the March sisters’ reaction to Beth’s illness and death in Little Women and Gabriella Lynn’s identifications with her dying servant and her mother in Ernest Linwood (1997: 94).

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Yet in What Katy Did, Coolidge suggests some of the complexities of the sentimental tradition through her self-reflexivity about the generic trope of the good invalid. The ‘very, very good’ Cousin Helen has an imaginative significance for Katy and Clover before they meet her: they ‘played Cousin Helen’ and imagined her to look ‘something like “Lucy” in Mrs Sherwood’s story [. . .] with blue eyes, and curls, and a long, straight nose. And she’ll [. . .] lie on the sofa perfectly still and never smile, but just look patient’ (1994: 94–5). Coolidge threatens to explode the myth of the ‘saintly invalid’ when Cousin Helen fails to have blonde curls or even to look very ill, yet ultimately conforms to the generic convention of creating a figure for Katy’s sympathetic identification (1994: 96). As ‘half an angel’, Helen serves as a role model for Katy, teaching her how to be a good invalid, and Katy’s identification in turn serves as a model for the reader (Coolidge, 1994: 105). Julie’s identification with the imperfect Arabella in Ryder offers a repetition-with-a-difference of this sympathetic model. Julie’s reading provokes identification through feeling, and such feeling, her ‘suffering the tortures of the damned [.  .  .] in all ages, all times and all bindings’, serves as a guide for Barnes’s reader (Ryder, 106). Julie suffers as many, with many, suggesting an empathy that goes beyond the ordinary boundaries of subjectivity and identification, based on a loosening of the distinctions between self and other and between text and world. As a reader, Julie’s self and her feelings are shaped in response to the text. In Ryder, different affective threads need not be untangled to create coherent subjects and narratives: such discontinuities in narrative and subjective coherence do not make for an affectively impoverished reader because Barnes avoids a link between factual information, consistent characterisation and the representation of trauma. Bennett notes the isolation of affect from character in early Deleuze and claims that: The value of Deleuze’s notion that affect is produced as intensity, by formal means rather than by narrative, is that it allows us to understand affect as something other than an emotional response to character, and thus to address the limitations of a narrative organization that contains affect within certain corporeal and moral boundaries. (2005: 31)

The different characters and ‘figures’ of Ryder (and Barnes indeed erodes the distinctions between the two) relate to each other and to the text in an ambiguous manner, preventing narrative and moral clarity without reducing affect. Affect seems to go beyond corporeal boundaries in the dream described in Chapter 24. Dalton’s psychosexual decoding of such images

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as the flooding of the valley and the fattening of the fig tree is persuasive, yet the description of a sudden and violent storm could also be read in terms of its affective weight. Indeed, an affective reading is not only in line with Barnes’s maxim that we should ‘reach not beyond the image’ but also coheres with comments made a few lines earlier which suggest that feelings may be transferred into the wider world: ‘Does not everything wear a muted aspect this bright spring morning? The very flowers hush their noisy trembling, the trees move no bough, and the birds warble but falteringly’ (Ryder, 108). Here the world is read through certain affective states that stick to and change the world. Bennett has suggested the value of attending to Veena Das’s claim that ‘trauma is not something immaterial that happens to the individual, leaving the world unchanged – rather it has a palpable extension within the world’ (2005: 49). That the material world is perceived and even shaped through affect further distances the trauma depicted in the chapter from individual characterisation, psychology and, implicitly, auto/biography. Although affects are not always bound to subjects who are already defined in the text, affect can be a way of shaping the subject, of defining her contours. Feeling is certainly designated as an embodied activity by Ryder, but the bodies that feel do not always have the status of clearly defined characters within the novel. The traumatic experience in Chapter 24 is represented in the language of touching and feeling: the physical sensation of touch is the means by which one is touched emotionally, and movement is the means to being moved. Julie’s identification works not on the basis of hermeneutic inquiry and there is no drive to discover the facts of Arabella’s narrative. Rather, it is through a vocabulary of movement and spatial positioning that the many selves of Julie feel with another body: Julie Grieve Ryder, Julie in multitude, follows that little body to the grave. It is Julie now lying on her bed, it is Julie snatched up and flung down into the market place, where they are selling Jesus for a price. (Ryder, 109)

Similarly, self-identification is seen to work on the basis of feeling, not knowing. Arabella’s panicked touching of her own face from an external perspective not only conveys her fear and distress but suggests how these affects are brought into being – through feeling itself: ‘And starting from her bed in a wide-eyed somnambulic sleep, she walks the floor, her groping hand playing madly over the features of the host that is her sleeping self, within that thrall’ (Ryder, 107). Such feeling of feeling, the sensation of sensation, brings the representation of affect in the chapter outside the order of teleological narrative where emotional identification

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works on the basis of a psychological understanding of motive, cause and effect. The cause of Arabella’s death is not revealed, but it fulfils an important generic criterion. Yet unlike in sentimental fiction, where the virgin’s peaceful and redemptive death is seen from the perspective of the loving family, Arabella’s death is a traumatic event registered at the level of the body’s sensations. That the death is in itself touching is suggested because it is described as a touching: ‘death’s unpeopled army had laid its icy hand upon her heart’ (Ryder, 108). Death becomes not so much a narrative conclusion but a particular affective state, an intensification of one affect at the cost of others: ‘The frail mould that but a moment gone housed a thousand impulses now holds but the long impulse of death!’ (Ryder, 108). The idea of a ‘frail mould’ of impulses suggests that the body is a living and changing theatre of affect, where different affects may coexist or one may dominate. Because the trauma of the chapter is not conveyed through a narrative of cause and effect, where we feel for a character because of the events they encounter, Julie becomes the agent of pure affect: It is Julie all horror, and terror, and great history. She becomes the shudder of the condemned. Her feet are all soles turned up, and her hands all backs for agony. Every man’s heart is in her mouth, the bowels of the world kennel in her belly. Echo and its voice, screaming the scream incredible, comes homing to her throat. (Ryder, 109)

The emphasis on the body, but a body that goes beyond the boundaries of subjectivity, is suggested by the combination of figural and physical and individual and collective body parts. Like an exaggerated version of the sentimental reader, for whom the tears of another sympathetic witness within the text provide a cue for her own weeping, Julie is moved, or affected, by affect. The significance of the physical signs of being moved, such as ‘screaming the scream’, recalls Bennett’s emphasis on ‘sense memory’, which presents ‘the physical imprint of the ordeal of violence’ (2005: 39). An example of representation that works upon such a premise is the painting of Francis Bacon, who ‘paints the scream, not what causes the scream’ (Bennett, 2005: 39). Bennett compares ‘sense memory’ to the premodern concept of identification found in imitatio Christi, when the spectacle of the crucifixion promotes bodily affect in the form of stigmata: through his or her own bodily mortification the stigmatic may feel the true meaning of Christ’s wounds (2005: 39). As I have suggested, such a focus on the affective experience of woundedness is crucial to Barnes’s engagement with trauma. Julie’s bodily identifications with Arabella are therefore connected to Barnes’s project of ‘keeping the wound open’; they provide a model for how we

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might read Ryder. Such a mode of reading, Barnes suggests, might challenge the moralistic aspects of the sentimental genre while honouring and indeed opening up some of its significant complexities.

‘Toxic nourishment’ The notion of representational ‘besideness’ has been axiomatic to my reading of Ryder and offers a new way of considering the relationship between Barnes’s novel and her own familial experiences. Instead of reading the novel biographically in an attempt to find out more about the author’s early life or, conversely, to make sense of the novel’s complexities, we might do better to linger on these complexities themselves. By thinking of reading in terms other than a search for certainty and clarity, we might gain insight into the experience of childhood trauma. Such a mode of reading does not ignore the question of experience in favour of a focus on play at the text’s surface, but rather offers a way of considering how the two might constitute each other. Paying attention to the novel’s interwoven humour and sadness, its painful pleasures and pleasurable pains, is particularly important when considering experiences that occur within the context of childhood and family life. In his case study of ‘Sculptor’, Tomkins emphasises that the mother represents both ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ to the child: ‘Distress, pain, pleasure and terror were tightly fused’ (2008: III, 809). This emphasis on the ambivalent nature of love between parent and child is echoed in the psychoanalysis of Michael Eigen, who claims that ‘parental love is not pure – it is mixed with everything else’ (1999: xv). Eigen proposes the idea of ‘toxic nourishment’, where good and bad permeate each other, ‘simultaneously feeding-poisoning the psychic bloodstream’ (1999: 27). Nourishment ‘can never be free of toxins’, just as toxicity has a nourishing element (Eigen, 1999: 34). The notion of toxic nourishment, when applied to the familial relations in Ryder, produces meaning from representational besideness without reducing its ambivalence. The notion of ‘toxic nourishment’ is evident in Jill Bennett’s discussion of Dennis Del Favero’s Parting Embrace, a series of photographs that, like Ryder, approach the experience of abuse from an affective rather than a narrative or moral framework. In these photographs, as in the series of images in Julie’s dream sequence, pain is registered as a physical imprint: Constructed as an unfolding of memory, the imagery offers a vision from the body, embracing in the process a certain moral ambiguity. The artist says of this work that it incorporates not just the pornography and the violence of

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memories of abuse, but also an element of love or fantasy, and these things are not always distinct; the affects of fear, humiliation, shock, and so on, may be tied to the same objects as those of joy and excitement. In other words, ‘love’ may characterize an aspect of the relationship one has with an abuser – particularly in an incestuous relationship where the victim has an emotional attachment to the abuser, notwithstanding the pain or trauma that may accompany abuse. (Bennett, 2005: 28)

In recognising this fluid relation between affect and object, and the variousness of affects connected to the survivor experience, we must also recognise the problems of trying to find a stable truth about experience in Ryder. The notion of ‘toxic nourishment’ provides a framework outside conventional morality and a way of registering the confused, non-narrative significance of affect. In such a framework, an abuser may be loved and hated, viciously satirised and portrayed with affectionate humour. While such mixed feelings are not always immediately apparent in the sentimental fiction with which Ryder engages, Barnes’s reading of this tradition recognises a degree of affective complexity in the sentimental scenario that differentiates her work from mere parody. Barnes’s re-staging of the sentimental novel mirrors her re-staging of traumatic experience: the nineteenth-century textual corpus is read and produced anew, just like the traumatised body. Literary and physical bodies are thus seen to overlap in Ryder, their mutual dependence challenging the separation between the fictional and the non-fictional. Readings that wish to impose a narrative and moral clarity onto the text must seek this clarification in the realm of ‘the real’, not only attempting the impossible task of separating the dreams, fantasies, and realities that form a ‘spectrum of experience’ in the novel, but also ignoring Ryder’s affective ambivalences, neglecting its richly textured surface to focus on what might lie beneath. Ryder demands that we register and read conflicting affects; Barnes invites us take pleasure and pain in her challenging and abundant novel. And it is to such abundance that we may – to paraphrase my epigraph – help ourselves again and again.

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Chapter 3

‘The Infected Carrier of the Past’: Nightwood, Shame and Modernism

His dark shaved chin was lowered as if in a melancholy that had no beginning or end. The Baron hailed him, and instantly the doctor threw off his unobserved self, as one hides, hastily, a secret life. (Nightwood, 99) You were ruined and you kept striking your hands together, laughing crazily and singing a little and putting your hands over your face. Stage-tricks have been taken from life, so finding yourself employing them you were confused with a sense of shame [. . .] For the demolishing of a great ruin is also a fine and terrible spectacle. (Nightwood, 128–9)

In Nightwood (1936), Djuna Barnes teaches us that one feeling often leads to another. Specifically, feeling itself – the experience and display of affect – produces the (decidedly mixed) feeling of shame. The melancholic attitude adopted by Dr Matthew O’Connor resembles the downwards pose of shame, a repeated physical trope in Nightwood. As a sign of feeling, O’Connor’s pose is both a marker and producer of shame that must be cast off to avoid yet further humiliation. As imagined by the doctor, Nora Flood’s hysterical reaction to the loss of her lover, Robin Vote, is an embarrassing yet strangely pleasing spectacle. Nora’s sense of shame in this scene derives from the knowledge that although such emotional ‘stage-tricks’ involve a theatrical performance and perhaps even a clichéd representation of feminised grief, they are, nonetheless, significantly and complexly affecting. Silvan Tomkins discusses the social prohibitions on the display of affect, noting that ‘few adult males cry in public. Almost no adults have tantrums. Few adults publicly hang their head in shame. Only rarely do adults shout with joy in public’ (2008: I, 100). Tomkins argues that many affects are socialised by shaming techniques (he calls this the ‘affect-shame bind’) and describes how apparently innocuous parental behaviour can produce a ‘total affect-shame bind’ in the infant (2008: II, 411). Tomkins describes how a child’s affective reactions to food

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presented to him at the dinner table might ultimately lead to his being shamed by his parents: whether he displays excitement or disgust, the child is taught that ‘affect per se is shameful’ (2008: II, 411). But if feeling too much or too openly is embarrassing, this shamefulness takes on a new and particular significance within the context of literary ‘high’ modernism. With its emphasis on form, reason and high culture, modernism arguably required a repudiation of the emotion associated with the naive humanism and popular appeal of nineteenth-century sentimentalism. In Sentimental Modernism, Suzanne Clark often turns to variants of the word ‘embarrassment’ to describe the modernist (and postmodernist) attitude towards the apparently sentimental.1 I want to argue that Nightwood’s commitment to the dynamics of affect, its reliance on notions of moving and being moved and its incorporation of gothic and romantic tropes were all potentially embarrassing for those modernists who attempted to hygienically avoid any appeal to feeling. Like Ryder, Nightwood engages with modes of feeling while rejecting depth psychology, allowing us to imagine how subjects are shaped within the contingencies of affect. Nightwood considers the movement of, within and between bodies. It is significant that Nora’s eyes are described as having ‘that mirrorless look of polished metals which report not so much the object as the movement of the object’: Nightwood privileges sensations of movement and the registering and feeling of objects rather than fixed objects – or identities – themselves (Nightwood, 47). This focus renders attempts to understand characters in terms of psychological realism somewhat problematic, as Barnes encourages us not to assimilate affective scenarios to form a coherent picture of the subject’s psyche but to dwell on these affects as they are felt through the body and between bodies. The experience of reading Nightwood, then, is above all an affective one, as Ernst van Alphen suggests. Van Alphen uses Elaine Scarry’s distinction between pain, which has no referential object, and imagination, which consists only of its object, in an attempt to account for why reading the novel leaves him peculiarly affected (he describes this feeling as a sense of loss of self). Hearing and seeing, van Alphen argues, are associated with the imagination because they are usually discussed in terms of their objects of perception, whereas feeling is described in terms of bodily localisation and so is closer to pain. Van Alphen claims that while reading is object-oriented and relates, therefore, to the imagination, Nightwood disturbs this, and so reading Barnes’s novel is more like feeling pain, or feeling ‘the effect of the object, the effect of the thematics of self-loss’ (1999: 170).2 Other readers have stressed the affective impact of Nightwood. Victoria L. Smith refers to the novel as ‘beside itself in the psychic or affective sense: a story out of its senses or wits –

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mad, or more precisely, melancholic’ (1999: 195). Melancholia is also explored in essays by Sarah Henstra (2000) and Martina Stange (2005). Teresa de Lauretis has read Nightwood in terms of ‘an excess of affect’ and as a textual inscription of the Freudian death drive (2008: 124). And Deborah Parsons claims that Felix, Nora and Jenny ‘are depicted through patterns of associated imagery that serve to emphasize the role of each as representative of universal states of melancholy: shame, loss and jealousy’ (2007: 171). Considering Nightwood in relation to shame in particular, however, allows us to think about Nightwood’s pleasures as well as its pains: critics such as Kathryn Bond Stockton and, most famously, Eve Kosofky Sedgwick have followed Silvan Tomkins in stressing the positive affects imbricated in shameful feelings. And furthermore, the structure of the shame response as understood by Tomkins bears resemblance to the traumatic structures which, as I have argued, can provide a model for Barnes’s modernist textuality, her reworking or witnessing of literary history. Just as the structural logic of the trauma response involves a repetition-with-a-difference – the unbearable is reworked into something that can be retrospectively experienced if not absolutely understood – the shame response repeats this non-dichotomous structure, partially transforming unbearable or untenable pleasures into psychic pain. According to Tomkins, shame originates from blocked interest or excitement: its ‘innate activator’ is ‘incomplete reduction of interest or joy’ (2008: II, 353, my emphasis). Just as the traces of an initial trauma continue to make themselves felt in the subject, the good feelings that the shame response reduces do not disappear entirely but occur in sometimes unexpected ways. Barnes’s novel reflects this in its insistence on the presence of excitement, delight, beauty and attraction within the scene of shame. Tomkins describes the manifold ways in which shame diffuses and spreads between subjects. Like trauma, shame is contagious, at times blurring the distinction between the shamed subject and her witness. In Nightwood, shame forms surprising attachments between characters and between characters and readers. Yet paradoxically, shame is also an isolating and individuating affect: building on Tomkins’s insights, Sedgwick discusses the foundational place of shame in identity formation. In Nightwood, Barnes suggests that traumatic early scenes of shaming form the basis for identity and even pride. Nightwood inscribes trauma and shame at the heart of subjectivity as it gestures towards the way that shame is partially reprocessed as pride, that shame is indeed what makes pride possible. As a result of this structure of partial reprocessing – or non-dichotomous difference – traces of shame cannot

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be removed from assertions of pride: in fact, Barnes shows how shame always provides the backdrop for pride. The shame response is both a turning towards and a turning away, an act of isolation and of communication, and an experience involving pleasure and distress: it is, above all, an ambivalent response: It is an act of facial communication in which excitement or enjoyment is only incompletely reduced. Therefore it is an act which is deeply ambivalent. This ambivalence is nowhere clearer than in the child who covers his face in the presence of the stranger, but who also peeks through his fingers so that he may look without being seen. (Tomkins, 2008: II, 361)

This ambivalence has the effect of collapsing important dichotomies and is a valuable resource for reading Nightwood: Barnes reveals the traces of excitement or interest inherent in shame, its surprising attachment to values such as beauty, love and adornment, its productive qualities and its contingency with pride. And through the character of Robin, the ‘infected carrier of the past’, Barnes reflects on how shame figures within her own textuality (Nightwood, 34). Like Nightwood itself, Robin carries traces of both a disavowed past and the positive affect initially invested in that past (or, put differently, of both shame and the pleasure before the shame). Critically, a consideration of Barnes’s engagement with this complex affect allows us to understand the ways in which modernism’s shame might also be regarded as its guilty pleasure.

‘Bow Down’: The pose of shame Nightwood is a text obsessed with feeling and movement, with bodies and bodily actions. Clark claims that the discourse of reason in Western culture (which she associates with a masculinist high modernism) ‘denies that the text functions as a hysterical body, communicating through symptoms, and tries to eliminate the marks of pathos’ (20). In the case of Barnes’s modernism, however, the text-as-body is an image worth retaining. In a May 1935 letter to Coleman, Barnes imagines the novel (which she was attempting to revise) as a corpse: ‘It lies here on the floor, and I circle around it like the murderess about the body, but do nothing’ (cited in Plumb, 1993: 151). And an anonymous contemporary reviewer for the TLS describes the novel as a malfunctioning or sick body: ‘It carries upon all its lineaments the symptoms of an indigestion or sickness of the soul so deep and pervasive as to seem irremediable’ (cited in Marcus, 1991: 196). As a text that produces and displays affect, Nightwood might well be imagined as a body, for Barnes, as we have

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seen, suggests that it is through bodies that feelings must be understood. O’Connor’s description of the embodied nature of sorrow, for example, sounds almost early modern in its Burtonian connection between anatomy and emotion: I, as a medical man, know in what pocket a man keeps his heart and soul, and in what jostle of the liver, kidneys and genitalia these pockets are pilfered. There is no pure sorrow. Why? It is a bedfellow to lungs, lights, bones, guts and gall! (Nightwood, 20)3

This radically somatic understanding of affect is, I want to suggest, elaborated by Barnes throughout Nightwood. Shame is understood in Nightwood through a series of corporeal manifestations, as an activity or trauma involving a heightened awareness of the body. Through the histories of debasement tattooed all over the body of Nikka, the black circus performer, and through the notion of covering, shame sometimes figures as a second skin. In the excised scene in which O’Connor is arrested and charged for a public homosexual encounter, he describes himself being ‘covered with snow and shame’ (Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts, 27).4 This zeugmatic construction suggests that shame, like the falling snow, settles on the body, forming its outline. The sense of shame as a covering or a second skin is repeated in Jenny’s comment (reported by Robin’s abandoned husband, Felix) about the affects produced by Robin’s failure to remember Sylvia, a young girl who adores her: ‘The child was “ashamed”. She said “shame went all over her” ’ (Nightwood, 104). The inverted commas of the reported speech have an estranging effect on the phrase ‘shame went all over her’, encouraging the reader to think of the comment in quite literal, physical terms. Nora’s first appearance in Nightwood is accompanied by blushing, a clear example of how shame manifests itself on the surface and as the surface of the skin, forming the boundaries of the subject. Embarrassment is also figured as ‘a full bladder’ – a bodily discomfort made worse, it would seem, by the potential for further embarrassment (Nightwood, 98). The most frequent ‘symptom’ of shame that emerges from the text-asbody is the repeated reference to downwards movement. This is reflected in the initial title for the novel, Bow Down (which became the title for Chapter One) and in the titles for three chapters: ‘The Squatter’, ‘Where the Tree Falls’ and ‘Go Down, Matthew’. Tomkins describes the shame response exactly as a downwards physical pose: The interruption and attenuation of excitement and or joy by virtue of inner or outer constraints activate the shame responses, the lowering of the eyelid,

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the lowering of the eyes, or the hanging of the head, and in the extreme case the lowering of shoulders and chest. (2008: I, 159)

This pose recurs in Nightwood as a physical act performed by shamed characters and as a textual symptom through the repeated emphasis on descent. Plumb has observed that Barnes’s sense of unity for Nightwood centres on the concept of ‘disqualification’: She seems to refer to an awareness of a sense of shame, a suggestion that individuals who incurred public dismissal or scrutiny suffered because of what had happened to them or what they were, that is, Jewish, homosexual, or alienated from the values of a dominant culture. (Nightwood: The Original Version, xviii)

Although Plumb indeed mentions shame, the ‘disqualification’ of which she writes is normally connected to downwards movement in less specifically affective terms: as Benstock notes, ‘The standard interpretation of the novel discusses depravity itself under investigation’ (1986: 257). Indeed some of the most appealing readings of Nightwood consider the novel in terms of degradation, the abject, decay and devolution.5 While these terms are compelling, an affective, specifically Tomkinsian, framework allows for a sharp focus on the performative and embodied identities favoured by Barnes while providing opportunities for thinking about the various ambivalent pleasures of the downwards condition.6 Judith Butler’s reluctance to give specific examples of ‘abject bodies’ in a 1998 interview with Irene Costera Meijer and Baukje Prins hints at why, in assigning the status of the abject to the particular ‘identities’ of Nightwood (homosexual, Jew, Black), we might indeed be replicating the process of abjection: ‘Typologies are usually exactly the way in which abjection is conferred: consider the place of typology within psychiatric pathologization’ (1998: 281). With such concerns in mind, shame is a helpful conceptual tool because it does not merely describe or categorise certain identities but, as Sedgwick argues, shaming is a performative moment in which identity itself is produced. Silvan Tomkins’s understanding of shame lends itself to anti-essentialist projects because for him the shame response is not an ‘innately patterned affect’ involving inherited neurological instructions (2008: II, 352). It is for this reason that Tomkins contrasts the downward movement of shame (the dropping of eyes, face and head) with the smile of joy and the cry of distress. The shame response is, Tomkins thinks, ‘more like silence in speech, i.e., a self-conscious strategy designed simply to stop communication which calls for no special innate program’ (2008: II, 352). Tomkins

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also emphasises shame’s flexibility in relation to objects: ‘One man’s shame can always be another man’s fulfilment, satiety or indifference’ (2008: II, 389). And such variation stems, importantly, from the shame response’s basis in inhibited interest or excitement: ‘the pluralism of desires must be matched by a pluralism of shame’ (Tomkins, 2008: II, 389). Most crucially, Tomkins’s emphasis on the physical pose of shame allows for an exploration of Nightwood that keeps the body firmly in focus without essentialist limitations: Tomkins’s shamed subjects are not conceptually fixed in position, rather their bodies may be tentatively located in relation to each other. The downwards pose of shame is described numerous times in Nightwood, but particularly in relation to the part-Jewish Felix Volkbein, who invents an aristocratic, gentile background for himself and his Jewish father Guido. Guido has passed onto Felix ‘the remorseless homage to nobility, the genuflexion the hunted body makes from muscular contraction, going down before the impending and inaccessible, as before a great heat’ (Nightwood, 2–3). I understand this ‘going down’ as a pose of shame, an act of self-abasement. The Volkbeins’ deference is described as an almost automatic physical reaction, a ‘muscular contraction’. But surprisingly, this ‘muscular contraction’ is a turning towards, not away, from ‘the impending’: the ‘hunted’ does not flee but bows down before the hunter. Such ‘muscular contractions’ are normally associated with retreat – one thinks, for example, of flinching at an object that has caused pain or indeed moving away from ‘great heat’. Barnes’s description underlines the ambivalence of shame, how it constitutes both a turning away and a turning towards, a form of isolation and a kind of communication in which one attempts to embrace the unbearable, ‘the impending and inaccessible’. Barnes explicitly links Felix’s bowing down to his internalised sense of shame and his wish to assume a coherent and socially acceptable identity. His ‘diversity of bloods’, his mixed history and race, has made him ‘the accumulated and single – the embarrassed’ (Nightwood, 8). Here, ‘embarrassed’ relates equally to the definitions ‘too much’ (in the sense that Felix’s blood is mixed) and ‘shamed’. This double meaning hints at the way shame delineates borders, marking and blurring the division between ‘pure’ and ‘impure’. Felix’s embarrassment takes ‘the form of an obsession for what he termed “old Europe” ’ and his shame leads him to bow down to ‘aristocracy, nobility, royalty’ (Nightwood, 8). Although this bowing down at times, through its compulsive qualities, almost takes on the characteristics of a pathology, is above all an activity, a doing, and one in which affect must find object: ‘In 1920 he was in

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Paris [. . .] bowing, searching, with quick pendulous movements, for the correct thing to which to pay tribute: the right street, the right café, the right building, the right vista’ (Nightwood, 8).7 Felix is an apparently minor character in the novel, peripheral to the central love story and often seeming to function primarily as an audience for the doctor’s extensive speeches. Yet while some have questioned his prominence in Nightwood, his strangely circular shame makes him vital to the dynamics of Barnes’s novel.8 While shame is exhibited and produced by all of Nightwood’s characters – and by the text-as-body more generally – it governs no character so intensely as Felix. Felix is so thoroughly shaped by shame that the interest-excitement that forms the basis for his ‘bowing down’ has become wrapped up with the mechanism of shame: his shame response, through its centrality to his affective life, becomes itself an affect invested with interest. This is suggested by the compulsion in his search for ‘the correct thing to which to pay tribute’ and, most compellingly, in the cafe scene in Vienna, where Felix sees someone he believes to be the Grand Duke Alexander of Russia, but all evening ‘steadfastly refuse[s]’ to look over at him (Nightwood, 110). As he leaves, Felix gives in to his overwhelming desire and turns and makes ‘a slight bow, his head in his confusion making a complete half-swing, as an animal will turn his head away from a human, as if in mortal shame’ (Nightwood, 110–11). Felix’s shameful response is dependent on an intense initial interest (crucially, in debasing himself) that itself produces ‘mortal shame’. By suggesting that Felix’s initial interest is already bound up with shameful attachments, Barnes illustrates the potential closeness of pleasure to the painful experience of shame.

‘Go down’ Barnes acknowledges the constituent role of interest and excitement in Felix’s shame in the list of corrections she made to Emily Coleman’s unpublished essay on Nightwood. Her irritation at Coleman’s readings are evident throughout her typed response, and she contradicts Coleman’s dismissal of Felix as a ‘sycophantic Jew’: ‘His bowing and his adjusted stomach the act of one who is afraid he has mistaken that which he most honours’. Felix’s bad feelings about the very things he loves and values indicate shame’s dependence on initial positive investments, but they also illustrate Tomkins’s specific claim that shame is partially reduced interest-excitement: that traces of initial good feelings remain in spite of shame. ‘ “I want, but –” ’ Tomkins writes, ‘is one

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essential condition for the activation of shame’ (2008: II, 388). The sentiment ‘I want’ indeed makes itself felt in Nightwood despite the presence of the negative qualifier ‘but’, as Barnes invites us to imagine the desires and attractions, the excitements, affections and appreciations that are wedded to scenes of shame. In a letter to James Scott, Barnes vehemently denies the possibility of any sexual meaning in ‘go down’, a phrase that recurs in Nightwood: Do stop this tiresome phallic symbolism, and sex business in everything. Very tiresome, and usually incorrect; such as the comment on ‘go down’ it means exactly what it says, from ‘Go down Moses, let my people go’. And in any other ‘Go down’ -- really Mr. Scott! (22 September 1971)

This is typical of the self-consciously lofty reprimands with which the ageing Barnes peppers her ostensibly reluctant correspondence with the ‘idiot children’ studying her work.9 In this instance Barnes’s comment seems particularly disingenuous, because the sexual act which her letter hints at in order to dismiss is alluded to several times in the drafts of the novel. In fact, ‘go down’ is, I think, a phrase that neatly captures Barnes’s exploration of the ways in which sexual pleasure is inscribed within scenes of debasement. In the extant drafts of Nightwood there are at least two allusions to the performance of oral sex that Barnes grande-dameishly denies as a referent for the phrase ‘go down’. The first, spoken by O’Connor, was indirect enough to warrant the cutting of just three words (indicated parenthetically) before it was considered clean enough for the censors: ‘And the lining of my belly, flocked with the locks cut off love in odd places that I’ve come on, a bird’s nest [of pubic hairs] to lay my lost eggs in’ (Nightwood: The Original Version, 85).10 Even without the reference to pubic hair the meaning still stands, but is oblique enough to need glossing for the Italian translator, Bruno Maffi. It means, Barnes claims in a letter to Erich Linder, who is posing questions on behalf of Maffi, ‘what it says, implying that among other things will be found in his stomach body hair, implication obvious considering that he is a homosexual’ (8 October 1948). The second reference is a more explicit description of oral sex between two women, and suggests the connection between pleasure and debasement implied by the phrase ‘go down’. The reference in question occurs as an additional sentence in an undated draft of the scene in which O’Connor talks to the distraught Nora about women who ‘turn the day into night, the young, the drug addict, the profligate, the drunken and that most miserable, the lover who watches all night long in fear and anguish’ (Nightwood, 84). O’Connor imagines a woman who

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walks the floor, holding her hands; or lies upon the floor, face down, with that terrible longing of the body that would, in misery, be flat with the floor; lost lower than burial, utterly blotted out and erased so that no stain of her could ache upon the wood. (Nightwood, 85)

This lowering of the body is suggestive of Tomkins’s pose of shame: the wish for self-effacement and the sense that the body must be entirely ‘blotted out and erased’ is consonant with Tomkins’s understanding of shame as a ‘sickness within the self’ (2008: II, 359). Barnes also inscribes guilt into the scene – an affect which, like shyness, is for Tomkins a variation within the category ‘shame-humiliation’ (2008: II, 351). The guilt of the girls ‘in the toilets at night’ is expressed by the reference to their ‘kneeling in that great secret confessional crying between tongues, the terrible excommunication’ (Nightwood, 85). Such kneeling might be understood as a formalised version of the downwards pose of shame, the confession as a ritualised performance of debasement. The sexual reference that does not appear in the published passage is, crucially, contained within this scene of guilt. The earlier version of the paragraph reads: Look for the girls also, in the toilets at night, and you will find them kneeling in that great second [sic] confessional, the one the Catholic church forgot – over the door Dames, a girl standing before her girl, her skirts flung back one on one, while between the columns the handsome head of the girl made boy by God, bends back, the posture of that head volts forth the difference between one woman and another – crying softly between tongues, the terrible excommunication of the toilet. (Nightwood: The Original Version, 262, italics indicate deleted material)

The inclusion of these lines, which were probably removed for fear of censorship, admits enjoyment to the scene of supposed debasement: the ‘handsome head’ of one woman giving pleasure to another. The claim that the head’s posture ‘volts forth the difference between one woman and another’ provides something of a foil to the depictions of sameness in the love story of Nora and Robin, and suggests that this moment of shameful pleasure is alsoa moment of individuation, distinguishing the two women from one another as they partake in a joint activity.11 The phrase ‘volts forth’ suggests a moment of intense and sudden, orgasmic pleasure. This ‘volting forth’ also (or even primarily) functions as a moment of communication to the reader or the viewer of the scene, who will apparently understand something of the women’s difference from the ‘posture of the head’. As such, the scene connects the reader with the women in the scene, suggesting that this experience of reading and comprehension is also a moment of jouissance, and therefore also a moment of shame.

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The ‘terrible excommunication’ uttered by the girls in the toilet is a curse that begins: May you be damned to hell! May you die standing upright! May you be damned upward! May this be damned, terrible and damned spot! May it wither into the grin of the dead, may this draw back, low riding mouth in an empty snarl of the groin! May this be your torment, may this be your damnation! (Nightwood, 85)

The speaker of the curse continues by calling herself ‘an angel on all fours [. . .] going down face foremost’, and her mixing of the sacred and profane mirror the ambivalence of the shame response (Nightwood, 85). The curser’s belief in the debasement of ‘going down’ and of female sexuality more generally is suggested by the reference to the ‘low riding mouth in an empty snarl of the groin’. However, the curse works on the basis of damning the recipient ‘upward’. By contrast, the downwards pose of shame, the act of ‘going down’, appears more desirable, perhaps even – as the opposite of damnation – as a kind of salvation. This idea is most succinctly expressed in the phrase ‘angel on all fours’, which captures the paradoxical nature of the sacred debasement as described in the curse. The intersection between sexual pleasure and shame is explored again in a scene to which I have already alluded and which was entirely excised by the time Nightwood was published in 1936: the doctor’s story of his arrest and trial after being discovered enjoying an anonymous sexual encounter in a public place.12 Barnes links pleasure to shame through the repeated action of handling in the scene. The doctor describes taking his penis out to urinate, when ‘something with dark hands closed over him as if to strangle the life’s breath out of him and suddenly the other, less pleasing hand, the hand of the law was on my shoulder and I was hurled into jail’ (Nightwood: The Original Version, 26). The sexual handling is replaced by a violent and authoritarian touching by the ‘hand of the law’, the repressive authority that deems his activity shameful. This link between pleasurable and repressive touching is already evident in the sexual moment itself, with the ‘dark hands’ seeming to ‘strangle the life’s breath’ out of O’Connor’s sex organ. The shame of punishment again bears traces of the pleasurable crime when O’Connor refers to his cell, which apparently once belonged to Marie Antoinette, as a ‘latrine’, recalling O’Connor’s initial exposure of himself (in order to urinate) (Nightwood, 26). The public lavatory has of course a long-standing association with illicit homosexual activity, and in this scene Barnes suggests its status as a location of both shameful sex and sexualised shame.

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If shameful scenarios carry traces of positive affect, then might these scenarios be thought of as ways of recapturing or unloosing unbearable pleasures? O’Connor would seem to suggest that we should embrace shame when he remarks that ‘in the acceptance of depravity the sense of the past is most fully captured’ (Nightwood, 106). The ‘past’ that O’Connor would like to capture would therefore appear to be a kind of trauma, which cannot be assimilated without being reprocessed as shame. Barnes suggests that shame can be reparative, that it is through enacting scenes of shame that we might access traces of the positive affect that has been denied or blocked, when O’Connor attempts to masturbate in church. In attempting to follow the advice of one Father Lucas, that ‘life is a simple book, and an open book, read and be simple as the beasts in the field; just being miserable is not enough – you have got to know how’, O’Connor looks for a church where he can ‘be alone like an animal, and yet think’ (Nightwood, 118, 119). In attempting to cure his sorrow (and perhaps his queerness too), the doctor adopts the physical pose of shame and addresses his penis, which he refers to as ‘Tiny O’Toole’: ‘Kneeling in a dark corner, bending my head over and down, I spoke to Tiny O’Toole, because it was his turn, I had tried everything else’ (Nightwood, 119).13 Appropriately enough, Tiny does not stand proud, but indeed lies ‘in a swoon’ (Nightwood, 119). Significantly, O’Connor realises that he must ‘embarrass Tiny like that for the good it might do to him’: the doctor believes he might find salvation through humiliation (Nightwood, 119). This desire for salvation is emphasised by the fact that O’Connor holds Tiny in the hand that he has had blessed when entering the church. While O’Connor keenly feels the pain of embarrassment, his acknowledgement that ‘there’s beauty in any permanent mistakes like me’ is significant (Nightwood, 119). His belief that embarrassment might be beneficial is based on an understanding of the disruptive pleasures associated with his homosexual shame: ‘C’est le plasir qui me bouleverse!’, he finally exclaims (Nightwood, 120, italics in original). The notion that it is, surprisingly, pleasure that turns him upside down, bowls him over or knocks him down (se bouleverser) is suggestive of how shame might move or affect one in an unexpectedly positive fashion. Shame, Barnes suggests, is a circular affect in which disavowed pleasures may erupt once more.

Beautiful debasements While connections between shame and sex might seem rather familiar, perhaps more surprising is Nightwood’s suggestion of the shameful

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pleasures relating to beauty and adornment. Barnes proposes that an object can be both beautiful and shameful at the very beginning of the novel with the reference to Guido Volkbein’s exquisite handkerchief of yellow and black linen that cried aloud of the ordinance of 1468, issued by one Pietro Barbo, demanding that, with a rope about its neck, Guido’s race should run in the Corso for the amusement of the Christian populace. (Nightwood, 2)

Although the handkerchief ‘cries aloud’ a particularly humiliating memory of anti-Semitism it is nevertheless prized for its beauty. This is just the first example of its kind in Nightwood; as Kannenstine puts it: ‘The novel’s fantasticality persistently yields an impression of beauty in barbarity or degradation’ (1977: 101–2). Barnes’s novel negotiates the intersection between aesthetic pleasure and shame. And it is at this intersection, I think, that we might better understand the function of ‘camp’ in Nightwood. In a novel punctuated with brief appearances by a host of carnivalesque figures, one of the most memorable is Nikka of the Cirque de Paris, the black, tattooed circus performer and bear-fighter. Nikka’s appearance in the novel is limited to one of the doctor’s lengthy reminiscences, but his shameful beauty is dramatically compelling. Nikka’s role is that of the circus freak, a shameful spectacle: the doctor describes him ‘crouching all over the arena without a stitch on, except an ill-concealed loincloth all abulge as if with a deep sea catch, tattooed from head to heel with all the ameublement of depravity!’ (Nightwood, 14). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the tattoo functioned as a mark of the primitive, of depravity and otherness. But like the shame response itself, attitudes towards tattoos were based on a kind of compromised interest. In Tattooed Michael Aktinson notes the ‘fascination toward and repulsion from tattooed bodies’ that Europeans and North Americans shared by the end of the nineteenth century, an attitude upon which Nikka’s freakish appeal depends (2003: 33). If tattoos in general were badges of shame, the words and images tattooed on Nikka’s body relate quite specifically to the debasement of blacks. As Jane Marcus suggests, Nikka’s body ‘is a text of Western culture’s historical projections and myths about race’ (1991: 225). The tattooed name ‘Desdemona’, which appears on Nikka’s penis when ‘at a stretch’, suggests the racist stereotype of the debased black man’s lasciviousness towards white women (Nightwood, 14). Marcus offers interpretations of some of the other shameful histories of Nikka’s tattoos:

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The angel from Chartres represents the myth of the black as angelic, innocent, and childlike during the early days of slavery; the book of magic refers to Europeans’ fears of African religions. The Rothschild rose from Hamburg may suggest money made in the slave trade. The caravel suggests a slave ship, and the elegant wrists the ladies who benefited from slavery. (1991: 225)

Marcus considers Nikka’s tattoos as a defiance of the Levitical taboo against writing on the body, arguing that the body of the Other in Nightwood is presented as ‘a book of communal resistances of underworld outsiders to domination’ (1991: 221). This resistance, Marcus argues, is provided by carnivalesque laughter. Yet instead of being struck by the subversive potential of Nikka’s tattooed body, what I find most compelling is his apparent fondness for his tattooed debasement. The histories of shame have been transformed into precious adornments in which, the doctor reports, Nikka takes aesthetic delight: ‘I asked him why all this barbarity; he answered he loved beauty and would have it about him’ (Nightwood, 15). I think that we might read this shameful beauty as an example of what Kathryn Bond Stockton refers to as ‘a dark camp that keeps the violent edge of debasement visibly wedded to camp caprice’ (2006: 205). It is significant that we only encounter Nikka through O’Connor’s story: the sheer number of his tattoos (they cover his whole body, and two pages of Nightwood) reflects the peculiar embarrassment of the doctor’s speech. Here the term embarrassment again carries meanings of both excess and shame. The garrulousness of the doctor has surely been observed by all readers of Nightwood and his stories were seen as prime locations for excision by Eliot and Coleman. Yet if the extent to which O’Connor speaks is embarrassing (as is suggested in ‘Watchman, What of the Night’, when the doctor himself is ‘embarrassed by Nora’s rigid silence’ in the face of his loquacity (Nightwood, 94)) it also provides much of the pleasure and interest of the novel. Nikka’s tattoos replicate the doctor’s speech in their excessiveness: like the narration from which they emerge, and moreover, like camp, they are comically, embarrassingly, pleasingly, too much.14 Kannenstine notes the ‘disciplined and necessary excesses’ of Nightwood and suggests that we might think of the novel in terms of the ‘derogatory connotation of the term rococo as pretentious or overdecorous, as applied to Renaissance or baroque art in its decline’ (1977: 103). Yet such a ‘pretentious or overdecorous’ aesthetic, a style valued or denigrated for its excess (depending on one’s own politics of taste) might would also serve as one definition of what we call ‘camp’. Both Sedgwick and Stockton have suggested that shame might be a useful tool in thinking about camp, and it is through

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Nightwood’s camp that the pleasures of shame most obviously reveal themselves. Barnes engages with ‘dark camp’ – a combination of black humour, embarrassment, excess and aesthetic pleasure – in the famous crossdressing scene in the doctor’s bedroom.15 The room (containing rusty or broken medical equipment and feminine toilet items) is viewed from the perspective of Nora, who finds O’Connor lying in bed, ‘heavily rouged and his lashes painted’, wearing a blonde wig and a ‘woman’s flannel nightgown’ (Nightwood, 71). Nora’s reaction combines attraction, embarrassment and guilt: There was something appallingly degraded about the room, like the rooms in brothels, which give even the most innocent a sense of having been accomplice; yet this room was also muscular, a cross between a chambre à coucher and a boxer’s training camp. (Nightwood, 71)

O’Connor’s drag, like all drag, is embarrassing because it is excessive (relying on hyperbolic forms of femininity) and because it fails to reveal the separateness and integrity of gender categories. Nora’s spectatorship reflects this embarrassment, yet also incorporates a degree of attraction and excitement at the scene: ‘It flashed into Nora’s head: “God, children know something they can’t tell, they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!” ’ (Nightwood, 71). Nora’s remark dramatises the pleasurable shame of the scene: while the doctor’s gender performance must be disavowed, it continues to interest. Writing on the excised scene of the doctor’s arrest, Leigh Gilmore notes that the pun ‘in “bow down,” a phrase that suggests abjection but also a sexual pose, a movement towards another, offers relief in this chapter. Although the law commands, the person still escapes, in part, from its totalizing force’ (1994: 620–1). But by understanding ‘bow down’ through the lens of shame, as opposed to abjection, the ‘movement towards another’ and the ‘relief’ of pleasure are paradigmatically part of this scene. Structurally dependent on the initial presence of good feelings, shame’s necessary ambivalence will perhaps get us further in accounting for the disturbing pleasures of Nightwood than notions such as depravity and abjection. The critical history of Barnes’s novel indeed oscillates between charges of collusion with repressive forces and attempts to rescue the novel from said charges. Nightwood has been read variously as flirtation with fascism and as a parodic critique of political and sexual fascism, as thoroughly homophobic and as an example of lesbian pride avant la lettre, as profoundly anti-Semitic and as a provocative challenge to the very basis of hegemonic othering.16 A consideration of shame might get us away from the question of whether

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the novel is subversive or whether it colludes in the oppression of minorities. Debasement, as Stockton argues, ‘informs us of hidden connections, cultural logics, and histories of fantasies, pain and attractions far more telling than the weak conceptions of oppression and subversion’ (2006: 24). Stockton notes that that such ‘conceptions’ provoke ‘the limiting question, seldom asked by novelists, though often posed by theorists, of whether some phenomenon (debasement, in this case) serves to “subvert” “dominant structures” ’ (2006: 24). By imagining the ways in which pleasures can be found in even the most shameful scenarios, Nightwood participates in a mode of thinking that avoids this ‘limiting question’.

Shameful intimacies: Contagion and communication To refuse to plot Nightwood’s location on a continuum between oppression and subversion is not, however, to read the novel apolitically. Indeed, reading Nightwood affectively allows us to experience the various attachments and identifications promoted by the shame response and therefore to consider ‘the value of debasement as a central social action, even when debasement seems a private, lonely act’ (Stockton, 2006: 2). Debasement might be said to function as a ‘central social action’ among the circus people, actresses and fake nobility that populate the ‘sham salons’ of Nightwood’s metropolitan underworld (Nightwood, 10). Like the pretend princesses and dukes, ‘gaudy, cheap cuts from the beast life’, Felix clings to a debased false title to ‘dazzle his own estrangement. It bought them together’ (Nightwood, 10). They participate in a ‘splendid and reeking falsification’: an activity that is both shameful in its overt dishonesty (based on an awareness of their own social exclusion) and a glorious appeal to community (Nightwood, 10). Tomkins helps us to challenge the assumption that shame is necessarily an isolating affect. Despite its associations with self-effacement and interrupted communication, the shame response is also, in itself, an act of communication. Tomkins’s example of the child who ‘covers his face in the presence of the stranger, but who also peeks through his fingers so that he may look without being seen’ not only allows us to imagine how interest-excitement endures in spite of shame, but also suggests that communication persists in spite of the wish for self-effacement. This ambivalence, as I have suggested, is implied in the turning towards/away through which Barnes dramatises Felix’s shame. The shame response, Tomkins argues, is basically self-defeating because in its attempt to reduce facial communication it actually communicates shame. It is

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especially self-defeating in the case of blushing, a ‘response auxiliary to the shame response’ that paradoxically increases facial communication, ‘even though the response is instigated by the feeling of shame and the wish to reduce facial visibility’ (Tomkins, 2008: II, 352). While Nightwood includes several references to blushing, the most notable example of shame showing itself on the surface of the body is Nikka’s tattooed skin. Like blushing, Nikka’s tattoos are read as signifiers of shame, yet represent a form of communication and a mark of social isolation. Jane Caplan notes that the tattoo’s boundary status on the skin is paralleled by its cultural use ‘as a marker of difference, an index of inclusion and exclusion’ (2000: xiv). Yet despite this, Caplan argues, ‘the structures of inclusion and exclusion it appears to support are also undermined by the conceptual instability inherent in a mark which is neither quite inside nor quite outside the skin’ (2000: xv). Tattooed skins, like blushing skins, serve only as rather slippery borders between a shamed subject and the shaming outside world. This conceptual instability between inside and outside, self and other, is suggestive of shame’s double movement ‘toward painful individuation, toward uncontrollable relationality’ (Sedgwick, 2003: 37). While marking him as a shamed other, Nikka’s tattoos provoke interest and attraction, forming bonds of communication with the fascinated O’Connor, who remarks: ‘Was he a sight to see!’ (Nightwood, 14). Stockton emphasises the ‘forms of sociality (attractions, reunions, lovemaking, even acts of clothing) that use humiliation for their own designs’ (2006: 26). Nikka’s tattoos, which do not hide his shame but carefully and lovingly exhibit it to others, might be read in such social terms. Shame’s ability to create identifications between apparently isolated subjects is explicitly stated in Tomkins’s observations about the contagious nature of this surprisingly generative affect. Tomkins gives several explanations for the ways in which shame spreads between subjects. First (and somewhat ironically), a mirroring shame response occurs precisely because the shame of the other is a barrier to mutuality (and so effects a break in communication for the second party). Second, the shame response is repeated as a kind of motor imitation, like a yawn producing a yawn. Third, the ashamed look of the other ‘may be internalized and act as an endopsychic source of shame to which the rest of the self responds with shame’ (2008: II, 402–3). And fourth, the shame of the other is an identification threat. In discussing how another’s bad treatment may flood us with shame, Sedgwick notes the possible ‘conceptual leverage for political projects’ that this might afford (2003: 37). In Nightwood, Barnes too suggests that shame is not merely isolating, but that its contagious nature might help form challenging intimacies

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between subjects. The ‘vicarious experience of shame’ is, I think, a crucial factor in understanding exactly what demands Nightwood places upon its reader (Tomkins, 2008: II, 407). The contagiousness of shame is suggested in the relationship between Felix’s parents, Hedwig and Guido. Hedwig, who dies giving birth to Felix, is a Christian, and her militaristic description suggests her authoritative position in relation to her Jewish husband (and implicitly the growing anti-Semitism within Europe). In his self-loathing, Guido debases himself through failed attempts to imitate her, which do not provoke Hedwig’s contempt but a more ambivalent shame: He had tried to be one with her by adoring her, by imitating her goose-step of a stride, a step that by him adopted became dislocated and comic. She would have done as much, but sensing in him something blasphemed and lonely, she had taken the blow as a Gentile must – by moving toward him in recoil. (Nightwood, 3)

In Hedwig’s case, ‘taking the blow’ becomes synonymous with ‘taking a bow’: the simultaneous turning towards and turning away of the shame response is suggested by the phrase ‘moving toward him in recoil’. As a response to Guido’s embarrassment, Hedwig’s pose of shame illustrates the notion that intimacies may be formed in potentially isolating scenes of debasement. Barnes does not deny the possibility that shame can be painfully isolating, but rather suggests that it might be reworked into something more sociable. This kind of transformation is suggested in the doctor’s description of the women ‘in the toilets at night’ (Nightwood, 85). Just as this episode describes a shift between the pleasure and sorrow of shame, it suggests how shameful scenes might involve an oscillation between isolation and communality. In her description, Barnes jumps from the third person plural to the singular, an especially noticeable shift since the subject ‘they’ is repeated at the beginning of each clause in the lines preceding the following: ‘Or walks the floor, holding her hands; or lies upon the floor, face down, with that terrible longing of the body that would, in misery, be flat with the floor’ (Nightwood, 85, emphasis mine). Barnes then returns to the plural, with the ‘girls [. . .] in the toilets at night [.  .  .] kneeling in that great secret confessional’ (Nightwood, 85). Plumb notes that Barnes changed ‘her’ to ‘their’ on the typescript ribbon, ‘probably in order to be consistent with number in the previous paragraph. However, perhaps because the passage loses its sense of singular suffering, she did not transfer the change to TSC1 or TSC2’ (Nightwood: The Original Version, 200). But, as it stands in the final version, Barnes in fact suggests how a shameful situation

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can be at once an instance of ‘singular suffering’ and a pluralistic engagement.17 The painful isolation and wish for self-effacement associated with homosexual shame are evoked in O’Connor’s references to ‘the mad Wittelsbach’, Ludwig II of Bavaria (Nightwood: The Original Version, 23). These references were ultimately excised: Plumb explains that, on Coleman’s suggestion, Barnes highlighted them as passages for deletion if Eliot was concerned about O’Connor having too many stories. While these references might appear minor and digressive, the story of Wittelsbach – who was declared mad and committed suicide in 1886 – provides an interesting counterpoint to the doctor’s own shame. The doctor seems to identify with Wittelsbach, depicting him as a flamboyant homosexual and possible transvestite: ‘So what of Ludwig? Called infirm because he’d had everything but a woman and a lace collar – and I wouldn’t be too sure about the lace collar’ (Nightwood: The Original Version, 23). O’Connor sympathises with Ludwig’s camp theatricality: [. . .] riding about on his lake dressed up like Lohengrin in a boat like a swan. What’s so crazy in that? If wanting a theatre all to yourself is madness, I’m madder than most; and if screaming would empty the world out I’d scream till I broke. (Nightwood: The Original Version, 23)

O’Connor empathises with the shamed one’s need for isolation, his desperate attempt to ‘empty the world’, yet this very identification challenges the notion that shame is solely isolating. Furthermore, the Wittelsbach story is reworked by O’Connor’s own narrative in Nightwood, where shame promises self-annihilation yet ultimately delivers the opportunity for perversely nourishing attachments with others. The excised scene of O’Connor’s arrest and trial – arguably his most shameful moment – immediately follows the Wittelsbach story and seems to refer back to it through the mention of suicide. The doctor tells Felix that he had to hold ‘on to my pants, because they had cut the suspenders for fear of suicide’ and his description of ‘shuffling along’ in the snow, his shoe laces removed ‘for fear of hanging’, adds a poignant comedy to the scene (Nightwood: The Original Version, 27). While O’Connor’s shame carries the threat of suicide, the scene culminates in a moment of intimacy between him and the judge charged with his public condemnation. O’Connor’s immediate response to his arrest indicates the ambivalent combination of a desire to communicate and a desire to efface himself: ‘looking right and left under my eyebrows – crying and shamed, (crying and needing a friend and afraid I’d see one)’ (Nightwood: The Original Version, 27). The doctor’s ‘looking right and left under my eyebrows’

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recalls Tomkins’s description of the facial characteristics signalling interest-excitement: ‘eyebrows down, track, look, listen’ (2008: I, 185). This desire for intimacy, the desire to look ‘for a friend’, exists in spite of O’Connor’s otherwise isolating shame. O’Connor is singled out before the judge as a criminal and a sexual deviant, yet while this scene is certainly – and crucially – shaming, the judge not only fails to charge the doctor, thus refusing to assert his full legal and juridical authority, but also succumbs to the vicarious feeling of shame himself. The scene when O’Connor thanks the judge highlights the connections between shame and camp, and the queer intimacies that this can produce: So I went by him and I whispered: ‘I thank you, and I love you very much, de tout mon coeur!’ He answered, soft and low, stabbing the blotter with a pencil: ‘C’est le coeur d’une femme!’ ‘Oui!’ I said gentle, so perhaps I’ve got me a friend. (Nightwood: The Original Version, 28)

While O’Connor debases himself with his over-gratitude and suffers mockery from the judge, he embraces the moment of shame: the enjoyable ‘camping’ of the scene relies on his appropriation of the shameful identity in which the judge’s charge of effeminacy casts him. But what is most compelling here is how this camp shame creates an affective bond between the judge and O’Connor. If O’Connor’s shame is transmuted into a more palatable camp, then it also seems to diffuse and envelop the judge, whose actions – ‘stabbing the blotter with a pencil’ – speak of an embarrassed nervous compulsion. Similarly – yet more problematically – this stabbing with the pencil (and not a pen) suggests a kind of sterile (inkless) penetration. The judge’s identification with the doctor is cemented by this sorry image of homosexual sterility, a recurring homophobic trope in Nightwood. But significantly, while a figure of hegemonic authority and the person who shames O’Connor, the judge himself is shamed and queered. O’Connor’s contagious shameful camp allows him to form a compromising intimacy with the judge, expressed with the knowing remark ‘perhaps I’ve got me a friend’. That this scene culminates with an affective identification between the representative of repressive authority and the apparently repressed stands as a compelling argument for what Sedgwick identifies as the ‘conceptual leverage’ provided by thinking about shame (2003: 37). O’Connor’s shame, embedded in his appealing camp, ultimately concludes in the embarrassment of the figure called upon to produce his shame. And the doctor’s excruciating account of his arrest equally mobilises the reader’s capability ‘through empathy and identification of living through others and therefore of being shamed by what happens to others’ (Tomkins, 2008: II, 407). Unlike an affect such as disgust, which permits us to

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repudiate O’Connor, the strange contagiousness of shame demands a more intimate relationship between Nightwood and its reader.18 The doctor’s peculiarly inviting, camp shame encourages an empathy and a sociability that complicates our understanding of him as simply an abject, solitary outsider.

Queer shame or gay pride? I have stressed the way that shame functions in Nightwood as a communicatory affect that provokes attachments between subjects. But Barnes’s novel also serves as a meditation on the other side of shame: the individuating qualities that define it as a self-making affect. In fact, Eve Sedgwick understands the communicatory and individuating aspects of shame as simply different sides of the same coin. Using the work of Tomkins and Michael Franz Basch, Sedgwick discusses how the shame response in infants is related to the loss of communicatory feedback from the caregiver, to the absence of a smile of contact. Such a communication failure breaks the circuit of mirroring expressions between infant and adult and so the moment of shame disrupts the ‘circuit of identity-constituting identificatory communication’ (Sedgwick, 2003: 36). However, Sedgwick claims that ‘in interrupting identification, shame, too, makes identity. In fact, shame and identity remain in very dynamic relation to one another, at once deconstituting and foundational, because shame is both peculiarly contagious and peculiarly individuating’ (2003: 36). Sedgwick describes how identification with another’s shame encourages a sense of ‘painful individuation’ as we find ourselves, against our wishes, ‘inside the individual skin of which each was burningly aware’ (2003: 37). Sedgwick therefore imagines shame as a productive trauma: the traumatic failure of recognition and break in communication shapes the subject. Similarly, Didier Eribon contends that the gay experience of ‘subjectivation’ is based in response to negative discourses including insult. Like Sedgwick, Eribon classes insult as a speech act, a perlocutionary performative utterance in the Austinian sense.19 A gay man, writes Eribon, learns about his difference through insults, which are ‘traumatic events experienced more or less violently at the moment they happen, but they stay in the memory and the body [. . .] to shape the personality, the subjectivity, the very being of the individual in question’ (2004: 15). Nightwood dramatises these recent claims about the individuating qualities of shame, and the language in which O’Connor in particular describes himself suggests that his queer subjectivity has

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been formed in the wounds of insult. Some of his most insulting selfdescriptive epithets were excised during the editorial process (presumably to prevent censors’ objections), including the italicised portion of the following: ‘ “You see before you, madame,” he said, “one who in common parlance is called a ‘faggot,’ a ‘fairy,’ a ‘queen.’ I was created in anxiety” ’ (Nightwood: The Original Version, 64–5, my italics).20 Not unlike the word ‘queer’, the terms O’Connor uses to describe himself are rooted in homophobic shaming. ‘Common parlance’ defines him in terms of insult and so his identity is born out of a negative, even traumatic, affective moment: ‘I was created in anxiety’. The connections between queer shame and childhood trauma are investigated in the doctor’s cross-dressing scene, and Nora’s exclamation that ‘God, children know something they can’t tell, they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!’ With its emphasis on dressing and acting, I read the scene as a theatrical performance and reworking of the primary trauma of shaming. The doctor’s cross-dressing not only enhances the theatricality of the scene but, as I have suggested, is itself coded as a profoundly embarrassing activity. If cross-dressing embarrasses straight sensibilities, by revealing, as Marjorie Garber suggests (in relation to this very scene) ‘the fact of blurred gender’, it can also provoke shame in gay men and lesbians (1992: 386). Elsewhere in her influential Vested Interests, Garber coins the term ‘transvestite panic’ (following Sedgwick’s notion of ‘homosexual panic’) in reference to the fears of gay men that they will be coded effeminate and lesbians that they will be coded masculine (1992: 137). She notes that the ‘overt self-advertisement’ practised by transvestites embarrasses other gay men who see such activity as ‘anachronistic and even self-hating’ (1992: 137). Similarly, in her anthropological study Mother Camp, Esther Newton writes that the drag queen ‘symbolizes all that homosexuals say they fear the most in themselves, all that they say they feel guilty about: he symbolizes, in fact, the stigma’ (1979: 103). In Nightwood, Djuna Barnes uses O’Connor’s drag to dramatise and resolve the foundational shameful moment of failed communication. Citing Basch’s claim that the ‘exquisite painfulness’ of shame in later life harks back to broken communications during infancy, to the inability to arouse positive reactions to one’s communications, Sedgwick emphasises the theatricality of this moment of adult shame: whenever the actor, or the performance artist, or I could add, the activist in an identity politics, proffers the spectacle of her or his ‘infantile’ narcissism to a spectating eye, the stage is set (so to speak) for either a newly dramatized flooding of the subject by the shame of refused return, or the successful pulsation of the mirroring regard through a narcissistic circuit rendered elliptical

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(which is to say: necessarily distorted) by the hyperbole of its original cast. (2003: 38)

Nora’s observation that children secretly like the wolf and Red Riding Hood in bed suggests the child’s shameful and thwarted attractions – the initial moment of shameful isolation predicated on blocked interestexcitement. In this scene, however, the doctor’s shameful spectacle is met by Nora’s ‘mirroring regard’. Nora shares in O’Connor’s contagious embarrassment, and such embarrassment is a precondition for intimacy: ‘The doctor said, “You see that you can ask me anything,” thus laying aside both their embarrassments’ (Nightwood, 71–2). The scene functions as a performance of shame, indicating the possibilities for reworking original trauma inherent in moments of shameful identification. Shame’s complex role in Nightwood – the way it seems to do so many different things in and for the novel – can help us to question the apparent polarity between the terms ‘shame’ and ‘pride’. The shame/pride distinction is muddied by Barnes’s insistence on the presence of positive affect within scenes of shame and, following the same logic of interdependence between positive and negative affect, in her understanding of shame as pride’s structural prerequisite. Tomkins argues that it is impossible to entirely remove individual or group shame: ‘The forms taken by shame are not distinct “toxic” parts of a group or individual identity that can be excised; they are instead integral to and residual in the processes by which identity itself is formed’ (2008: I, 63). And in Nightwood, Barnes suggests how these ‘integral’ and ‘residual’ traces of shame make themselves felt even within moments of apparent pride. The distinction between pride and shame is blurred by the proud, exhibitionist theatricality displayed by O’Connor as he performs shameful identities. For example, while O’Connor’s sexuality seems in no way hidden, he continues to refer to himself as ‘the Old Woman who lives in the closet’ (Nightwood, 124). The doctor becomes closeted, therefore, through his own unsolicited admission: his shameful hiddenness is implied only through his proud exhibitionism. Indeed, as Didier Eribon points out, the closet itself suggests the complex imbrications of shame and pride. While it is often ‘denounced by gay activists as a symbol of shame, of submission to oppression’, historically the closet has also been the only means of resisting heteronormative oppression, and has therefore functioned as ‘a way of being “proud” ’ (Eribon, 2004: 49). O’Connor’s overt, theatrical pride as he exhibits his apparently closeted identity is therefore perhaps only as paradoxical as the shame-pride distinction itself.

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While Nightwood repeats the trope of bowing down, it also includes recurring images of corporeal motions and stances commonly associated with pride: ascension, elevation and uprightness. Through playful combinations of these two apparently contradictory poses, such as the curse ‘May you be damned standing upright!’, Barnes hints at the potential closeness of pride and shame. The most base and cheap prostitute that exists in the metropolitan underworld is thus called a ‘Tuppeny Upright’, and the soon-to-be impotent Count is named ‘Altamonte’ (Nightwood, 118, 23). But even the downwards pose of shame is itself imbued with pride through Barnes’s reference to the song ‘Go Down, Moses’ in the title of her penultimate chapter, ‘Go Down, Matthew’. In the song, the imperative ‘go down’ implores Moses to act with pride, to free the oppressed Israelites. Equally, as a Negro spiritual, the song’s associations with slavery suggest how assertions of pride are often proceeded by or predicated on a shameful scenario. Shame’s foundational place in creating pride is also implied in the relationship between Felix and those to whom he bows down: With the fury of a fanatic he hunted down his own disqualification, rearticulating the bones of the Imperial Courts long forgotten (those long remembered can alone claim to be long forgotten), listening with an unbecoming loquacity to officials and guardians for fear that his inattention might lose him some fragment of his resuscitation. He felt that the great past might mend a little if he bowed low enough, if he succumbed and gave homage. (Nightwood, 8)

Felix’s wish to ‘mend’ the past through his self-abasement again suggests pride’s dependence on shame: his own ‘disarticulation’ is the means by which a proud history can be ‘rearticulated’ or ‘resuscitated’. This same logic, whereby apparent dichotomies are dismantled and replaced by the idea of a structural interdependence, is repeated in the claim that only the ‘long remembered’ can be ‘long forgotten’. ‘Just as heterosexuality needs homosexuality,’ writes Susan Burgess, ‘so too may pride need shame. Foreground (pride) requires what is background (shame) to define its outline’ (2005: 141). Consequentially, rather than erasing or replacing shame, pride actually exacerbates shame: ‘Without pride,’ Burgess argues, ‘the outline of shame disappears’ (2005: 141). This tendency is particularly evident in a story by O’Connor that, upon the initial suggestion of Coleman, was removed from the final version of the text.21 O’Connor relates the military decoration of a young gay soldier called MacClusky, portraying him with the combination of ridicule and camp pleasure he normally reserves to describe himself. Before the war, MacClusky was a dancer who could

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be seen ‘swinging’ through the streets of London, ‘reeking of gardenia and clutching a cane, his face made up so perfect you would think his mother had done right by him’ (Nightwood: The Original Version, 95). MacClusky, then, is understood through an embarrassing and embarrassed homophobia, the subject of shame despite the moment of honour at the centre of the story. His identity as a soldier is clearly meant to sit uneasily with his vanity and his ‘girlishness’: O’Connor relates how MacClusky panics and, instead of shooting, simply hits the Germans’ heads with the heft of his gun. The phallic implication of the gun is clear: being insufficiently masculine, MacClusky is unable to operate the weapon and uses it in an improper, ‘deviant’, fashion. His military decoration, a supposed moment of pride, only serves to emphasise his shameful difference from his comrades. O’Connor describes MacClusky at Flanders coming up to regimentals to be decorated by his prowess, and all of us grinning at him because we knew how and why he came by it, by a lack in the mind of the general who did not know what sort of a nature the lad was suffering under. (Nightwood: The Original Version, 95)

MacClusky’s military pride leads to his shameful isolation as his fellow soldiers conspire to laugh at his queer ‘lack’. O’Connor’s description of MacClusky’s decoration is worth quoting in full for its elaboration of how pride can in fact reinforce shame: So when the general comes up prancing and pinning and kissing the elect we all stood still, looking out of the ends of our eyes at Mac who loomed up like a horse-bun on a platter, all misery and glory, thinking quick and slow: ‘Here’s where I come into something that will take away the ignominy of my past, and the marrow of my nature will be refilled and made glorious,’ for he had been so far away and beaten up in his heart for the opinion the world had of him – and everybody has it, no matter what they say – that he had forgotten where he was standing and what he was waiting for, when down on his breast flew the crois de guerre with a pin in its tail and at that he gave a jump back that carried him a foot out of line, and with a great swelling and rolling him along he came back again and the tears spurted out of him right forward like a lemon. (Nightwood: The Original Version, 96)

MacClusky’s moment of pride is accompanied by mixed feelings (‘misery and glory’) as it relates painfully and inextricably to his previous shame. He hopes that he will be reborn – that his past will be forgotten and he will be ‘made glorious’ – yet the memories of past shame are in fact brought to the fore and threaten to eclipse the moment of honour. Pride itself takes on the characteristics of shame, and is ultimately felt as a kind of physical trauma: the violent puncture of the medal’s pin. As a

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painful, affecting wound, pride must make itself feel like shame in order to be registered by MacClusky. It is no surprise, therefore, that a discourse of insult governs the doctor’s description of MacClusky’s pride: at the pinnacle of his pride he cries ‘like a lemon’. This description does not simply convey the juicy abundance of MacClusky’s tears but also functions as an insulting term with homophobic implications. While ‘lemon’ in particular is slang for a foolish or unsatisfactory person, the use of ‘fruit’ as a derogatory term for a male homosexual was already in circulation at the time of the novel’s composition. O’Connor claims that MacClusky’s tears are those of a boy ‘who has been queer all his hour and its suddenly made all right by a general upheaval of justice’, but the pride granted by the authority is phantomlike and insubstantial: the crois de guerre has merely ‘tossed him up into a shape of approval’ (Nightwood: The Original Version, 96, emphasis mine).

Modernist embarrassments Just as Barnes suggests that pride requires shame, O’Connor posits the notion that ‘heights’ are reached through descent or degradation: ‘we do not “climb” to heights but are eaten away to them, and then conformity, neatness, ceases to entertain us. Man is born as he dies, rebuking cleanliness’ (Nightwood, 106). And for O’Connor, this turn towards debasement involves embracing the past: ‘In the acceptance of depravity the sense of the past is most fully captured’ (Nightwood, 106). As a text that explores the temporal dimension of shame, specifically the shameful pleasures produced by looking back, Nightwood itself suggests the connection between depravity and history, a connection secured by the affective dynamics of shame. Like Robin, the ‘infected carrier of the past’, Barnes’s texts are shameful partly because they bear traces of a disavowed past (Nightwood, 34). Barnes writes of Robin in 1935: ‘I do not want to connect her in any way with the present temporal world as we know it, it is why I did not let her say more than two words for herself in the book’ (cited in Plumb, 1993: 156). Robin is not a character whose actions can be understood in terms of psychological realism, but rather she functions in Nightwood as a figure whose primary interest arises from her ability to provoke feeling in others. And the feeling Robin most commonly produces in others – including Nora, Felix and Jenny – is a sense of shame. The awareness of depravity Robin creates in others relates to her apparently primordial and animalistic qualities: she is a ‘beast turning human’ (Nightwood, 33). Yet Robin’s power over the other characters relates to the fact that

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the sense of the past she ‘carries’ produces pleasure as well as shame. Felix appreciates in Robin ‘an undefinable disorder, a sort of “odour of memory”, like a person who has come from some place that we have forgotten and would give our life to recall’ (Nightwood, 106). In her ability to bear traces of a forgotten past, Robin not only infects others with a sense of shame, as they are reminded of the things they have left behind (which O’Connor often refers to in terms of dirt and filth), but also produces pleasure through this very remembering. Robin’s ability to reduce every movement to ‘an image of a forgotten experience’ is described as ‘an insupportable a joy as would be the vision of an eland coming down an aisle of trees, chapleted with orange blossoms and bridal veil’ (Nightwood, 33–4). Robin carries both the shame of the past and the pleasure that came before the shame: she bears traces of a ‘joy’ so ‘insupportable’ that it had to be (partially) renounced. Like Felix, Nightwood is ‘impure’, a text comprised of ‘mingled passions’ and thus ‘the accumulated and single – the embarrassed’. Yet its embarrassing potential comes not only from the fact of its genre mixing, but rather the specific genres in which it participates make it, like Robin, an ‘infected carrier of the past’. Significantly, among the genres that Barnes re-reads or ‘witnesses’ are those that privilege the affective responses of their readers. Caselli has recently drawn attention to Nightwood’s ‘unbridled emotionality’ as one of the characteristics of Barnes’s ‘improper modernism’, a symptom of how ‘Nightwood does almost everything that a modern should not, and too much of what a modern should’ (2009: 183).22 And in her analysis of Eliot’s role in the revision of Nightwood for publication, Faltejskova cites Eliot’s ‘belief that good literature should be devoid of personal and “new” emotion’ as one of the reasons for his excision of certain passages (2010: 72).23 The texts within the romantic and gothic traditions to which Nightwood refers all work to make their readers feel, and to feel in a manner which, for the modernist reader, constitutes a disavowed pleasure or ‘insupportable joy’. One such ‘insupportable joy’ is indeed the centrality of ‘passionate love’ to Barnes’s narrative (Nightwood, 62). The fact that the novel is remembered, primarily, for the ‘insane passion’ between Nora and Robin serves as just one reason why it might provoke embarrassment for the modernist reader (Nightwood, 68). ‘Passion’ is a word that seems ill at ease with modernist sensibilities: it is more suggestive of the strength of feeling valued in the romantic fiction of the nineteenth century than the more cynical eroticism privileged by the high modernists. Clark argues that modernism constituted itself as ‘serious’ through a gendered opposition with the romantic, which it conflated with ‘the sentimental

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and the popular’ (1991: 19). Nightwood, as a notoriously ‘difficult’ modernist text with apparently limited popular appeal, threatens to deconstruct this opposition, retaining a certain romantic sensibility alongside its complex, embodied representations of affect. Deborah Wilson argues that Nightwood ‘most effectively parodies and indicts a heterosexual romantic apex, Wuthering Heights’, that Nora’s comment that Robin ‘is myself’ echoes Cathy’s ‘declaration of radical union with Heathcliff – “I am Heathcliff” ’ (1996: 58). Clearly such a declaration has dramatically different consequences when spoken by a lesbian, especially considering Nightwood’s flirtation with homophobic constructions of homosexuality as narcissism. But must we assume that the reference to Emily Brontë’s novel, a copy of which may be found among Barnes’s personal library at the University of Maryland, is entirely parodic? Indeed, not only did Barnes enthusiastically refer to Wuthering Heights (1847) as ‘the greatest story of love ever written’ (Caselli, 2009: 178), she also told Coleman that Brontë was ‘like God, like Shakespeare and the Bible’, claiming that ‘I think only two women have written books worth reading, Emily Brontë and myself’ (Herring, 1995: 195). And according to Herring, Barnes’s adulation for Brontë ‘infuriated Coleman, who thought such hyperbole typically American’ (1995: 195). In other words, it appears that Barnes’s appreciation of the nineteenth-century novelist was deemed inappropriate, excessive and probably embarrassing by the woman who acted as Nightwood’s fierce advocate to Eliot and the board at Faber & Faber. Barnes’s novel in fact stands in non-dichotomous relation to the romantic excess of Wuthering Heights as it witnesses the radical affective power of this earlier novel. Nightwood represents a significant departure from Wuthering Heights (a novel that fuses the gothic and the romantic in its celebration of ‘passion’), rejecting nineteenth-century models of subjectivity in favour of more abstract tableaux of affect. However, what Barnes’s work has in common with Brontë’s is an absolute commitment to the textual inscription and production of feeling. Nightwood – which in an earlier draft even included a character called Catherine who was later combined with Nora – owes a debt to Wuthering Heights that, because not exclusively parodic in nature, might be regarded as an embarrassment to the kind of modernist sensibilities represented by Coleman’s comments. Several recent critics have read Barnes’s work in the context of gothic conventions in particular. Avril Horner considers Nightwood within the French gothic tradition, in particular tracing the resonances between Barnes’s text and Lautréamont’s Maldoror (1868–9) and Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (1932). Horner claims that Nightwood’s gothic credentials relate, broadly, to ‘a continual

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questioning of normality as benign’ and ‘a blurring of the boundaries between night/day, masculine/feminine, sacred/profane, real/surreal and human/animal’ (2002: 232). Specific gothic elements include the Volkbein’s Viennese home, Felix’s role as Wandering Jew, Robin’s vampiric ‘night-time predatory wanderings’ and the dark and labyrinthine depiction of Paris (Horner, 2002: 232). Indeed, the Paris of Nightwood is not the capital of modernity that one might expect in a depiction of the city in the 1920s, but rather, as Horner claims, a ‘dark and labyrinthine city, more reminiscent of the capital before Haussmann’s transformation of it between 1852 and 1870’ (2002: 234). In fact, claims Horner, Barnes’s depiction of Paris owes more to the nineteenth-century metropolises as depicted by Eugène Sue and Charles Dickens, thus challenging the modern idea of the city as ‘acme of urbane sophistication and cultural integrity’ (2002: 235). The anachronistic ‘gothic’ representation of Paris has particular significance because it functions as a reminder of what modernity sought to eradicate. Nightwood’s city and its past are in fact conceptually linked to shameful attachments: ‘Those who love everything are despised by everything, as those who love a city, in its profoundest sense, become the shame of that city, the détraqués, the paupers; their good is incommunicable, outwitted, being the rudiment of a life that has developed, as in man’s body are found evidences of lost needs’ (Nightwood, 47). Here, shame continues to be understood as a feeling predicated on positive affect: intense love produces intense shame. But crucially, the subjects who are the ‘shame’ of the city are precisely so because they bear traces of an embarrassing, pre-modern past. Through her nineteenth-century attachments, including her representation of the city, Barnes risks becoming a détraqué of the modernist canon. Nightwood’s most famous modernist ‘reader’ was of course T. S. Eliot, one of the novel’s editors and the author of its preface. In Chapter 1 I attempted to problematise recent critical attempts to vilify Eliot as the paternalistic oppressor of the powerless Barnes. Indeed, in the absence of Eliot’s support it is unlikely that Nightwood would have seen publication at all during the late 1930s without even more substantial revision. However, Eliot’s carefully measured 1937 Preface to the novel, along with the nature of the revisions he and Frank Morley suggested, provide a valuable insight into Nightwood’s slippery position in relation to modernist discourse. Eliot’s support for Nightwood should not be disregarded, but its caveats might be read in relation to the kind of impulse that prompted his celebratory assessment that Ulysses had ‘destroyed the whole of the 19th century’.24 Miriam Fuchs refers to a ‘lingering ambivalence’ in Eliot’s introduc-

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tion (1993: 219), while Donna Gerstenberger detects what she calls a ‘proprietary anxiousness’ (1989: 129). Both descriptions are apt for a piece of criticism that goes out of its way to highlight problems with its subject and, in claims such as the following, threatens to damn Nightwood with faint praise: When I first read the book I found the opening movement rather slow and dragging, until the appearance of the doctor. And throughout the first reading, I was under the impression that it was the doctor alone who gave the book its vitality; and I believed the final chapter to be superfluous. (Nightwood, x)

Why, one might ask, does Eliot spend a large portion of his introduction pinpointing misgivings to be overcome? Gerstenberger claims that Nightwood must have held a ‘shock of recognition’ for Eliot because its modernism bears similarities with The Waste Land’s depiction of the decay of civilisation, aristocratic disarray, the estrangement from identity and its ‘fragmentary, non-linear form’ (1989: 129, 130). But would the ‘shock of recognition’ Gerstenberger describes really have been all that shocking for Eliot? I am sceptical that, by exhibiting all the right and proper signs of a high modernist text, Nightwood would provoke anxiety for Eliot. In fact, I think that it is precisely the novel’s departure from modernist orthodoxy that leads to Eliot’s peculiar response. The word ‘embarrassment’ might be equally pertinent as ‘ambivalence’ and ‘anxiety’ in considering Eliot’s attitude towards Nightwood. Indeed, Eliot seems embarrassed in relation to a number of features of the text. Most obviously, as several critics have noticed, he de-emphasises the homosexual particularity of the novel, stressing its universal appeal. He suggests that readers focus less on the ‘particular abnormalities of temperament’ of the characters because the novel’s ‘deeper design is that of the human misery and bondage which is universal’ (Nightwood, xii, xiii). Fuchs claims that Eliot was particularly drawn to the character of O’Connor because he could subsume his ‘individual, nearly grotesque transvestism’ into the established Western literary tradition of Tiresias, an ‘exemplar of universal suffering’ (‘Djuna Barnes and T. S. Eliot’, 1993: 292). Other modernist admirers of Nightwood were also keen to describe the novel in terms of an impersonal argument about a general cultural malaise.25 In his review for The Listener, Edwin Muir claims that the novel’s ‘main theme’ is best summed up by O’Connor’s line that ‘No man needs curing of his individual sickness, his universal malady is what he should look to.’ As opposed to ‘individual sickness’, the notion of ‘universal malady’ takes one quite far away from a focus on affect, diagnosing as it does a metaphysical condition rather than a sickness felt in the body.

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The wish to downplay the ‘individual sickness’ of Nightwood’s characters is reflected in some of Eliot’s editorial decisions, in which direct references to homosexuality are recommended for excision. It is significant that my chapter has focused on a number of scenes that were ultimately excluded from the 1936 edition: these were the parts of Nightwood that, for various reasons, made it less acceptable as a modernist publication. The demands of censorship cannot be ignored here, and it is certainly the case that Eliot, as editor, had a responsibility to highlight the scenes that would risk charges of obscenity. Equally, not all of the excisions can be attributed to T. S. Eliot or Frank Morley, Eliot’s fellow editor at Faber & Faber:26 Barnes herself chose to make certain cuts and, as Faltejskova has shown, Emily Coleman also deleted certain scenes before showing Eliot the typescript. However, some of Eliot and Morley’s suggestions for change seem excessively, and peculiarly, censorious. A case in point is where descriptions of homosexual shame are included but references to the enduring pleasures within these scenes are excised. One such excision involves the cutting of only two words, which I indicate parenthetically: ‘And do you think that those circular cottages [of delight] have not brought me to great argument’ (Nightwood: The Original Version, 78). Plumb explains that this excision was marked for deletion in one typescript only, by the red and blue ink she attributes to Eliot and Morley respectively, and that it ‘seems an attempt to suppress the suggestion of pleasure with respect to homosexual acts’ (Nightwood: The Original Version, 199). In the scene the doctor proposes a particularly shameful view of his life as an inadequate parody of heterosexual normalcy; he speaks of his frustrated ‘wish for children and knitting’ and exclaims: ‘God, I never asked better than to boil some good man’s potatoes and toss up a child for him every nine months by the calendar. Is it my fault that my only fireside is the outhouse?’ (Nightwood, 82). O’Connor’s shame about his queer existence was mitigated by the two words that Eliot and Morely decided to cut: ‘cottages of delight’ transforms the closeted space of ‘the outhouse’ into something more than a sorry substitution for the ‘fireside’ of heteronormative domestic bliss. ‘Cottages of delight’ insists on queer pleasure, and this insistence opens up the possibility of a pride that, as Eribon (2004) and others have suggested, is central to the complexity of the closet. If Eliot and Morley’s editorial embarrassment about the pleasures of Nightwood’s shameful bodies might be contextualised within the stringency of 1930s obscenity laws, then Eliot’s Preface suggests a specifically literary kind of embarrassment. As Donna Gerstenberger notes, Eliot ‘worries the question of a genre definition’ through considering what Barnes’s novel ‘is not’ (1989: 129). This negative focus is

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characteristic of an essay which protests too much against the idea that Nightwood might contain unpalatable literary resonances. Interestingly, Eliot creates an association between novels and debasement, which he apparently brings up in order to dismiss: ‘Unless the term “novel” has become too debased to apply, and if it means a book in which living characters are created and shown in significant relationship, this book is a novel’ (Nightwood, x). Clearly, the term ‘novel’ carries some unpleasant associations for the classicist Eliot, who finds it necessary to strip the term of certain cultural baggage in order to give it his own, acceptable definition. As Fuchs writes, Eliot constructs an ‘ideal readership’ for Nightwood by claiming that the book will appeal primarily to readers of poetry (1993: 292). The urgency in Eliot’s wish to emphasise Barnes’s poetic abilities relates, I think, to an embarrassment about the nineteenth-century novelistic traditions in which Nightwood participates. When Eliot closes with his well-known remark that the novel possesses a ‘quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy’, he is suggesting an acceptable literary precedent for Nightwood (Nightwood, xiv). Unlike the more camp ‘horror and doom’ associated with the gothic novel, or the schmaltzy ‘passion’ of the romantic love story, the Elizabethan tragedy is exactly the kind of genre that a modernist might incorporate without shame.

‘The Possessed’ Barnes’s novel ends with a short, coda-like chapter in which Robin and Nora are wordlessly reunited in a rural American chapel. The chapter is dark yet strangely comic, a quasi-gothic, ritualised performance of affect in which Robin acts in accordance with the chapter’s title: ‘The Possessed’. Having abandoned Jenny, Robin walks the countryside and, in a movement at once animalistic and ritualistic, circles ‘closer and closer’ to the place where Nora lives, sleeping in the woods or in a decaying chapel (Nightwood, 151). One night Robin is woken by the barking ‘far off’ of Nora’s dog. Nora too is disturbed by the dog and leaves the house. She sees a light in the chapel at the top of the hill and runs into it, ‘cursing and crying’ (Nightwood, 152). The scene that follows is perhaps the most memorable and compelling in the whole novel, but invites, I think, not so much the reader’s interpretive impulses as her affective response. Before a ‘contrived altar’ in the chapel stands Robin, and ‘at the moment Nora’s body struck the wood, Robin began going down’ (Nightwood, 152). As Robin slides downwards, Nora’s dog ‘stood

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there, rearing back’ and trembling, ‘whining and waiting’ (Nightwood, 152). Robin’s behaviour becomes confused with that of the dog: ‘And down she went, until her head swung against his; on all fours now, dragging her knees’, ‘whimpering too now, coming forward, her head turned completely sideways, grinning and whimpering’ (Nightwood, 152, 152–3). The scene, chapter and novel ends with a depiction of abject shame as Robin becomes as bestial as the dog himself: Then she began to bark also, crawling after him – barking in a fit of laughter, obscene and touching. The dog began to cry, running with her, head-on with her head [. . .] and she grinning and crying with him; crying and crying in shorter spaces, moving head to head, until she gave up, lying out, her hands beside her, her face turned and weeping; and the dog too gave up then, and lay down, his eyes bloodshot, his head flat along her knees. (Nightwood, 153)

In this scene, ‘going down’ becomes associated with perhaps the most shameful thing imaginable: human proximity to the animal. As Alice A. Kuzniar writes: ‘To imagine blurring the distinctions of human and beast is to enter into the territory of shame’ (2006: 9). Robin’s relation to the dog is so intensely and uncomfortably physical that several readers have claimed the scene is sexual in nature. Barnes at first strongly denied this but later tacitly acknowledged its sexual implications by cutting out the phrases found by Coleman to echo a mutual friend’s story about pretending to treat a dog like a lover.27 The fact that such an act, whether read as overtly sexual or not, takes place in a church affords it the descriptive term ‘obscene’. Eliot tried to soften the impact of the scene by suggesting that the word ‘obscene’ be replaced by ‘unclean’, yet his distaste for the chapter was such that he at first called for its excision. Eliot’s decision to state his initial disapproval of the scene in his Preface might be read as an attempt to distance himself from it: by registering his reservations he can, to a degree, mitigate any potential embarrassment. The scene’s gothic overtones, emphasised by Horner, might also have caused embarrassment to the modernist sensibility. Indeed, Horner argues that the scene ‘both recalls the Gothic novel’s fondness for the sacrilegious act and expresses that modernism’s anxieties concerning the fragmentation of the self are essentially gothic’ (2002: 232). Might this scene be embarrassing then, partly because it suggests that some of the constituent qualities of modernist textuality are not fundamentally new but are reworkings of tropes found in discredited genres? I have read the scene, and Barnes’s novel in general, as being potentially embarrassing to the modernist sensibility. Yet I have also maintained that embarrassment, as a variation of shame, is an ambivalent

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affect that relies on initial interest or excitement, and that such pleasures endure within scenes of shame. Perhaps Barnes, then, in the words of O’Connor, seeks to embarrass her reader ‘for the good it might do to him’. This ‘good’ might take the form of the renewal of a disavowed pleasure, or a simple act of identification with a wounded other. In her description of Robin’s behaviour as ‘touching and obscene’, Barnes suggests the rich ambivalence of the reader’s affective response to such a shameful scene. While the word ‘obscene’ is suggestive of the reader’s desire to turn away with repugnance from Robin’s shame, ‘touching’ suggests the way that witnessing shame makes such disassociation impossible. ‘Touching’, in this context, implies the contagiousness of shame and the strange relationality created between the shamed one and her witness, who cannot turn away, but is touched by shame too. Stockton argues that, as social actions, self-debasements do not create ‘harmonious communities’ so much as a kind of social solitude of people who are set, in some deep measure, apart from each other – but in an apartness they create together and in which they are held (sometimes sexually by a lover, sometimes mentally in someone else’s mind). (2006: 27)28

Nightwood encourages the reader to ‘position’ herself accordingly in relation to the body of the text, allowing it to ‘touch’ or ‘hold’ her while still, as a very consequence of responding vicariously to its shame, feeling ‘apart’ from it. While Eliot might have felt ambivalent about Nightwood, his admiration and disapproval perhaps equal in measure, another major modernist was wholeheartedly damning in his appraisal of Barnes’s work. In his jibe to Eliot, whom he thought exaggerated Barnes’s talents, that Barnes’s ‘Blubbery prose had no fingers or toes’, Ezra Pound creates the idea of a soft, flabby (and by implication feminine and indulgent) writing in relation to which his own ‘hard’ (for which read masculine and rational) poetics can emerge (1971: 286). Such a critique supports Clark’s argument that the ‘serious’ in literature constitutes itself in relation to a feminised other: Pound requires Barnes’s prose to represent what modernist textuality should not look like. The ‘hardness’ that Pound values in poetics is a clear example of how high modernist aesthetics are understood on the basis of an absence of feeling, as a serious retreat from the ‘sentimental’. Yet ‘hardness’, as Ahmed points out, ‘is not the absence of emotion, but a different emotional orientation towards others’ (2004: 4, emphasis in original). Similarly, Clark argues that her discussion of the sentimental within modernism is at issue ‘because no discourse can escape appealing to the emotions of its

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audience, and yet modernist criticism pretended to do so’ (1991: 6). Nightwood’s potential to embarrass the modernist reader teaches us that any ambition to create an emotionless discourse is unrealisable. Indeed, we might say that the modernist project to disavow the importance of emotions, bodies and feeling is itself embarrassed by Barnes’s text. But happily, Nightwood also demonstrates that such embarrassment might bring not only pain but pleasure, interest and excitement too.

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Chapter 4

‘That Magic Reiteration’: Ladies Almanack and Happiness

The Virgin with the Partridge Call, Stepping her rolling azure Ball, The Queen, who in the Night turned down The spikës of her Husband’s Crown Therein to sit her Wench of Bliss The whole long Year will be like this! For all the Planets, Stars and Zones Run girlish to their Marrow-bones! And all the Tides prognosticate Not much of any other State! (Ladies Almanack, 60) No ‘thesis’ on the pleasure of the text is possible; barely an inspection (an introspection) that falls short. Eppure si gaude! And yet, against and in spite of everything, the text gives me bliss. (Barthes, 1975: 34)

From the wider cosmos to street level, from ‘Planets, Stars and Zones’, to ‘Petticoat Lane, just off Breach-String-Alley’, the ladies of Djuna Barnes’s Ladies Almanack inhabit a world defined by joyful ebullience and bodily pleasure (76). The geographical emphasis is important: bliss is not ‘atopic’ as Roland Barthes claims in The Pleasure of the Text (1975), but rather Barnes suggests that happiness is ‘here’ within the very pages of her Almanack (23). Understood as a tribute to the lesbian community of 1920s expatriate Paris, a sapphic roman à clef depicting Natalie Barney and the women who attended her salons at 20 rue Jacob, Barnes’s work playfully adopts and adapts the form of an early modern astrological almanac. The Almanack recounts the lifelong exploits of Dame Evangeline Musset – a rakish adventuress generally understood to be based on Barney – but also serves as a mock treatise on lesbian sexuality and woman’s pleasure.1 Privately printed as a limited edition in 1928, Ladies Almanack is itself a pleasing material object, complete with mock wood-cut illustrations and ornate typefaces. Indeed, the first

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fifty of the original 1,050 copies were lovingly hand-coloured by the author herself. With her Almanack, Djuna Barnes positions reading as a highly enjoyable bodily activity, on a continuum with other physical and material pleasures, including the so-called anti-modernist pleasures of fashion and commodity culture. Roland Barthes’s proposition that ‘no “thesis” on the pleasure of the text is possible’ is just one expression of an apparently widely held sentiment in literary theory and criticism. For Barthes, the difficulty of understanding and discussing textual pleasure is somehow connected to his perception that it is an inherently asocial affect: ‘I can only circle such a subject – and therefore better do it briefly and in solitude than collectively and interminably’ (1975: 34, emphasis in original). In what follows I suggest that Ladies Almanack teaches us that thinking about the positive affects can be a far from brief and solitary affair, but first I want to consider how far Barthes’s claim that ‘no thesis is possible’ has set the tone for literary theoretical inquiry into happiness. A survey of the scholarship emerging from the recent ‘affective turn’ in critical theory would seem to support Barthes’s hunch that it is difficult, perhaps even futile, to theorise the good feelings that we might experience as readers and subjects. While theorists have been interested in the positive investments relating to negative affect and the potential proximity between pain and pleasure, the wounded, traumatised and shamed subject has so far proved a more fruitful area for inquiry than the happy one. Such a purview has, until now, been shared by Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism. Important exceptions to this critical trend may be found in the work of Michael D. Snediker (2008), who has taught us about the value of ‘queer optimism’, and Elizabeth Freeman (2010), who has helped us to imagine a pleasurable corporeal relationship to documents of the past through her notion of erotohistoriography. But while literary and cultural theory has been relatively slow to engage with the positive affects, there has also been a significant turn towards happiness in self-help and popular therapy genres and a proliferation of inquiries into the science and economics of happiness, which Sara Ahmed refers to collectively as ‘the happiness industry’ (2010: 3). Ahmed, and her fellow contributors to the ‘Happiness’ special issue of New Formations she edited in Winter 2007/2008, have opened up a compelling and much needed critique within cultural studies of the insidious ideological work done by this ‘happiness industry’. Ahmed points to the normalising function of happiness in these discourses, showing how claims to happiness increase the value of certain kinds of personhood. Ahmed draws our attention to the ‘unhappy effects of happiness’, how happiness is used to justify oppres-

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sion and ‘to redescribe social norms as social goods’ (2010: 2). The value of Ahmed’s work in this area cannot be underestimated, and one of its most significant insights is about the importance, strategic and otherwise, of the freedom to be unhappy. In her chapter ‘Unhappy Queers’, Ahmed joins critics such as Heather Love and Didier Eribon in emphasising the centrality of bad feelings to queer existence, asking ‘what it might mean to affirm unhappiness, or at least not to overlook it’ (2010: 89). Yet Ladies Almanack invites us to consider what might it mean to affirm happiness, to affirm a happiness that ‘goes beyond the straight lines of happiness scripts’, to affirm a happiness that literary criticism and queer theory have, arguably, been much readier to ‘overlook’ than unhappiness (Ahmed, 2010: 115). And since the positive affects remain relatively underexplored it is perhaps unsurprising that the theoretical vocabulary for good feelings can seem provisional and messy. This is apparent from a cursory look at the beginning of this chapter: my title promises a discussion of ‘happiness’, yet my epigraphs speak of ‘bliss’ and ‘pleasure’. And my opening sentence brings the words ‘joy’ and ‘ebullience’ into play. I think that such messiness might indeed prove to be a useful conceptual tool. ‘Pleasure’ remains dominant, however, in the theoretical and psychoanalytic work I draw on: from Freud onwards, ‘pleasure’ carries the semantic burden when it comes to thinking about what it means to feel good. And while I don’t wish to jettison the word ‘pleasure’, I find this dominance in the theoretical lexicon somewhat problematic. For not only does ‘pleasure’ often become equated with sexual pleasure, it often comes to signify pleasure in accordance with a particular model of sexuality or a particular way of enjoying sex. And all too often in contemporary theory, such a kind of pleasure seems to have little to do with ideas of happiness or enjoyment. Michael Snediker astutely identifies the kind of spiral of negativity that occurs in discussions of pleasure, noting the ‘theoretical conflations of happiness with pleasure, pleasure with sexual pleasure, sexual pleasure with jouissance, jouissance with a sort of death’ (2008: 70). Following Snediker’s insights, this chapter asks what happens when we think of sexual pleasure without jouissance (and as a form of pleasure not entirely unlike others), and when we insist that ‘happiness’ might be a notion worthy of theoretical inquiry. ‘Pleasure’ figures as something of an ur-word for Roland Barthes. Barthes acknowledges that he uses ‘pleasure’ ambiguously, in both a general and a miniaturised sense and always in relation to a second term: jouissance or ‘bliss’. When contrasted with ‘bliss’, ‘pleasure’ refers to a more modest affect, containing a notion of contentment and stability, perhaps coming close to the meanings that often cluster around the term

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‘happiness’. But when used more generally, ‘pleasure’ also incorporates ‘bliss’. The consequences of such semantics are significant. While forever remaining associated with the deathly sexual pleasures of jouissance, pleasure must also be used to describe other ‘lesser’ (non-erotic) forms of positive affect. Barthes’s orders of pleasure also correspond to orders of discursivity: the opposition between texts of pleasure and bliss can be established indirectly by the fact that ‘pleasure can be expressed in words, bliss cannot’ (1975: 21). Concomitantly, those texts that produce ‘bliss’ – unlike those that merely produce ‘pleasure’ – must necessarily escape critical discourse: ‘criticism’, Barthes insists, ‘always deals with the texts of pleasure, never the texts of bliss’ (1975: 21, emphasis in original). Barthes’s distinction between ‘pleasure’ and ‘bliss’ also relates to questions of duration and temporality, questions that we find taken up in Djuna Barnes’s considerations of happiness. In this chapter I treat The Pleasure of the Text less as an interpretative tool for reading Barnes (not because I find Roland Barthes’s thesis ungenerative or uninteresting – it is anything but); rather I am interested in how Ladies Almanack might trouble some of Barthes’s theorisations of pleasure, including his hierarchical distinction between different types of textual pleasure and their temporal and ideological qualities. Although ‘bliss’ occurs in the Almanack quotation with which my chapter opens, this word alone does not adequately describe the variety of good feelings expressed and produced by this piece of verse, from the bawdy pleasures of its innuendo to the happy elan of those three exclamation marks. I want to argue that Barnes’s Almanack illustrates the proposition that notions such as pleasure, happiness, joy and bliss are not mutually exclusive but might in fact overlap, but overlap in a way which does not reduce positive affect into the thin concept (happiness = pleasure = jouissance) identified by Snediker (2008). Writing specifically on the distinction between ‘happiness’ and ‘joy’, Ahmed (2010) warns us against conflating the two terms, insisting on their specific histories. However, Ahmed also suggests that imagining the freedom to be unhappy would also include ‘the freedom to be happy in inappropriate ways’ (2010: 222). Such a ‘freedom’, I want to insist, defines the world of Ladies Almanack, where happiness relates in part to an ‘inappropriate’ failure to respect boundaries, particularly those between gender, genre and affect. Indeed, the refusal to choose one word to the exclusion of all others is part of the aesthetic of ‘having it all’ on which, as I hope to show, the Almanack relies. The assumed integrity of these terms and their supposed relations to each other might prove quite inadequate for describing the different ways in which Ladies Almanack makes one feel good. Another reason for allowing the vocabulary of the positive affects

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to stay messy is precisely because, as I have suggested, Ladies Almanack challenges the sort of thinking in which the positive affects become organised hierarchically. I have, however, privileged ‘happiness’ in my title for two reasons: first, due to the common trajectory from pleasure to jouissance described above, I worry that the term ‘pleasure’ allows us to forget too many forms of feeling good; and second, I am interested in the way that ‘happiness’, like Ladies Almanack itself, is often regarded as frivolous and silly. In her thoughtful inquiry into the value of ‘Happy Memories’ for political action, Carrie Hamilton cites a review by Terry Eagleton that shows the defensiveness, dismissiveness and critical disdain that can accrue around the word ‘happiness’: ‘Visions of future happiness are all very well; but happiness is a feeble, holiday-camp kind of word, resonant of manic grins and multicoloured jackets’ (Eagleton, cited in Hamilton, 2007/2008: 66–7).2 Eagleton’s association between happiness and the ‘multicoloured jacket’, the denigrated aesthetic of the sartorial commodity, might in fact be complicated by Djuna Barnes’s equation between such apparently cheap and unsophisticated purchasable pleasures and the so-called ‘higher’ pleasures of modernist textual difficulty. Furthermore, Ladies Almanack cleverly and playfully encourages us to question the assumption, implicit in Eagleton’s comment, that happiness is inimical to intelligent inquiry and that frivolity and stupidity are the same thing. The complexity of happiness as understood by Barnes derives partly from its relationship to temporality. While Roland Barthes, broadly speaking, sees a separation between the ‘bliss’ of the modernist text and the less intense ‘pleasure’ of older forms of writing, Djuna Barnes suggests a model of a happy reader/writer who participates in a generous and dynamic reworking of previous literary forms. The past is therefore re-staged in the present through a form of productive remembering. In this sense, the Almanack’s ‘happiness’ may be theorised through the notion of non-dichotomous difference I have elaborated throughout this text. Ladies Almanack does not locate happiness in the future but rather situates it in an ongoing present which itself involves a reiteration of the past, all the while challenging the assumptions of novelty and fleetingness that attach themselves to thinking about the positive affects. While the temporal structure I identify here bears comparison with the notion of belated understanding and retrospective experience I have discussed in relation to trauma, I do not wish to suggest that ‘happiness’ is in any way trauma minus the pain, or pain or shame transformed. Rather, I want to draw attention the capaciousness of non-dichotomous difference as I characterise it: while it is a structure evident in the trauma

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response, it is also, as I shall suggest, present elsewhere. Indeed, I want to emphasise that Barnes’s text is entirely devoid of such ‘bad’ feelings, and to suggest that happiness itself is a complex affect. Like Snediker, I want to find happiness ‘interesting [. . .] to think about feeling good, to make disparate aspects of feeling good thinkable [. . .] to take positive affects as serious and interesting sites of critical investigation’ (2008: 3, emphasis in original). Yet among critics of Ladies Almanack there seems to be a reluctance to accept the text as a happy one, free from any hidden pain or shame. Such views might well originate with Barnes herself, who later in life denied (rather disingenuously) that she was ever a lesbian and dismissed Ladies Almanack on the grounds of insignificance.3 Some early Barnes scholars were perhaps too quick to accept the author’s apparent renunciation of lesbian love and to follow her retrospective dismissal of the Almanack. Although Kannenstine, for example, dismisses it as ‘essentially a work of style, a protracted literary sketch’ he takes it seriously enough to delve beneath its ‘surface levity’, finding ‘a pain-racked comedy, aware of a lost Eden and a confused present’ (1977: 52, 53). Such bad feelings are, I maintain, in the eyes of beholders rather than immanent in the text: the reactionary sentiments of the aged Barnes are absorbed by more conservative critics (such as James Scott, who, with apparent sincerity, views the Almanack as a satire on ‘the absurdity of modern promiscuity among women’ (1976: 80)) or reflected back onto the text by critics alert to the possibility of homophobia. Karla Jay argues that Barnes, resentful at playing ‘the beggar at the feast’ at Barney’s salons, was venting spleen when she depicted her wealthy friends in Ladies Almanack (1991: 185). Rather than finding anything blithe or celebratory about the Almanack, Jay reads it as a ‘biting satire, verging on viciousness’, finding a ‘venom’ in Barnes’s humour that not only this reader fails to appreciate, but went equally unnoticed by its apparent targets (1991: 185, 186).4 Indeed, perhaps the only critic to actually emphasise the unequivocal happiness to be found in reading the Almanack is Susan Sniader Lanser, author of the first major feminist reading of Barnes’s text. Lanser notes that, unlike The Well of Loneliness, the aim of Ladies Almanack was not for tolerance but to please its ‘already converted audience’: ‘Its purpose is not to plead but to delight’ (1991: 166). That the Almanack succeeded in this purpose is suggested by the responses of its own ‘characters’: Janet Flanner reportedly boasted often of being represented in the book. Solita Solano wrote to Barnes in the 1960s that she had ‘reread “Ladies Almanack” and had nearly forgotten how charming and amusing it is – in fact, it has improved with my age.’ Natalie Barney writes constantly to

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Barnes in the 1960s that Ladies Almanack is ‘a constant joy to me,’ a solace when she has not had news from Barnes herself. She rereads it, she says, ‘with new finds and delights.’ (Lanser, 1991: 167, emphasis in original)

Yet other feminist and queer readers have appeared to be uncomfortable with such an untempered notion of delight. While Caselli’s recent work on the Almanack engages with the issue of pleasure, she too suggests a somewhat compromised understanding of positive affect. Caselli’s notion of an ‘economy’ of pleasure, of which melancholy is a constitutive part, is an example of the kind of negative constructions of happiness I find hard to sustain when reading the Almanack. In certain studies of Ladies Almanack the insistence on bad feeling relates to the text’s flirtation with biological essentialism and homophobic sexological constructions, such as the description of how Musset ‘had been developed in the Womb of her most gentle Mother to be a Boy, when, therefore, she came forth an Inch or so less than this, she paid no Heed to the Error’ (7). While such ideas seem entirely parodic, especially in light of the text’s ongoing and unflattering comparison between sexology and astrology, the fear that the Almanack might be replicating hegemonic ideas about ‘the lesbian’ perhaps leads some critics to deny the pleasures of the text.5 Christine Berni summarises and indeed perpetuates this resistance to absolute pleasure: The critical divergence represented by Jay and Lanser, as well as the oxymoronic descriptions of this notoriously difficult text, testify to more than Barnes’s ambivalence about subject matter. The combination of pain and joy in Barnes’s text illustrates how resistance emerging through a preexisting body of language cannot help reinforcing many of the debilitating terms that it simultaneously resists. (1999: 85)

I see no affective ambivalence in Ladies Almanack, no pain or melancholy to match its joys and pleasures. Instead, I understand Barnes’s Almanack as unequivocally committed to the textual inscription and production of happiness. Indeed, while I do not consider the text to be homophobic, I want to suggest that its affective qualities are independent from its political imbrications, that it might be possible to find the text pleasing before we are sure that it has avoided all trace of homophobia. To suggest that the affective must necessarily submit to the political is a logic that seems hard to sustain when I take into account my experience of reading the text. My interest therefore is not in situating Ladies Almanack somewhere on a continuum between ‘subversive’ and ‘hegemonic’, but in taking seriously the joys of reading a work that make such an enterprise seem almost beside the point.

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‘Lists and Likelihoods’: The pleasures of having it all Freud’s study of his grandson’s fort-da game in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is a foundational text in the theorisation of how good feelings arise. The game is understood by Freud in relation to the ‘instinctual renunciation’ made by the child in allowing his mother to leave his presence: ‘He compensated himself for this, as it were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach’ (1955: XVII, 15). Freud’s dynamic of fort-da predicates pleasure upon an initial loss or trauma: feeling good in the present is understood as an affective compensation for feeling bad in or in relation to the past. The child’s game involves a repetition of a painful memory as ‘a necessary preliminary to [the mother’s] joyful return’: the ‘joyful da’ requires the initial presence of a distressing ‘fort’ which must be reworked (Freud, 1955: XVII, 15). Significantly, Freud’s most influential description of pleasure is about overcoming negative affect: the ‘fort-da’ model is a testament to the subject’s ability to transform loss and unhappiness into joy.6 Freud’s narrative of feeling good is partly one of economy: it is a hydraulic model where a degree of necessary unhappiness is worked over to produce a somewhat limited pleasure. It is through the conceit of an ‘economy of pleasure’ that Caselli understands Ladies Almanack (2009: 64). Caselli notes, quite correctly, that the pleasure of reading the Almanack is often understood as an unveiling, a decoding or an unlocking. Instead, she suggests, the ‘difficulties’ of the text ‘belong to its economy of pleasure’ and are ‘instrumental to opening up the relation between pleasure and meaning, that is to say, to exploring the politics of representation’ (Caselli, 2009: 38, 39). The economy of pleasure imagined by Caselli involves the understanding that ‘ “delight” is never divorced from “profit” ’ (2009: 64). Caselli argues that ‘the text is neither a celebration or a chastising of the Barney coterie’ and that ‘Normality and excess are tied to each other and can constantly swap places’ (2009: 64).7 Perhaps unsurprisingly, Caselli turns to Freud’s fort/ da ‘back and forth’ theorisation of pleasure as a model to describe the ‘oscillating melancholic pleasure’ that she finds in Ladies Almanack’s contradictory claims (2009: 65).8 In what follows, however, I want to suggest a more emphatically positive reading of the text’s affective dynamics. Even if the Almanack is read as a satirical work, the reader’s experience may be understood as an entirely pleasurable one. While the discursive oscillations and political affiliations of the text may indeed lead one to think of it in economical terms, I want to suggest that Barnes conceives of pleasure in terms quite distinct from economy: that is as abundance, excess and extravagance.

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In the April section of the Almanack Barnes engages comically with ideas of melancholy, mocking the idea of love-sickness as part of her parody on the discourse of sexology, where lesbian love has symptoms that must be diagnosed: Acute Melancholy is noticeable in those who have gone a long Way into this Matter, whereas a light giggling, dancing Fancy seems to support those in the very first Stages; brief of Thought; cut of Concentration; a Tendency to hop, skip and jump, and to misplace the Eye at every single or several Manifestation of Girl in like Distemper. (Almanack, 27–8)

The mixed feelings described here surely affect the reader in a wholly unambiguous fashion. While melancholy is mentioned parodically, it is not performed by the text: to read Barnes’s jokes about love sickness, the rising of the ‘Epiglottis’, the distending of the ‘Spleen’ and the ‘continual swallowing of the Heart’ is not to experience melancholy, but to experience pleasure (Almanack, 28). The notion of an ‘economy of pleasure’ suggests, contra the affective experience of reading Ladies Almanack, that happiness always comes at a price. Instead, Barnes’s work posits a model of pleasure based on abundance over economy, of besideness over exchange, a model that might be gestured towards linguistically by such uneconomical conceits as ‘having it both ways’, ‘having it all’ or ‘having one’s cake and eating it too’. While the economic model posits happiness always in necessary relation to melancholy, pleasure always in relation to pain and pleasure in opposition to meaning, ‘having it all’ suggests a notion of happiness and pleasure in which only happiness and pleasure figure, and which pleasure itself produces meaning. This model is based on a positive idea of accumulation, which can be linked, as I shall suggest, to a celebratory understanding of material culture. ‘Having it all’ is precisely what Barnes’s Ladies Almanack, with its noncompromising, gloriously greedy and accumulative notion of happiness, promises the reader. The Almanack ends with elaborate funeral rituals after the death of its heroine, Evangeline Musset. These rituals function not only as a celebration of difference but as a celebration of different desires simultaneously fulfilled: the text concludes with a celebration of the ‘Ladies’ all getting what they want. The dying Musset acknowledges that there are many different kinds of burials and decides that as her ‘many Mourners of many Races and many Tempers’ loved her ‘differently in Life so I would have them plan differently for me in Death’ (Almanack, 82). While such a notion might be democratic it in no way offers a compromised or economical model of the women’s pleasure in honouring Musset:

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some buried her shallow and some deep, and Women who had not told their Husbands everything, joined them. And there was veiled Face downcast, and bare Face upturned, and some lamenting sideways and some forward, and some who struck their Hands together, and some who carried them one on one. (Almanack, 83–4)

Although the women’s celebration on this occasion is in fact connected to a loss, the joy of the funeral description relates precisely to how no sacrifice or compromise is required of anyone. This notion of happiness as accumulation and both-at-once-ness, replicated in the pleasure afforded to the reader by the repeated narrative trope of cataloguing, relates to the celebration of excess that is present throughout the Almanack. The pleasures of excess and both-at-once-ness are suggested in the condemnation of lovers’ (excessive) language in the July section of the Almanack. The section indeed raises the question that talking or writing about good feelings might be ‘difficult’, only to make such a question comically redundant through the chapter’s own joyful performance. The logic of excess over economy is expressed through the irony that Barnes’s text is gloriously unrestrained as it laments the lack of restraint in lover’s language. The narrator suggests that woman’s language of love, if not of ‘poetic Value’, must be suited to purpose and not extravagant – ‘as clipped of Foliage as a British Hedge’ – yet this chapter, as much as any in the Almanack, is characterised by its verbal and visual ornamentation (Almanack, 42). The illustration (Figure 4.1) accompanying the text depicts a woman floating on a cloud with angels flying towards her and lovers’ words (‘honey heart’, ‘and hasty heaven’) falling like sunbeams onto her through an enormous bow bearing the word ‘July’ (Almanack, 42). This illustration reminds us (as if we could forget) that decorative and excessive language, such as the kind mocked by the narrator of the chapter, is a crucial part of the Almanack’s aesthetics. The visual trope of the bow is repeated several times in the Almanack and conveys not only the importance of material (specifically sartorial) concerns to Barnes’s understanding of happiness, but also suggests the value of decoration and ornamentation for its own sake. The long examples of the language the narrator cites apparently in order to condemn also reflect other recurring images in the text, such as flowers and cherubim. ‘Nay — — I cannot write it!’ the narrator opines, after having already quoted the lovers’ speech extensively, ‘It is worse than this! More dripping, more lush, more lavender, more mid-mauve, more honeyed, more Flower-casting, more Cherub-bound, more downpouring, more saccharine, more lamentable, more gruesomely unmindful of Reason or Sense, to say nothing of Humor’ (Almanack, 45–6). In fact the nar-

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Figure 4.1 Illustration for ‘July’, Ladies Almanack. © The Authors League Fund, as literary executor of the Estate of Djuna Barnes.

rator does ‘write it’ while ‘having it both ways’ by also engaging in her mock protest. The narrator’s tendency to ‘protest too much’ engages the pleasures of accumulation and abundance: she uses, for example, an elaborate sequence of images in complaint about the excessive and cloying qualities of the lovers’ language: ‘they be not happy unless writhing in Treacle, and like a trapped Fly, crawl through cardinal Morasses, all Legs tethered and dragging in the Gum of Love!’ (Almanack, 46). The language’s stickiness is described through a comparison with three different kinds of cloying substances: the manufactured (‘Treacle’), the organic (‘Morasses’) and the fantastic (‘the Gum of Love’). ‘Excess’ need not be balanced against normativity or normality: the discourse of normativity is swallowed up by the text’s excessiveness (it is indeed one strand of it) and therefore does not produce any attendant melancholy to compromise the reader’s happiness. One of the Almanack’s most insistent pleasures is indeed its discursive

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mixing: the way that it ‘speaks in tongues’, as Lanser puts it. Yet while different languages and perspectives brush up against each another, why should ‘positive’ and politically sound arguments be weighed against ‘negative’ and potentially problematic viewpoints in order to assess how the text makes one feel? The Almanack’s ‘mélange of modes and media’ includes the early modern astrological almanac, the medieval wood-cut and the eighteenth-century comedy of manners (Lanser, 1991: 159). Barthes in fact claims that part of a text’s ‘jouissance’ relates to the notion of besideness: ‘the subject gains access to bliss by the cohabitation of languages working side by side: the text of pleasure is a sanctioned Babel’ (1975: 4, emphasis in original). In the sense that it ‘speaks in tongues’ or functions as a ‘sanctioned Babel’, Ladies Almanack would seem to exemplify the Barthesian notion of textual pleasure, guaranteeing the enjoyment of the reader who discards ‘logical contradiction’ and ‘abolishes within himself all barriers, all classes, all exclusions’ and ‘mixes every language, even those said to be incompatible; who silently accepts every charge of illogicality, of incongruity’ (Barthes, 1975: 3, emphasis in original). Such discursive mixing makes the blissful reader a subversive reader: ‘court, school, asylum and polite conversation would cast him out’ (Barthes, 1975: 3). Djuna Barnes’s own linguistic mixing might be said to have a similar radical effect: the medical and astrological discourses that work side by side constitute an important social critique. Yet there are other, perhaps less ‘subversive’ (in the Barthesian understanding) types of besideness at work in Ladies Almanack. The idea of accumulation or abundance that I have highlighted is related in part to the pleasures of abolishing ‘barriers, classes and distinction’ but it produces a happiness that is, in ways that challenge Barthes’ thesis, at once social, sensual and material. This chapter opened with a quotation from the Almanack’s ‘Lists and Likelihoods’, a short poem that sits between the sections for September and October, and predicts, in mock astrological almanac style, that the ‘whole long Year’ will be filled with pleasure between women. The list is particularly suited to Barnes’s model of pleasure, because it is a form in which details are important but relate to a dynamic of cumulative effect (or cumulative affect).9 Not to pay attention to the particular things is to miss out on most of the pleasure, but the nature of abundance conveyed by the list as a whole is equally important. In the August section of the text, a character named High-Heel describes a world where woman is at the centre, engaged in extravagant consumption and taking delight from everything around her: bees work to provide her ‘Negus and Nectar’, worms work so that she can ‘be wrapped in Silks and Satins’ (Almanack, 51). High-Heel claims that such pleasure-seeking women might be

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found anywhere and provides a list of places while also cataloguing the women’s material possessions: And from where, say you, come such Women? Up from the Cellar, down from the Bed of Matrimony, under Sleep and over come. Past watching Eye and seeking Hand and well over Hedge. From Pantry and Bride’s-sleep, in Mid-conception and in old Age, from Bank and Culvert, from Bog’s Dutch and Fen’s marrow, from all walks and all paths, from round Doors and drop Lofts, from Hayricks and Cabbage-patch, from King’s Thrones and Clerks’ Stools, from high Life and from low. Some dropping Teapots and Linens, some Caddies and Cambric, some Seaweed and Saffron, some with Trophy Skulls and Memory Bones, gleanings from Love’s Labour Lost. Some in Nightgowns and some in Fashion, some hot with Home work and some cool with Decisions. (Almanack, 53–4)

I quote this list (which is, with its ‘teapots’, ‘linens’ and so on, also a kind of shopping list) in length partly because I think that the sheer extent of Barnes’s catalogue and the feeling of saturation that envelops the reader is crucial to her mode of aesthetic pleasure. High-Heel’s list works on a basis of absolute inclusiveness and exhaustion, working over the notion of presence with varying degrees of literalness and figurativeness. The description of happy women ‘Up from the Cellar, down from the Bed of Matrimony, under Sleep and over come’ over-determinately stresses their situatedness: the prepositions work both geographically and metaphorically to emphatically suggest the ‘here-ness’ of pleasure. Happiness is not elusive nor must it always occur in relation to sorrow or pain: in Ladies Almanack, pleasures often occur simply in relation to other pleasures. The Almanack in general and High-Heel’s catalogue in particular suggest the ubiquity of pleasure. I opened this chapter by contrasting the Almanack’s utopian notion that happiness is ‘here’ with Barthes’s emphasis on ‘atopia’. Barthes refers to atopia in relation to both ‘pleasure’ in a general sense and in the more specific sense he attaches to ‘bliss’ when distinct from ‘pleasure’. For Barthes, only the more elusive, more asocial and revolutionary – and ultimately indescribable – ‘bliss’ is atopic. Barthes’s distinction between the orders of pleasure relate importantly to the question of atopia/ubiquity: ‘what the text says, through the particularity of its name, is the ubiquity of pleasure, the atopia of bliss’ (1975: 59). For Barthes, this distinction amounts in part to differing relationships between text, world and subject, and results in two different affective attitudes for the reader: either relate the text to the ‘pleasures’ of life (a dish, a garden, an encounter, a voice, a moment, etc.) and to it join the personal catalogue of our sensualities,

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or force the text to breech bliss, that immense subjective loss, thereby identifying this text with the purest moments of perversion, with its clandestine sites. (1975: 58–9)

Barthes sees textual bliss as pure, sexual, asocial, atopic, subversive and (although he doesn’t state it here) associated with the narrative complexities of the modernist work. Lesser readerly pleasures, those associated with more passive, less radical (effectively realist) texts relate to a materialised pleasure (perhaps a pleasure of consumption) and are associated with the desire to make ‘the text an object of pleasure like the others’ (Barthes, 1975: 58, emphasis in original). While invariably considered a ‘difficult’ modernist work, Ladies Almanack is strongly invested in the assumption the text is indeed ‘an object of pleasure like the others’. The Almanack does not posit atopia as the hallmark of the most significant pleasures, but its investment in excess and abundance relates to the maligned notion of happiness as ubiquitous. In what follows, I want to think more about the nature of the Almanack’s joys and how the sexualised textual pleasures that, for Barthes, stand apart are seen by Barnes to relate to other forms of embodied enjoyment.

‘An object of pleasure like the others’: Reading and other embodied joys In the introductory section of Ladies Almanack, Evangeline Musset is described as a kind of missionary or saviour in a language that satirises medical and biological understandings of sexual pleasure: she is ‘one Grand Red Cross for the Pursuance, the Relief and the Distraction’ of women who suffer ‘Itch of Palm, or Quarters most horribly burning’ (6). Pleasure, it is comically suggested, cannot be reduced to a vocabulary of ‘relief’ and ‘distraction’. ‘Relief’ implies the orthodox (and Freudian) narrative of sexual pleasure as a total cessation of a built-up excitement, while ‘distraction’ suggests the notion of sexuality as a sphere separate and distinct from the rest of one’s affective life. Barnes’s satire on the idea that sexual pleasure must have a biological or reproductive impetus is matched by her proposition that pleasure may be found in certain aspects of material culture. Desire, suggests the narrator, occurs in women either in the Spring of the Year, or at those times when they do sit upon warm and cozy Material, such as Fur, or thick and Oriental Rugs [. . .] or who sit upon warm Stoves, whence it is known that one such flew up with an ‘Ah my God!’ (Almanack, 6)

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The ‘heat’ related to sexual desire may just as well be found in material objects as in immanent, biologically hard-wired passions. And the sexual pleasure of the ladies is not separate and distinct from the pleasure they take in fashionable, luxury commodities. Similarly, in the March section Barnes suggests an eroticism based on an elision between clothing and body parts, when Tilly-Tweed-in-Blood complains that she has never heard of a lesbian couple ‘in a Bed of Matrimony, tied up in their best Ribands, all under a Canopy of Cambric, Bosom to Bosom, Braid to Braid, Womb to Womb!’ (Almanack, 19).10 The delights of bodies and the feel of flesh against flesh are on a par with the delights of clothes and furnishings and the feel of flesh against fabric. Although the fur and rugs in the Introductory section apparently leave the women in an ‘insupportable’ state, the idea of ‘warm and cozy Material’ introduces another feeling and another type of pleasure into the equation: coziness contradicts the ‘relief and distraction’ model of (sexual) pleasure, implying a happiness based on a different kind of relationship to excitement and time. Ladies Almanack challenges the notion that either sexual or narrative pleasure must follow the trajectory of a build-up and release of tension. Equally, sexual pleasure, like the pleasure of the text, is not entirely separate from other kinds of pleasure, such as friendship, talking, shopping and eating. In questioning the assumption that sexual pleasure must always be understood as a happiness apart from others I do not wish to prudishly resist the centrality of sex in Ladies Almanack. In fact, I want to insist that it is an integral part of Barnes’s notion of happiness. By suggesting an affective continuity between pleasures experienced in different contexts by the ladies of the Almanack, I am proposing something quite different from Adrienne Rich’s notion of a ‘lesbian continuum’ (1987). Yet Rich’s claim that the ‘erotic in female terms’ is ‘unconfined to any single part of the body or solely to the body itself’ does go some way towards describing the idea of eroticism expressed in the Almanack (53). For example, the August section features an illustration of a zodiac woman, a bawdy version of the zodiac man found in astrological almanacs (Figure 4.2). With her emphasis on bodily pleasures over biological function (her genital regions are annotated as ‘the love of life’), Barnes’s zodiac woman represents an answer to the August chapter’s satire on scientific, medical and sexological discursivity about ‘the lesbian’: ‘What they have in their Heads, Hearts, Stomachs, Pockets, Flaps, Tabs and Plackets, have one and all been some and severally commented on’ (Almanack, 52, 47). The fact that such ‘pleasures’ might relate to body parts other than the genitals, including such typically uneroticised parts as ‘the hungry heart’, ‘the seeking arm’ and ‘the kneeling knee’, suggests

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Figure 4.2 ‘Zodiac’ illustration for ‘August’, Ladies Almanack. © The Authors League Fund, as literary executor of the Estate of Djuna Barnes.

a notion of sexual pleasure that is far from Barthes’s asocial jouissance and is in some respects closer to Rich’s version of eroticism (Almanack, 52). However, Rich’s influential theory involves an uneasy prudishness about bodies that I neither wish to replicate nor suggest is present in Ladies Almanack. As Rich attempts to open up the ‘woman-identified experience’ outside genital desire, she celebrates, for instance, ‘delight in each other’s company and attraction to each other’s minds and character’ while warning against ‘shallow or sensational “lesbian scenes” in recent commercial fiction’ (regardless of the pleasures some women might find in them) (66, 63). While I wish to counter the orgasm-

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centred, asocial notion of jouissance and the idea that sexual pleasures are always and necessarily apart from other kinds of happiness, I don’t want to make it sound as though the ladies of the Almanack don’t want or enjoy sex, and that the body is not absolutely central to Barnes’s understanding of pleasure. It is partly through the idea of jouissance that many major queer theorists have understood sex as something that, while dominating the discussion of ‘pleasure’, has very little to do with positive affect. One of the most compelling and influential of these discussions takes place in the work of Leo Bersani, which constitutes an ongoing critique of the ‘redemptive reinvention of sex’ (1987: 215, italics in original). Bersani famously understands sexuality as a ‘self-shattering and solipsistic jouissance’ which ‘may be a tautology for masochism’, and points to the ‘inestimable value of sex as [.  .  .] anticommunal, antiegalitarian, antinuturing, antiloving’ (1987: 222, 217, 215). While Bersani’s antisocial thesis is compelling, especially within the context of the AIDS crisis where the idea of ‘the social’ arguably works to protect mainstream society from queer contamination, his sex-negative arguments don’t get us very far in theorising the relationship between sex, happiness and sociality in Ladies Almanack. Equally, any theoretical model that ‘renders suspicious any form of “enjoyment” that isn’t a (mis)translation of jouissance’, as Snediker puts it, seems inhospitable for a careful analysis of Barnes’s text (2008: 23). Barthes uses the jouissance model of sexual pleasure as a mode of explaining textual bliss: ‘The asocial character of bliss: it is the abrupt loss of sociality, and yet there follows no recurrence to the subject (subjectivity), the person, solitude: everything is lost, integrally’ (1975: 39). Like Bersani’s queer sexual subject, Barthes’s blissful reader undergoes a self-shattering experience: the jouissance that comes with a certain type of reading is a deeply solipsistic event (paradoxically) involving a loss of personhood. In Ladies Almanack, however, Barnes suggests an altogether different model of sexuality and a concomitantly different model of readerly pleasure.11 Put simply, Ladies Almanack takes seriously the idea that pleasure should be pleasing, that bliss is not a rarefied affect but is coterminous with happiness and that sexual pleasure is one part of happiness. While Barnes was of course unfamiliar with the idea of jouissance as elaborated in late twentieth-century critical theory, the Almanack mocks the notion that the best pleasures should be painful or traumatic. When Musset says ‘Love of Woman for Woman should increase Terror’ she seems to be advocating a form of pleasure that Barnes’s contemporaries might recognise not as jouissance but as the sublime (Almanack, 20). In the context of the Almanack, a text entirely free from ‘terror’, Musset’s

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Figure 4.3 Illustration for ‘March’, Ladies Almanack. © The Authors League Fund, as literary executor of the Estate of Djuna Barnes.

comment functions rather as a camp joke about the supposed aesthetic superiority of the sublime. This joke is made all the more clear by the picture accompanying ‘Windy March’, an illustration of the spanking that Musset defends as an example of such necessary ‘terrors’ in the face of Lady Buck-and-Balk’s protestations of woman’s frailty (Figure 4.3). The illustration is a comic one: a bored-looking, well-dressed woman spanks with a glove the exposed and prominent bottom of a woman wearing a maid’s cap and a giant bow around her waist. Barnes’s bawdiness here functions in a manner analogous to that of ecstasy, jouissance and masochism as described by Snediker, who writes that these terms let ‘pessimists eat their pain-cake, and have it too’ (2008: 48). The Almanack suggests the ways that bawdiness lets optimists eat their ‘happiness-cake’ and have it too. The camp pleasures of spank-

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ing (which, along with buttocks, are a recurring visual trope in the Almanack) are invoked without any concern for the painful pleasures of sado-masochism. Such bawdiness is emphasised by the idea of wind, which is personified by figures blowing air from each corner of the illustration. The idea of a terrible and terrifying wind is undermined by the picture of the bottom and the suggestion of other, less sublime and more corporeal forms of windiness. While this might be considered a domesticising, even sanitising way of considering this sexual act, it would seem inaccurate to suggest that, within the world of the Almanack, spanking is depicted as a strange or unsanitary occupation. To insist on the painful aspect of Musset’s spanking would seem to be a rather po-faced denial of the affective implications of the chapter. The suggestion that Barnes’s ladies enjoy a sexuality that cannot be understood in terms of jouissance also relates to the Almanack’s insistence on the sociality of bodily pleasures. Barthes’s understanding of pleasure as ‘a drift, something both revolutionary and asocial, and it cannot be taken over by any collectivity, any mentality, any ideolect’ (1975: 23), is not borne out in Barnes’s representation of the relationship between sexuality and community. In the May section Nip and Tuck refer to themselves as ‘Members of the Sect’ and bring Musset reports of a ‘Sister lost’ in the town who, it is implied, could benefit from the Dame’s advances (Almanack, 31). While the notion of a ‘Sect’ is a perhaps a satirical comment on contemporary anxieties about lesbian recruitment, the idea of an (albeit unequal) community of women in which difference and disagreement can exist quite happily is integral to the values of the Almanack. The ‘novitiates’ of the Almanack can of course be understood as the real-life coterie of female writers and artists working in Barnes’s Paris, yet the importance of community can be appreciated, I think, without reference to historical and biographical research.12 While the Almanack challenges the notion that sexual pleasures are asocial, Barnes also imagines social and sexual affiliations that challenge normative assumptions. Pleasure is not social and communicative in the sense that it forms monogamous alliances between couples, but rather in that it forms unexpected connections that undermine the common-sense distinction between pleasure and vicarious pleasure. In the November section, Musset’s aim is less to experience sexual pleasure herself than to persuade, through the medium of riddles, younger women to choose frivolous pleasure over heavy-hearted love affairs. She exclaims: ‘I shall ring the Bells of all Basham for this discovery; and make such a Groaning and a tintinabulation throughout my own City, that every Woman will unloosen her Stays and hang them at the Window for joy of the thing!’ (Almanack, 74). The Dame’s ‘groaning’ evokes the sound of

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sexual pleasure yet also functions as a form of communication to which others, she imagines, will respond in a equally sexualised manner. For Musset, pleasure and sexuality relate in a particularly social yet nonnormative way, with her taking joy in the (ultimately unfulfilled) hope that the other women she meets might understand sexuality neither in relation to family, youth and procreativity, nor as a solipsistic activity. Equally, when the ladies of the Almanack hear Patience Scalpel’s ‘cutting’ voice of derision they answer her heterosexist disapproval with delight at the sexual pleasures of another of their community: ‘Merry Laughter rose about her, as Doll Furious was seen in ample dimity, sprigged with Apple Blossom, footing it fleetly after the proportionless Persuasions of Señorita Fly-About’ (12). Doll’s pleasure (or the promise of it) is a source of happiness or merriment for the other women: they delight and unify as a group on the basis of witnessing another’s bodily activity. Such happiness in relation to others’ pleasures cannot simply be understood through the negative conceit of ‘vicariousness’, which carries a notion of fraudulent, substitutional pleasure that, with its close proximity to jealousy, might not be much of a pleasure at all. A similar interest in another’s bodily pleasure takes place in the Saint’s Days section that sits beside the main body of the text in February, when Musset’s death is narrated for the first time.13 As her final living act, Musset – who takes significant pleasure in eating – buys a pasty and gives it to her friend. Again, ‘vicarious pleasure’ does not adequately describe Musset’s happiness here; instead, bodily pleasure seems to be something that can be witnessed and shared by another. Instead, the Almanack might help us to understand Ahmed’s claim in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) that positive affect can work to open up bodies towards each other. According to Ahmed, pleasure relates not to solipsism, but may be communicated from one body to another to create social relations: ‘Pleasure involves not only the capacity to enter into, or inhabit with ease, social space, but also functions as a form of entitlement and belonging. Spaces are claimed through enjoyment, an enjoyment that is returned by being witnessed by others’ (2004: 164–5). For Barnes, pleasure and enjoyment are not only crucially related to sociality, but happiness is fundamentally about presence, about inhabiting space, as opposed to elsewhereness or ‘atopia’. The emphasis on a happiness felt in relation to pleasures experienced by other bodies obviously gestures towards a possible model for reading Ladies Almanack, and to a way of thinking about the reader’s pleasure beyond vicariousness. However, Barnes’s text refuses to let one forget that reading itself is an embodied activity, that it ‘is not uniquely an abstract operation of the intellect: it brings the body into play, it is

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inscribed in a space and in a relationship with oneself or with others’ (Chartier, 1994: 8). In this sense, we might think of the pleasures of reading Ladies Almanack in terms of an opening up of the textual body to the body of the reader. As Karen Littau writes: The relation a reader has to a book is also a relation between two bodies: one made of paper and ink, the other flesh and blood. That is to say, the book has a body, evident even in the use of terms such as footnotes and headers, but so does the reader. (2006: 2)

The materiality of the Almanack is stressed at the very beginning of the text: in the illustration following the frontispiece and preceding the introductory section a woman is shown holding ‘Ladies Almanack’ – the book Barnes’s reader touches in her own hands – with a caption reading ‘the book all ladies should carry’ (6) (Figure 4.4). Barnes refuses to allow her reader to forget that the book is a material object and that reading is a corporeal activity. The first edition of Ladies Almanack was privately printed at Dijon, a limited edition of just 1,050 copies. In the front page of Barnes’s own copy of the first edition, found in her catalogued library at the University of Maryland, she lists the specific material qualities of the texts published in this edition: ‘10 copies on Vergé de Vidalon, coloured and signed by the author, parchment cover; 40 copies on Rives, hand-coloured; One thousand on alpha’. The tactile and visual elements of the text were clearly significant to its author, and although luxurious paper and handcolouring are not pleasures that most readers of the Almanack experience, almost all subsequent editions – from the major 1972 Harper & Row reprint to the 2006 Carcanet edition – have been facsimiles of the original. The mock wood-cut illustrations, ornate typefaces, archaic capitalisations, textual indentations, columns and symbols make the reading experience a decidedly visual one for nearly all those familiar with Barnes’s text. While her later statements about the Almanack were ambiguous in general, Barnes’s correspondence indicates that her commitment to the visual appearance of the work in particular was unwavering. When negotiating with Italian publishers Adelphi Edizioni in the 1970s she is especially anxious that the translated Almanack will look the same as the American Harper & Row edition. In 1972 Barnes asks her Italian editor Luciano Foá: ‘And what do you intend about the illustrations? The Almanack cannot appear without them; they are part of the whole’ (11 December 1972). Ladies Almanack is a text where surface is vitally important, and where the looking of reading is never subordinated to reading as an intellectual pursuit. The January section of

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Figure 4.4 ‘The book all ladies should carry’, Ladies Almanack. © The Authors League Fund, as literary executor of the Estate of Djuna Barnes.

the Almanack concludes with an illustration of Musset as a mischievous child penetrating the main body of the text. Patience Scalpel’s pompous arguments against women’s pleasure are punctured by Musset’s body: her body appears to invade the textual corpus, though (importantly) it

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is clearly part of it too. To ignore the Almanack’s illustrations, to read beyond the visual, is to pretend that reading is a disembodied activity. Such a mode of reading, based on a puritanical dismissal of images in favour of words, means that the pleasures of Ladies Almanack will not be fully realised. While functioning as a protest against Scalpel’s words, Musset’s corporeal presence within the block of printed text also serves as a reminder of how the two bodies – the body of the reader and the body of the text – will touch in the course of reading. Embodied readerly pleasures have historically been gendered as feminine and subsequently dismissed: like other pleasures associated with mass culture, reading for pleasure has been understood as simple ‘consumption’. Such an attitude is particularly evident in masculinist modernist discourse, but in fact predates twentieth-century crises regarding the convergence of literary and commodity cultures. Littau discusses eighteenth-century dietetic addresses to reading, including Johann Adam Bergk’s The Art of Reading (1799), which ‘couches moral and aesthetic concerns in a language that makes it clear that reading matter is absorbed, or ingested, through the body’: ‘In a vibrant literary market where the novel had become the most popular form of entertainment, Bergk’s critique of reading is directly related to the dangers it presents as a genre which encourages escapism and reading for pleasure and leisure’ (2006: 40). As Littau suggests, those texts understood to be ‘absorbed, or ingested, through the body’ rather than ‘read’ are generally considered to be ‘easy’. The reader-as-consumer, whether in the eighteenth century or more recently, is normally a reader of novels, and most often a reader of novels participating in the broadly defined realist tradition. Barnes’s Almanack challenges the notion that modernist texts with unfamiliar formal characteristics and non-quotidian language necessarily provoke a different kind of pleasure from the types of literature associated with consumption. By emphasising a happiness associated with values such as excess, accumulation, sociality and corporeality, and activities such as shopping, dressing and eating, and an eroticism understood outside of the confines of jouissance, Barnes suggests that the pleasures of her ‘difficult’ modernist text are perhaps not as elusive as they might seem. In fact, I think that we might turn to the logic of fashion culture as it occurs in Barnes’s Almanack to better understand the kinds of pleasure one takes in the ‘difficult’ text. At the beginning of the Almanack Evangeline Musset is described as donning ‘a Vest of superb Blister and Tooling, a Belcher for tippet and a pair of hip-boots with a scarlet channel (for it was a most wet wading)’ (Almanack, 7). On the one hand Barnes’s careful description of Musset’s dress allows her to relate the sartorial to the sexual. Musset’s ‘hip-boots’ function like

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the joint muff and pole in the illustration preceding the frontispiece, signifying both male and female sex organs: they sheath her legs in the manner of barrier protection from the ‘wet wading’ yet include a ‘scarlet channel’. Yet equally important is the conspicuously obscure and archaic language Barnes chooses for thinking about material pleasures. Musset wears ‘vintage’ clothes which, if one wished to wear too, one would have to carefully hunt down – an act which is mirrored by the reader who must hunt down the precise meanings of ‘Blister’, ‘Tooling’, ‘Belcher’ and ‘tippet’ in a dictionary.14 And like thrift store chic, Barnes’s lexical archaisms only constitute the ‘vintage’ in the present tense: their value does not exist or reside in the past but rather their resuscitation in the present makes them valuable as fashionable or ‘modern’ items, strange and indeed perversely new in their selfconscious oldness. Both acts of loving attention to detail, the pleasures of ‘active’ reading and shopping collide: Barnes troubles the distinction between cognition and consumption, between textual difficulty and material delight.15 When taken as a discrete phrase, enclosed in apologetic inverted commas, ‘reading for pleasure’ becomes a ‘pleasure like the others’ or, most woefully prosaic of all, a leisure activity. Barthes dismisses the bourgeois pleasure of leisure (a pleasure that is for him the antithesis of pleasure) swiftly and parenthetically when discussing the question of sociality: ‘the text [.  .  .] manifests the asocial nature of pleasure (only leisure is social)’ (1975: 16). Ladies Almanack suggests the value of ‘leisure’ and its potential relationship to the reading of (even modernist) texts, through its emphasis on shopping and the pleasures of clothes, fabrics and other material objects. Importantly, it challenges the assumed separation between the pleasures of high modernism and the pleasures of mass culture and in doing so suggests that quotidian happiness found in mass culture might actually be interesting, troubling the kind of assumptions made by Fredric Jameson when he dismisses ‘the “pleasurable” in that narrow, culinary, bourgeois sense’ (1983: 9). Barthes too is ‘convinced’ that ‘[n]o significance (no bliss) can occur [. . .] in a mass culture (to be distinguished, like fire from water, from the culture of the masses), for the model of this culture is petit bourgeois’ (1975: 38). For Barnes, ‘culinary’ pleasures are neither ‘narrow’ nor separate and distinct from the pleasures of queer sexuality and modernist textuality; rather, the significant pleasures of mass culture resonate with and may even provide a descriptive lexicon for the ‘bliss’ of the reader.

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Old statements and new wonderments: Happiness and temporality The presumption that happiness is always ‘elsewhere’ or ‘atopic’ relates of course to questions of time as much as questions of space. Caselli’s assessment of the pleasures to be had by the reader of the Almanack seems somewhat negative not just because of her economic emphasis but also because she claims that these pleasures are, for many readers, ‘always lost, or located elsewhere’ (2009: 41). The reasons for this, she suggests, are historically specific: most of the readers wish they had been part of Barnes’s expatriate Paris ‘back then’ (Caselli, 2009: 41). ‘[C] liquey Bohemia’, which Caselli sees as central to the Almanack and its reading history, ‘needs to remain unreadable’ (2009: 41). On the basis of Barnes’s 1916 article, ‘Becoming Intimate with the Bohemians’, Caselli claims that Bohemia, be it in New York or Paris, ‘cannot be “given away” ’ but can ‘only exist as what is already lost: its reality depends its remaining unknown’ (2009: 41). Such a logic relates, Caselli argues, to the Almanack’s ‘overt antiquarianism’ and its similarities with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts: Rather than engaging directly with these sources, Ladies Almanack presents itself – through its mock wood-cuts, its layout, and its language – as the antiquarian object, potentially a fake, certainly belonging to an irretrievable past, creating ‘that magic reiteration of a past that makes of an old statement a new wonderment and a new reality.’ (2009: 41)

Caselli’s formulation of delights relating to past and present, to a kind of antiquarian inauthenticity and the camp pleasures of fakery, are compelling. Yet what interests me in the above quotation are the possible slippages between Caselli’s statement and the Barnes citation used to support it. Barnes’s understanding of the ‘wonderment’ of the past relies not on a concept of irretrievability or on something as (now) familiarly postmodern as the self-conscious fake. Rather, Barnes’s quotation suggests an understanding of the relationships between past and present and the ‘wonderments’ inspired by such relationships that is far more dynamic than the pleasures relating to fakery. Indeed, Barnes suggests that the pleasure of antiquarianism, in which vintage fashion also participates, is, somewhat paradoxically, a pleasure of the present, or rather the past-in-the-present, as opposed to a pleasure that resides in the ‘irretrievable’ past itself. It is this dynamism, the ‘magic reiteration’ that neither rejects the past nor simply pastiches it, but rather restages it to create a new reality (altering the understanding of the past while changing the mood of the present) that I want to consider. Ladies Almanack

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challenges the assumption that happiness can be accessed only through a shocking novelty and gestures towards the transformative pleasure of performing the past; Barnes’s text creates ‘new’ pleasures from a reiteration of history. Barnes emphatically locates happiness in the present tense: her Almanack challenges the associations between happiness and fleetingness, and considers instead a continuous, complex yet unwaveringly positive notion of the present. Ladies Almanack suggests a happiness (and a literary style) based on the conflation of temporalities, the past-in-the-present and the old-in-the-new, creating a ‘new wonderment’ and a happy ‘new reality’ through Barnes’s ‘magic reiteration’ of the past. ‘A Lady of Fashion’: Newness and repetition According to Barthes, our evaluation of the world is based on an opposition between old and new: the new is not a fashion but ‘a value, the basis of all criticism’ (1975: 40). ‘The language I speak within myself is not of my time’, Barthes writes: it is prey, by nature, to ideological suspicion; thus, it is with this language that I must struggle. I write because I do not want the words I find: by subtraction. And at the same time this next-to-last-language is the language of my pleasure: for hours on end I read Zola, Proust, Verne, The Count of Monte Cristo [. . .] This is my pleasure, but not my bliss: bliss may come only with the absolutely new, for only the new disturbs (weakens) consciousness (easy? not at all: nine times out of ten, the new is only the stereotype of novelty). (1975: 39–40, emphasis in original)

While familiarity and repetition might provide a steady pleasure for the reader, absolute novelty is a precondition for the orgasmic, self-shattering experience that Barthes understands as ‘bliss’.16 And while newness is revolutionary and exciting, oldness and repetition is essentially conservative: ‘encratic language (the language produced and spread under the protection of power) is statutorily a language of repetition’ (1975: 40). Barthes therefore expands on his pleasure/bliss distinction through the concept of novelty, constructing an opposition between ‘a mass banalization (linked to the repetition of language) – a banalization outside bliss but not necessarily outside pleasure – and on the other, a (marginal, eccentric) impulse toward the New’ (1975: 41). I have suggested that Ladies Almanack troubles Barthes’ hierarchies of pleasure by suggesting that sexual pleasure is a pleasure ‘like the others’. But equally, the Almanack asks us to question the supposed correlation between degrees of novelty and intensities of pleasure that underwrites

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Barthes’s thesis. Instead, Barnes’s Almanack denies the attractiveness and indeed the possibility of absolute novelty. In what might look like a tautological statement, I want to suggest that Ladies Almanack celebrates the idea of fashion rather than newness. Fashion – especially in the example of vintage clothing discussed above – is pleasurable for its novelty and its familiarity: it indeed undermines the dichotomy between newness and repetition. Barnes’s Almanack, ascribed to the figure of ‘a Lady of Fashion’, relates to the concept of the fashionable in several ways. First, fashion’s investment in the present rather than the future is key to the Almanack’s anti-teleological, nonreproductive understanding of sexuality. Equally, Barnes’s text takes seriously the pleasures of the frivolous and superficial. Yet Barnes’s choice of ‘Lady of Fashion’ as nom de plume has strong eighteenth-century resonances and indicates the importance the past bears on fashion. Fashion relates not only to the new, but also to the idea of cyclicality, to stylised repetitions of past forms and to fond and productive rememberings. Such a relationship to temporality is also shared by the almanac form, where the ‘newness’ of each year must be understood within the context of a larger history, of conventions remembered and reworked. Like fashionable items, the value of an almanac relates to the present tense, yet accrues meaning through a dialogue with the past. The February section of Ladies Almanack serves as a meditation on the impossibility of newness, with the narrator not only despairing that her lover is ‘out of Fashion’ but she cannot find a new way to love: My Love she is an Old Girl, out of Fashion, Bugles at the Bosom, and theredown a much Thumbed Mystery and a Maze. She doth jangle with last Year’s attentions, she is melted with Death’s Fire! Then what shall I do for her that hath never been accomplished? [. . .] Hath she not been turned all ways that the Sands of her Desire know all Runnings? Who can make a New Path where there be no Wilderness? In the Salt Earth lie Parcels of lost Perfection – surely I shall not loosen her Straps a New Way, Love hath been too long a Time! Will she unpack her Panels for such a Stale Receipt, pour out her Treasures for a coin worn thin? Yet to renounce her were a thing as old; and saying ‘Go!’ but shuts the Door that hath banged a million Years! (15–17)

While the speaker of this section worries about producing novelty, she loves and is pleased by her ‘Old Girl’: remembering and working with the past are actually presented as valuable and pleasurable activities. The phrase ‘Parcels of lost Perfection’ seems a crucial one for understanding Barnes’s aesthetics, and describes the happiness created by the ‘Old Girl’s’ out-of-date garb, such as her a ‘bugle’. Sartorially speaking, a ‘bugle’ is, according to the OED, a ‘tube-shaped glass bead’, a term in use from the late sixteenth to the nineteenth century. This apparently

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outdated item produces pleasure in the present for the narrator (and the reader) despite her apparent anxieties about novelty. In Ladies Almanack, ‘vintage’ clothes function as ‘Parcels of lost Perfection’, sources of pleasure related to the past and to acts of remembering and rediscovering. Equally important to the February section is the way that the language of the almanac is incorporated within discussions about the impossibility of newness. Besides the astrological lexicon of stars and moons, the woman is said, like the almanac itself, to ‘jangle with last Year’s attentions’, reflecting how, in the almanac, newness is always a repetition of a previous year’s text. This recalls a moment in the January section, when Barnes undermines the idea that lesbian sex is a new and therefore shocking activity: ‘ “In my time”, said Patience Scalpel, “Women came to enough trouble by lying abed with the Father of their Children. What then in this good Year of our Lord has paired them like to like [. . .]?” ’ (Almanack, 12). Scalpel’s reference to the ‘Year of our Lord’ is a linguistic formula that occurs in almanacs every year and so suggests repetition and familiarity as much as newness. From the January section onwards, memory and repetition have governed an understanding of the present: in the dead of winter, a certain comfort is provided by cyclicality: ‘When the Birds give no Evidence of themselves, and are in the Memory alone recorded’ (Almanack, 10). Because of the almanac’s calendar structure, the new is always understood in relation to the past: absolute novelty is not one of the pleasures associated with Barnes’s chosen form. The February section not only teaches us that aspirations for complete novelty are unrealisable, but also indicates the possible complexities of the present tense. While suggesting the value of ‘Parcels of lost Perfection’ in the main body of the chapter, the utter separation between past and present is denied through the use of an additional narrative flanking this text. This supplementary narrative again takes a calendrical structure, comprising a list of ‘Saints Days’ in which Musset’s biography is celebrated anecdotally in monthly divisions. The Saints Days include new stories about Musset’s life and repetitions of anecdotes that take place elsewhere in the narrative. For example, we are already familiar with the comic idea of phallic lack conveyed in the Saints Day entry for January, which informs us that ‘when new whelped, she was found to have missed by an Inch’ (Almanack, 14–15). The present tense of the narrative in this section is therefore ostentatiously complex: through its two parts it includes a repetition of the past as it recounts Musset’s whole life while also narrating the Almanack’s present tense. The Saints Days represent not only a biography within a biography and a calendar within a calendar, but suggest that the engagement with the present

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includes a dialogue with the past. Such an idea utterly confounds the notion that narrative pleasure (or any other kind of pleasure) is synonymous with novelty. ‘Enthusiasm in things forgotten’: Remembering queer pleasures Barthes’s understanding of the distinction between pleasure and bliss relates importantly to the ways that the text and subject either conform or break with what has come before. Barthes claims that the text of pleasure is associated with a ‘comfortable practice of reading’: it ‘comes from culture and does not break with it’ (1975: 14, emphasis in original). The text of bliss, however, is discomforting, imposing a ‘state of loss’ as it breaks with culture, unsettling ‘the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions’ (1975: 14). Similarly, Barthes claims that our understanding of bliss relates to the historiography of modernity. If one considers the avant-garde as a progression, then the text of bliss may be conceived of as a ‘logical, organic, historical development of the text of pleasure’, or the text of bliss can be said to rise out of history ‘like a scandal (an irregularity), that it is always the trace of a cut, of an assertion (and not of a flowering)’ (1975: 20). Yet Ladies Almanack neither has a comfortable, straightforward relationship with culture nor attempts to destroy it. While it unsettles ‘historical, cultural, [and] psychological assumptions’ in its joyful representations of ludic lesbian sexuality, it does not break from or reject the past. Instead of conceiving of modernity and its textual pleasures in relation to a ‘flowering’ or a ‘cut’, Djuna Barnes proposes a relationship based upon a repetitionwith-a-difference in which the past is created anew through performance in the present. It is partly through the notion of ‘bords’ or ‘edges’ that Barthes offers a nuanced and complex model of textual bliss. Barthes proposes that the value of the works of modernity proceeds ‘from their duplicity’, the fact that they ‘always have two edges’ (1975: 7). In Sade, for example, Barthes recognises ‘an obedient, conformist, plagiarizing edge’ where language is copied in its canonical state, which comes into contact with ‘another edge, mobile, blank (ready to assume any contours), which is never anything but the site of its effect: the place where the death of language is glimpsed’ (1975: 6). The blissful, or ‘erotic’ is not found in one particular ‘edge’, nor in culture or its destruction, but in the way the two edges connect, in ‘the seam between them, the fault, the flaw’ (1975: 7). Barthes’ model rests on the notion that adherence to the past, the established and the canonical represents obedience and conformism, while the ‘edge of violence’ and destruction is the ‘subversive edge’ (1975: 7).

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While the Almanack seems to support the notion that the pleasure of the texts of modernity relates to both an attachment to and difference from previous literary forms, Barnes does not suggest that these relationships are respectively conformist or subversive. Instead of suggesting that an attachment to pre-modernist languages is a conservative gesture that gains its blissful, puncturing power when thrown up against a destructive, subversive impulse, the Almanack indicates that through the repetition of earlier texts a destabilising ambivalence or ‘queerness’ can be retrospectively understood. In the Almanack in particular, and in Barnes’s oeuvre more generally, pleasure does not arise from a Barthesian edging between culture and its death, but from a certain collapse of the distinction between conforming and subversion through the transformational activity of productive remembering. Barnes’s entry for June includes a subsection, entitled the ‘Fourth Great Moment of History’, in which Barnes’s relationship with the past is somewhat elucidated. Narrated by Doll Furious, this section suggests an attachment to canonical history and to earlier cultural forms that is not exclusively parodic in nature. The conventions of literary courtship, for example, become through Barnes’s repetition an appropriately camp language for describing Musset’s delight. With her reference to the ‘Dandy with his Candytufts of Hope and his Gallipots of Love’, real archaic terms are made to sound like surreal nonsense words: by performing earlier forms of literary (hetero)sexual courtship Barnes reveals (and also creates) their queer pleasures (Almanack, 41). Similarly, in the in March section, Musset’s performance of the archaic convention of duelling produces a sexual pleasure in ‘A strong Gauntlet struck lightly athwart the Buttock’ (Almanack, 20). In the ‘Fourth Great Moment of History’, Barnes reworks the stories of Jezebel and Sheba as she reworks a form found in her other 1928 publication, Ryder. In the Almanack, Barnes describes how Jezebel shouts ‘Uoo Hoo!’ out of a window as ‘Kings’ go past her window until one day when the Queen of Sheba passes by and she shouts the same: ‘And that was Jezebel’s last “Uoo Hoo!” ’ (41, italics in orginal). This is a lesbian reworking of the second of ‘Three Great Moments of History’ in Ryder, a story about Stonewall Jackson told by Matthew O’Connor: ‘Thus, when Stonewall Jackson went riding by, Barbara Frietchie, putting her head out of the window, shrieked, “UUUUh, HHHu, Stonewall!’ (Ryder, 230). Barnes’s ‘moments of history’ thus express the transformative pleasures of reiterating past narratives. In Ryder, a historical story (Frietchie actually waved a unionist flag when Jackson passed) is reworked into an amusing and suggestive narrative, itself reworked into an explicitly queer narrative in Ladies Almanack. Origins

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lose their importance through a constant but pleasurable reworking: the past is not a stable and predetermined point of origin, but a ‘wonderment’ created in the present, which speaks to the interests of the present. The notion that the past is created through the act of its telling and remembering is suggested in the short section entitled ‘Spring Fevers, Love Philters and Winter Feasts’. Here Barnes suggests that lesbianism has always already existed, yet at the same time jokes about the idea of origins: ‘Was there a whisper of Ellen or Mary, of Rachel or Gretchen, of Tao or Hedda or Bellorinabella y Belloerella, or Tancred of Injen in the Old Winds, or of Wives whispering a thing to a Wife?’ (Almanack, 70). The claim that there was love between women from the beginning of civilisation must be balanced against the idea, suggested by the humour of the opening lines, that to talk about origins is to create and to imagine as much as to remember: ‘Now, was it the same in the Haphour of the World, when whelks whispered in the brink of the Night, rocked in the Cradle of Time’s Ditch, taking their Will-of-the-wisp, all in a flux of Tenses and Turns?’ (Almanack, 69). The repetition of winds and whispering suggests a comparison between the two speculations about the past, and the comic image of whispering whelks suggests the element of fantasy in any act of remembrance. History is further considered through the character of Bounding Bess, a historian who has an ‘Enthusiasm in things forgotten’ (Almanack, 32). Ladies Almanack mocks naive historicising throughout and critiques an undynamic relationship with temporality through the naming of the villainous Patience Scalpel: the notion of passivity implied by the name Patience is perhaps part of the reason why this character is so incapable of joy. (‘I am of my Time my Time’s best argument’, Patience also remarks (Almanack, 11).) Yet while Bess is rejected by Musset on account of her pedantry, her relationship with the past echoes, to a degree, that of the Almanack itself. ‘There have been great Women in History’ Bess notes, ‘and though now they face upward, they have me to repine’ (Almanack, 32). Bess serves as witness to these women: like the Almanack itself, she inscribes lesbian pleasure into the past and so creates pleasure in the present. Through Bess’s ‘repining’ the women of the past are created anew as ‘lesbians’, as ladies of the Almanack: Bess looks into the past and imagines a history of pleasure through her remembering. The connection between remembering, imagination and pleasure is developed further through the logic of commodity culture in October when Musset expresses her desire to assemble the ideal woman from a variety of body parts she has observed on other women:

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I would have my Scullion’s Eye lie in the Head of Billings-On-Coo, with the Breasts of Haughty on the Hips of Doll, on the leg of Moll, with the Shins of Mazie, under the Scullion’s Eye which lies in the Head of Billings-On-Coo. The Buttocks of a Girl I saw take a slip and Slither one peelish day in Fall [. . .] to lie on the back of the Hips of Doll, on the Leg of Moll, whose Shins are Mazie’s, all under the Eye of the Scullion, Etc. (Almanack, 65)

Thus the passage continues for several more lines, Musset’s style reflecting the Almanack’s tendency towards repetition and cataloguing. Musset suggests the pleasure of both excess and careful selection, and indicates that newness is created by looking again, and re-membering (quite literally in this case) what is already there.17 Again, the pleasures of shopping emerge as a fruitful image for considering other kinds of happiness, related to both the sexual body and the body of the text. Musset’s construction of an imaginary woman by ‘shopping’ for body parts she has already seen nicely describes the relationship between Barnes’s Almanack and pre-modernist textual forms: Barnes neither imagines the absolutely novel nor simply imitates. Musset’s performance of the past, like Barnes’s, is both an act of remembering and an act of imagining, and so occupies a transitional space between fantasy and reality. The psychoanalytic concepts of ‘transitional space’ and ‘transitional phenomena’ are famously explored by D. W. Winnicott and provide a helpful (and contra-Freudian) model for thinking further about the structures of happiness in Ladies Almanack. Considering the state between the infant’s inability and growing ability to recognise and accept reality, Winnicott proposes the notion of a third part of human life before the individual possesses an ‘inner reality’ – an ‘intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute’ (1975: 230, emphasis in original). The phrase ‘transitional object’ refers to the intermediate area ‘between the thumb and the teddy bear, between the oral eroticism and true object relationship, between primary creative activity and projection of what has already been introjected, between primary unawareness of indebtedness and the acknowledgement of indebtedness’ (Winnicott, 1975: 230). While the transitional object, from our point of view, comes from without, this is not the case from the baby’s point of view; yet ‘Neither does it come from within; it is not an hallucination’ (Winnicott, 1975: 233). The transitional object, crucially, is not only a space between reality and fantasy, but also relates to an idea of positive affect that defies the distinction between passivity and activity: the infant’s creativity is as important as the mother’s presentation of herself. The child at once takes from the mother and invents. Early in its development the child becomes capable of conceiving of the idea of something that would meet her needs. While

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the infant does not know what is to be created, at this moment the mother ‘presents herself’: The mother’s adaptation to the infant’s needs, when good enough, gives the infant the illusion that there is an external reality corresponds to the infant’s own capacity to create. In other words, there is an overlap between what the mother supplies and what the child might conceive of. To the observer the child perceives what the mother actually presents, but this is not the whole truth. The infant perceives the breast only in so far as a breast could be created just there and then. (Winnicott, 1975: 239, emphasis in original)

Winnicott’s model suggests a dynamism in the production of pleasure that bears comparison with the act of remembering in Ladies Almanack, where the past does not exist without a witness in the present. The reader must create ‘Parcels of lost Perfection’ rather than merely receive pleasure, and this pleasure is at once related to both inner life and external (material) reality. Like Winnicott’s ‘good enough’ mother, the past ‘presents’ pleasure to Barnes and her reader, who are ready to invent such pleasure anew. ‘[A] Love Letter for a Present’: Happiness in the present continuous While emphasising the importance of the past to Barnes’s understanding of pleasure, I have also stressed that happiness is a condition of the text’s present tense: it is not elsewhere, but here. An assumption of brevity or fleetingness often attaches to our feelings about good feelings in the present, an assumption that is perpetuated by the idea of jouissance. In discussing how the pleasure of representation is not directly attached to its object, Barthes notes: ‘The text of pleasure is not necessarily the text that recounts pleasures; the text of bliss is never the text that recounts the kind of bliss afforded literally by an ejaculation’ (1975: 55). While Barthes dismisses pornography as an example of textual bliss – the ‘text of bliss’ does not literally make its reader come – ‘ejaculation’, which we might agree is a largely (although perhaps not exclusively) male phenomenon, is nonetheless the model for the kind of bliss associated with the most rarefied forms of textual pleasure. This is of course no surprise: in French, jouissance carries the meaning of an orgasmic joy. This understanding of happiness might well be one of the reasons for the perception that it cannot be discussed or captured in language. As Snediker remarks, ‘[t]he difficulty of really thinking about happiness (as opposed to the ease of thinking that real happiness arrives fleetingly) is a function of its presumed fleetingness’ (2008: 30). This presumption

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perhaps relates to such Barthesian articulations on bliss such as: ‘I can only circle such a subject – and therefore better do it briefly and in solitude than collectively and interminably.’ In his consideration of fleetingness, Snediker poses a question that one might profitably ask in relation to Djuna Barnes’s Almanack: What if happiness could outlast fleeting moments, without that persistence of attenuating the quality of happiness? What if instead of attenuating happiness, this expansion of happiness opened it up to critical investigations that didn’t a priori doubt it, but instead made happiness complicated, and strange? (2008: 30)

I want to conclude my reading of Ladies Almanack by further highlighting the complexity of Barnes’s representation of the present tense as the location for happiness. Barnes allows us to imagine a happiness that is not fleeting, emphasising instead a continuing present (or a ‘present continuous’) that comprises a witnessing of the past and a state of extended and unwavering (yet variant) happiness. The present tense of happiness in Barnes’s Almanack is indeed ‘complicated, and strange’ – happiness is not located in nostalgia for the past or hope for the future, but in a utopian present tense that collapses conventional temporal distinctions. As I have repeatedly suggested, sartorial pleasures are key to the Almanack’s investigation and performance of happiness, and in February’s ‘Saints Day’ section Barnes offers new ways of imagining the relationships that clothes might have with sexual pleasure and temporality. In a detail recounting Dame Musset’s legion sexual conquests, the narrator remarks: ‘When eighty-eight she said, “It’s a Hook Girl, not a Button, you should know your Dress better” ’ (Almanack, 17). Conventional understandings of clothing’s role in the context of sexual pleasure are governed by assumptions about fleetingness, yet a different model of pleasure and a different kind of delight is implied by Musset’s remark to ‘know your Dress better’. Musset’s happiness relates not to the ‘passionate’ ideal of ripping clothing off quickly to attain a fleeting moment of pleasure. Instead, she suggests the importance of paying careful and loving attention to the details of clothes and to incorporating other kinds of pleasure into a blissful present tense that confounds the momentary principles of jouissance. In a way that challenges conventional associations between happiness, time, narrative and morality, Patience Scalpel is a joyless figure partly because she locates happiness not in the present but in the future (she is patient).18 Her jealousy regarding the other ladies’ happiness seems based, in part, on her understanding that their pleasures are not fleeting but enduring:

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She saw them gamboling on the Greensward, she heard them pinch and moan within the Gloom of many a stately Mansion; she beheld them floating across the Ceilings, (for such was Art in the Old Days), diapered in Toile de Jouy, and welded without Flame, in one incalculable Embrace. ‘And what’, she said, ‘the silly Creatures may mean by it is more than I can diagnose! I am of my Time my Time’s best argument, and who am I that I must die in my Time, and never know what it is in the Whorls and Crevices of my Sisters so prolongs them to the bitter End? [. . .]’ (Almanack, 11)

The ladies of the Almanack enjoy a ‘prolonging’ happiness based on the continuation of present bodily joys and, while their pleasure is not fleeting, neither is it related to investment in the future. Barnes’s vision is surprising because it questions the assumption that apparently frivolous corporeal pleasures must be short-lived: the women’s ‘gamboling’, ‘pinching’ and ‘moaning’ are quite distinct from the momentary bliss of jouissance (and, grammatically speaking, all take the form of the present continuous). Equally, the happiness of the ladies is related to a notion of the past being created anew in the present: ‘she beheld them floating across the Ceilings, (for such was Art in the Old Days)’. While Patience is ‘of her time’ and so unhappy, the women’s embodied pleasure is based upon a more malleable understanding of temporality. Patience is fleetingly unhappy, while they are continuously delighted. The idea of an ongoing present and an ongoing pleasure is, ironically, fully celebrated at the Almanack’s conclusion, after the death of its heroine. Musset’s tongue – which does not burn after her cremation but is said to flicker ‘to this day’ – provides cunnilingual pleasure to the surviving ladies (Almanack, 84). The flickering tongue serves as both a monument to past pleasures and a source of new ones: it embodies (or disembodies) the idea that the present continuous is the verb of happiness. For Barnes, pleasure – like the flickering tongue – is enduring rather than fleeting, relying not on a notion of progress or change in the future, but on a continuing now-ness. I have argued that, in the February section of Ladies Almanack, the speaker’s anxieties about the impossibility of finding a new way to love her ‘Old Girl’ are refuted by the structure of the chapter (and the Almanack more generally), which suggests a form of happiness based on finding-creating ‘Parcels of lost Perfection’ from the past. Yet crucially this focus on re-staging the past is in no way nostalgic: it is above all a celebration of the present. The section opens with a line suggesting the difficulties of locating happiness in the future: ‘This be a Love Letter for a Present, and when she is Catched, what shall I do with her? God knows!’ (Almanack, 14). While the speaker is aware that affective investment in the future is pointless – that the yet-to-come point at which the

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woman is ‘catched’ is almost beside the point in terms of her happiness – the question becomes about how to imagine happiness in the present tense. And while the Almanack provides answers through emptying out the possibility of novelty and suggesting the value of repetition, the emphasis on the present means that the reader cannot entertain the idea that happiness resides in the past. This emphasis is suggested by the playful double meaning of present in ‘Love Letter for a Present’, which is brought out by the speaker’s comment, slightly later in the chapter, that ‘To have been the First, that alone would have gifted me!’ (Almanack, 17, emphasis in original). Contrary to the speaker’s emphasis on the desirability of being first (i.e. that happiness lies elsewhere), Barnes’s connection between ‘present’ and ‘gift’ establishes the elevation of the present tense. This present, however, is not fleeting and simple, but a complex tense based on a productive form of remembering. Despite his emphasis on jouissance, Roland Barthes considers how pleasure might endure for the reader, contrasting the pleasure of a classic text where one ‘goes straight to the articulations of the anecdote’ with the ‘applied’ reading of ‘the modern text, the limit-text’ (1975: 12): Read slowly, read all of a novel by Zola, and the book will drop from your hands; read fast, in snatches, some modern text, and it becomes opaque, inaccessible to your pleasure; you want something to happen and nothing does, for what happens to the language does not happen to the discourse: what ‘happens,’ what ‘goes away,’ the seam of the two edges, the interstice of bliss, occurs in the volume of the languages, in the uttering, not in the sequence of utterances: not to devour, to gobble, but to graze, to browse scrupulously, to rediscover – in order to read today’s writers – the leisure of bygone readings: to be aristocratic readers. (1975: 12–13, emphasis in original)

Using a term he scornfully rejects elsewhere in his thesis, Barthes suggests that reading modernist texts might involve not a fleeting pleasure but a leisurely engagement. While ‘leisure’ suggests an engagement with mass culture and bourgeois interests (hence, one assumes, Barthes’ dismissal of it later on in his argument – ‘(only leisure is social)’), it also, as Barthes suggests, relates to aristocratic forms of pleasure. Just as Djuna Barnes suggests how the old and the new are born out of each other, that earlier textual forms in fact become more complex through modernist reworkings, she also refuses to choose between ‘bourgeois’ and ‘aristocratic’ models of pleasure. Dame Evangeline Musset is a lady of leisure in the aristocratic sense: her life revolves around the protracted experience of pleasure. Yet Barnes also celebrates the apparently bourgeois leisure activities of shopping and ‘consuming’ material goods. Ladies Almanack suggests a model for reading pleasure based on both forms of

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leisure: Barnes’s reader is encouraged to ‘graze’ and ‘devour’ or ‘gobble’. The enjoyment one experiences in reading the Almanack is not simply the pleasure of rushing to the ending – in her 1972 Foreword Barnes suggests we ‘honour the creature slowly’ – nor the fleeting pleasure of immersion in something singular and discrete (Almanack, 87). Owing to the Almanack’s peculiar form, one has to go backwards as well as forwards, to read two types of narrative alongside each other, and to consider images as much as words. Like ‘having it all’, the emphasis on the present continuous as the tense of happiness represents an unequivocally positive and indeed utopian understanding of feeling good. Djuna Barnes’s reader is encouraged to delight in excess and abundance, to be unashamed of the pleasures of gorging on lists and catalogues, and to enjoy exhaustive and contradictory arguments where all roads lead to happiness.

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Conclusion

Given its traumatic beginnings, one might include ‘surprise’ among the affects produced by this book’s ‘happy ending’. But this ‘ending’ is of course no such thing: by travelling non-chronologically from The Antiphon (1958) to Ladies Almanack (1928) through Ryder (1928) and Nightwood (1936), I hope to have honoured the queer relationship to time exhibited by Barnes’s oeuvre. In Djuna Barnes the past is never history, but is apprehended in its full strangeness – and with all its possibilities for horror and delight – in the present tense. And besides, this work’s emphasis on the unruliness of affect – on how affects combine in remarkable and unexpected ways – perhaps makes such ‘surprises’ altogether less surprising. Through her enticing concept of erotohistoriography, where the lost object is encountered in the present and through the body, Elizabeth Freeman describes a mode of criticism which might allow us to ‘imagine ourselves haunted by bliss and not just by trauma: residues of positive affect (idylls, utopias, memories of touch) might be available for queer counter- (or para-) historiographies’ (2010: 120). We might well imagine Ladies Almanack as a form of erotohistoriography, as a text haunted by bliss, yet the reading practice I have elaborated throughout Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism in fact allows us to find traces of bliss within trauma and other kinds of negative experiences and feelings. Barnes’s work illustrates the insight that affect is ‘born in in-betweenness and resides in accumulative beside-ness’ (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010: 2). Barnes teaches us to ‘reach not beyond the image’ but to sit with our ambivalence, to experience the ‘additive and accretive’ feelings that accumulate and circulate at the surfaces of bodies and texts. This affective reading practice allows us to experience the queerness of any history, the mixed feelings that challenge any polarising and moralising narrative of the past and upset the very order of narrative itself. In a poem first published in The Trend in 1914, Barnes’s narrator

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dismisses the ‘fireside’ creeds that provide ‘written pity’ and ‘written wrath’, and plans instead to ‘build me a personal God’ out of clay (Collected Poems, 32). In an image that resonates with the marionettes of her early journalism, the puppet-like characters of her fiction and the suggestive body-as-sponge image I consider in Chapter 2, ‘The Personal God’ describes a body shaped by contact, animated by the touch of another: I’ll breathe out his flaccid belly, I’ll cup out his sightless eyes I’ll sob in the labor bending, As I handle his plastic thighs. (Collected Poems, 32)

This clay body is formed by the movements and affects of another body, which is in turn affected by the body of clay. This malleable god contrasts with ‘The god that is always the same’: Barnes’s clay god is responsive and emotional; he is governed by contingency and affect: he is ‘rash’ and ‘his judgement shall halt and be lame’ (Collected Poems, 32) The image of the affective and affecting body in this early poem provides, like many of Barnes’s bodies, a model for reading. Indeed, in its emphasis on rash, halting and lame judgement it celebrates the particularity and contingency of the act of reading over the false certainties of ‘the written’, because ‘written pity’ and ‘written wrath’ might turn into quite different affects as they touch the reader (Collected Poems, 32). Furthermore, Barnes moulds and shapes the literary corpus of the past as she brings into being her clay god. Breathing into the flaccid belly of the textual body, she animates it through her own body; the breath, like affect, circulates between the bodies and changes both. Like affect, Barnes understands reading as a form of contact, arising in our capacities to touch and be touched, to move and be moved. Barnes’s productive readings of literary history teach us how we might, in true Winnicottian style, both create and receive her own textual corpus. While the queer oeuvre of Djuna Barnes has helped us to rewrite the history of modernism, her work elides any distinctions we might make between the reading and the writing of such a history. Residing in the spaces between reader and writer, passing back and forth between body and text, are the pains and pleasures of Barnes’s affective modernism.

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Notes

Introduction 1. ‘Trauma’ originates from the Greek τραυμα or ‘wound’. 2. Caruth indeed emphasises the ‘central Freudian insight into trauma, that the impact of the traumatic event lies precisely in its belatedness, in its refusal to be simply located, in its insistent appearance outside the boundaries of any single place or time’ (1995: 8–9). 3. In this sense I do not wish to reiterate exactly the positions mapped out in the welcome feminist reappraisal of Barnes’s work beginning in the late 1980s. The idea of Barnes’s modernism as one of marginality is reflected in the title of Bonnie Kime Scott’s 1993 essay ‘Barnes Being “Beast Familiar”: Representation on the Margin of Modernism’. 4. Barnes’s relationship to the sentimental is discussed at length below and in Chapter 2. For discussions of Barnes and the gothic see Avril Horner, ‘ “A Detour of Filthiness”: French Fiction and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood’ (2002); Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, ‘Strolling in the Dark: Gothic Flânerie in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood’ (2001); and Deborah TylerBennett, ‘ “Thick Within Our Hair”: Djuna Barnes’s Gothic Lovers’ (2001). Tyrus Miller considers ‘late modernism’ as a body of work characterised by its ‘linkage forwards into postmodernism and backwards into modernism’ (1999: 7). Miller’s positioning of Barnes is pre-empted in Donna Gerstenberger’s 1993 essay ‘Modern (Post) Modern: Djuna Barnes Among the Others’. 5. Hank O’Neal records a conversation with Barnes in September 1978: ‘She spoke at length about Joyce (Jim) [. . .] and about T. S. Eliot (Tom) as well. At one point she became very angry and raged about a small bookshop on Tenth Street called Djuna Books. She is outraged by its existence. “How dare they,” she said, adding, “it is probably a terrible little lesbian bookshop” ’ (1990: 19). 6. Among Barnes’s personal library, now held within her archive at the University of Maryland, is an edition of Eliot’s Selected Essays 1917–1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1932). She has marked a section covering two pages in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ from the line ‘What happens is a continual surrender of himself’ to ‘a continual extinction of personality’.

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7. Barnes’s relationship with Wood began in 1922 and lasted for eight years. For further details on their life and cohabitation in Paris, see Phillip Herring (1995: 156–70). Barnes’s Ladies Almanack (1928) has often been read in relation to its potential biographical value as a sketch of Natalie Barney’s lesbian literary salons. As Shari Benstock notes: ‘Because the better known of Barnes’s writings [. . .] include characters and situations drawn from her own biography, particularly of the Paris years, there is a tendency to read her fiction as a record of her life’ (1986: 233). 8. Other notable biographical interpretations include Anne B. Dalton and Marie Ponsot’s reading of Ryder and Louise DeSalvo’s reading of The Antiphon, discussed in Chapter 2 and Chapter 1 respectively. 9. For a discussion of Barnes’s polygynous family home, see Herring (1995: 29–42). 10. Herring cites Barnes’s statements about her sexual violation given to James Scott in his unpublished interview in 1971 (1995: 53, 268). 11. See, for example, Zadel Gustafson to Djuna Barnes, 11 April 1905, 11 June 1908 and 29 September 1908. 12. Cvetkovich’s discussion of ‘public trauma’ encompasses issues as diverse as incest, butch–femme discourse and AIDS. 13. Caselli continues: ‘To put it somewhat differently, one needs to ask alongside Freud’s positions in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, what creates trauma as trauma, instead of focusing on a predetermined notion of what constitutes abuse’ (2009: 130). While Caselli makes the connection between a particular kind of reading practice and the consideration of trauma she goes no further in exploring the significance of this. In fact, in her reading of Ryder and The Antiphon she offers a somewhat monolithic notion of how the traumatic might figure in each text: ‘Rather than a repetition of an original trauma for cathartic purposes, both texts stage adulteration and travesty, Ryder counterfeiting the picaresque, The Antiphon tragedy’ (2009: 197). Indeed, like the staging of ‘adulteration and travesty’, I see trauma discourse as a potential means of undermining originality and authenticity. 14. The similarities between psychoanalysis and deconstruction on this point are noted by Dominick LaCapra (2001: 21). 15. For other interviews in which Barnes lays bare the conventions of the form, and so empties it of its revelatory force, see in particular ‘Gaby’s Reputation for Reckless Deviltry is Shattered’ (1914) and ‘The Confessions of Helen Westley’ (1917) (both reprinted in Interviews). However, Barnes’s tendency to invoke a language of hermeneutics only to present an overtly theatricalised subject is evident in most of her interviews. 16. Barnes offers equally theatrical representations of backstage spaces – see ‘Gaby’s Reputation for Reckless Deviltry Is Shattered’, ‘May Vokes’ (1915) and ‘I Could Never Be Lonely Without a Husband, Says Lillian Russell’ (1914). 17. Barbara Green claims that Barnes makes a ‘proto-Mulveyesque’ argument against the forms of ‘spectacular feminism’ adopted by the suffragist movement in its display of the female body during public force-feeding and other types of protest (1997: 171). Green argues that Barnes’s interviews reveal that the interviewer’s aim – to penetrate the secret life of the interviewee

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18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

Notes – conflicts with the prohibition on women owning the gaze, and that Barnes’s work provides ‘a mocking critique of the impossible position of the girl reporter’ who must be turned into a spectacle (1997: 173). Nancy Bombaci (2002), focusing on the interviews, argues that Barnes appropriates the fetishistic gaze Mulvey associates with the masculine subject position and conflates this position with its feminine counterpart. I refer here of course to Laura Mulvey’s highly influential 1975 essay on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. For variations of this type, see the following short stories: ‘Paprika Johnson’ (1915), ‘What Do You See, Madam?’ (1915), ‘The Jest of Jests’ (1917), ‘Indian Summer’ (1917), ‘The Passion’ (1924) and ‘The Grande Malade’ (1925). Indeed, as I suggest in Chapter 4, ‘consumer desire’ is one of the affects demonstrated in Barnes’s Ladies Almanack. Barnes’s other, less sympathetic, articles are ‘Part Victory, Part Defeat at Suffrage Aviation Meet’ (1913) and ‘Seventy Trained Suffragists Turned Loose on City’ (1913). Plumb’s assessment relates to her monograph’s larger project of situating Barnes’s work within the symbolist movement, one of the characteristics of which, she argues, is that character serves idea. Deborah Parsons remarks that ‘Barnes’s plays and stories from her Greenwich Village years mock the fashion for psychoanalysis in the popular imagination, teasing her audience and readers with overt symbolic elements that nevertheless refute attempts at interpretation’ (2003: 22). The extent to which Barnes knew Freud’s work is unclear, but we know from a letter to Coleman that she had read psychoanalysis and formed an ambivalent relationship to it: ‘I’ve read the psychoanalysts from time to time, a bit here, a bit there, all of them, but of course I would have to go through them again and properly’ (Barnes to Emily Coleman, 15 December 1938). James Joyce, in his 1922 interview with Barnes, refers to her as a ‘Freudian’, although the extent to which this is simply for rhetorical effect is unclear (Interviews, 1995: 293). Ahmed writes that the former view might be represented by Descartes, David Hume and William James, the latter by Aristotle (2004: 5). Part of the recent debate between contemporary philosophers of emotion broadly relates to this question, and specifically to whether or not emotions are judgements. See, for example, the essays in Robert C. Solomon’s edited collection Thinking About Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions (2004). Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth mark the watershed moment for the current interest in affect as 1995 and the publication of two essays: Sedgwick and Frank’s ‘Shame in the Cybernetic Fold’ (1995) and Massumi’s ‘The Autonomy of Affect’ (1995). As Gregg and Seigworth observe, these essays have shaped ‘the two dominant vectors of affect study in the humanities’: ‘Silvan Tomkins’s psychobiology of differential affects’ and the Deleuzian reading of Spinoza found in the work of Massumi (2010: 5). Gregg and Seigworth note that affect is more ‘hardwired’ in Tomkins’s scheme, while Deleuze locates affect in immanence and in ‘the complex assemblages that come to compose bodies and world simultaneously’ (2010: 6). As Gregg and Seigworth suggest, while these theories could never

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26.

27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

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be easily or fully resolved ‘they can be made to interpenetrate at particular points and to resonate’: it is in this spirit that I use the insights of affect theories from the Tomkinsian and Deleuzian-Spinozist vectors beside one another (2010: 6). Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank co-edited Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader in 1995 and their introduction was reprinted in Sedgwick’s 2003 book Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Sedgwick’s queer readings of Tomkins inform my discussion of shame in Chapter 3, but her less directly Tomkinsian work on the affects has also been key to my thinking: see, for example, my discussion of ‘besideness’ and the Sedgwickian distinction between paranoid/reparative reading in relation to Ryder (Chapter 2). For a discussion of the potentially alarming nature of the word ‘innate’ for ‘theory-minded’ contemporary readers of Tomkins, see Sedgwick (2003: 102). Sedgwick uses Ann Cvetkovich’s 1992 Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism as an exemplary case of the equation between ‘theory’ and anti-essentialism that has governed many considerations of affect. Garry Sherbert reads Nightwood in Freudian terms as ‘an unfinished work of mourning’ (2003: 117). Sarah Henstra (2000) and Martina Stange (2005) also discuss melancholia in Nightwood, and Carolyn Allen (1996) and Caroline Rupprecht (2006) read the novel in relation to narcissism. In ‘Djuna Barnes: Melancholic Modernism’ (2007), Deborah Parsons includes a brief discussion of shame in Nightwood, in which she in fact mentions Sedgwick’s reading of Tomkins. Caselli also cites this letter, noting that it ‘confirms Barnes’s condemnation of “slush” as the serious modern writer’s bete noire’ but also hints at its ambivalence, writing that Barnes’s affective theory can be better understood if one bears in mind that ‘nothing in Nightwood is used in its usual derogatory sense’ (2009: 179). Segel’s Body Ascendant: Modernism and the Physical Imperative (1998) is one of a relatively small number of studies on modernism and the body to emerge in recent years. Many of these works have tended to share a focus on the body in relation to technology. See, for example, Tim Armstrong’s Modernism, Technology, and the Body (1998), Sara Danius’s The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics (2002) and Yoshiki Tajiri’s Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body: The Organs and Senses in Modernism (2007). Indeed, as Felski writes, the ‘symbolic force’ of the term ‘modernism’ ‘lies in its enunciation of a process of differentiation, an act of separation from the past’ (1995: 13). Other significant early studies of modernism that stress historical discontinuity and radical novelty include Harry Levin’s ‘What Was Modernism?’ (1965) and Maurice Beebe’s ‘What Modernism Was’ (1974). See, for example, the following: Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism (1984); Ann L. Ardis and Leslie W. Lewis (eds), Women’s Experience of Modernity, 1875–1945 (2003); Maria diBattista and Lucy McDiarmid (eds), High and Low Moderns: Literature and Culture,

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35.

36.

37. 38.

39.

40. 41.

Notes 1889–1939 (1996); Cassandra Laity, H.D. and the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle (1996); Lynne Hapgood and Nancy L. Paxton (eds), Outside Modernism: In Pursuit of the English Novel, 1900–30 (2000); Giovanni Cianci and Peter Nicholls (eds), Ruskin and Modernism (2001); Eric Haralson, Henry James and Queer Modernity (2003). Edmund’s notion of ‘rearticulation’ indeed suggests both the similarities and critical differences between twentieth-century modernism and nineteenth-century sentimentalism though, as I discuss in Chapter 2, she characterises Ryder as an ‘anti-domestic’ novel. Love observes that not only do many queers ‘feel backward’ but ‘backwardness has been taken up as a key feature of queer culture’: ‘Over the last century, queers have embraced backwardness in many forms: in celebrations of perversion, in defiant refusals to grow up, in explorations of haunting and memory, and in stubborn attachments to lost objects’ (2007: 7). This association between queerness and backwardness is also taken up by Elizabeth Freeman: ‘The stubborn lingering of pastness (whether it appears as anachronistic style, as the reappearance of bygone events in the symptom, or as arrested development) is a hallmark of queer affect: a “revolution” in the old sense of the word, as a turning back’ (2010: 8). Early Barnes poems working broadly within the gothic tradition include ‘The Dreamer’ (1911), ‘Call of the Night’ (1911), ‘Six Songs of Khalidine’ (1923) and ‘The Flowering Corpse’ (1923). Foundational texts establishing connections between modernity and the Great War include, of course, Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Storyteller’ (1936). For a classic study of the relationship between the First World War and modern literature see Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975). Kalaidjain offers a reading of trauma in relation to Ryder and The Antiphon. He argues that in both texts ‘Barnes presents a crisis facing the incest victim’s exile from the patriarchal order underwritten by the Oedipal paradigm of the Law of the Father’ (2006: 160). Kalaidjian explains the apparent contradiction between Barnes the (sometimes) anti-feminist reactionary and her anti-patriarchal texts as a psychic outcome of her abuse; specifically, he identifies a vacillation between avowal and disavowal of anti-Oedipal undifferentiation as the incest victim’s simultaneous repudiation and internalisation of the Oedipal. I discuss Kalaidjian’s work further in Chapter 1. Chapter 1 of Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings (2003) is entitled ‘The Everyday Life of Queer Trauma’. Michaela Grobbel has written on ‘memory theaters’ in the work of Barnes, Ingeborg Bachmann and Marguerite Duras, arguing that these writers ‘creatively and critically reenact the past in the present, thus calling attention to the “here” and “now” of the present situation’ (2003: xiv). Grobbel emphasises the embodied and performative nature of memory, and in her reading of Nightwood focuses on the ‘ “return” of the past’ as ‘a repetition of the same but in disfigured form’ (2003: 38). Grobbel considers the thematics of traumatic loss, claiming that Barnes coped with the end of her relationship with Thelma Wood ‘by “remembering” it through writing Nightwood’ (2003: 37).

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Chapter 1 1. I use the 1962 edition of The Antiphon that appeared in Barnes’s Selected Works. Barnes insists repeatedly to translators Christine Koschel and Inge von Weidenbaum in their 1968–70 correspondence that the 1962 version is her preferred text. The differences between the 1962 text and the version originally published in 1958 are slight, but I note any significant differences within cited material. 2. Phillip Herring claims that the setting for the play is a composite of the house in which Barnes’s mother Elizabeth was raised – Flore House, in Oakham, Rutland (now Leicestershire) – and the nearby manor house of Burley-on-the-Hill (1995: 264). Flore House had originally been a Benedictine monastery built in the thirteenth century. Barnes visited Oakham in June 1936 with Emily Coleman and Peter Hoare. 3. The logic of the open wound bears a certain resemblance to Ahmed’s claim that ‘a good response to Wendy Brown’s critique would not be “to forget” the wound or indeed the past as the scene of wounding’ because to forget would be to repeat the violence or injury (2004: 33). 4. DeSalvo claims that ‘every act of incest is an initiation into prostitution’, but gives little evidence for her argument that Miranda is a prostitute (1991: 304). On the basis of Elisha’s remark that Miranda is ‘out of patron and of money’ DeSalvo argues that ‘it is highly likely that Miranda has spent her life in the care of “patrons” who pay her for sexual services’ (Selected Works, 101; DeSalvo, 1991: 304). Although the brothers imply that Miranda is sexually promiscuous, there seems to be little evidence to support this, and besides, promiscuity does not equate to prostitution. I find it rash to assume that ‘patron’ refers to prostitution rather than literary patronage, as Miranda works in the theatre and as a writer. Barnes herself received patronage from Peggy Guggenheim when writing Nightwood. 5. The view that incest is a product of the dominant social order contrasts with the sociological and anthropological focus on the incest taboo, where incest is understood to disrupt the familial and social order. For a thoughtful recontextualisation of the different concepts of incest within a Foucauldian paradigm, see Vicki Bell’s Interrogating Incest: Feminism, Foucault and the Law (1993). 6. Sarah Bay-Cheng (2005) understands this allusion differently, reading it as a critique of the voyeuristic exploitation she associates with Ibsen’s (among others’) plays. For a discussion of anti-theatricality and The Antiphon, see below. 7. The Barnes archive contains an undated ‘Early Draft’ of Acts 1 and 2 which, as I argue below, seem to have been written at different times. There are two similar drafts of all three acts dating from July 1954 (marked ‘First Copy’ and ‘Finished Copy’); four full copies dating from September 1955, with Copy 2 marked as Muir’s copy, and Copy 3 marked as Eliot’s (Copies 1 and 2 are slightly different typescripts from Copies 3 and 4); a copy dating from February 1956; three copies dating from June 1956; and one copy dating from August 1956. These versions could be said to represent significant stages in redrafting. The archive also contains the actors’ copies of the play from the May 1956 Poet’s Theatre reading of the play,

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8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

Notes along with miscellaneous pages, drafts, proofs and notes relating to The Antiphon. The main difference between the two published texts relates to the distribution of lines between characters. For a study of the fascinating personal and editorial relationship between Barnes and Eliot, with particular reference to his editorship of Nightwood, see Miriam Fuchs, ‘Djuna Barnes and T. S. Eliot: Authority, Resistance, and Acquiescence’ (1993), and Monika Faltejskova, Djuna Barnes, T. S. Eliot and the Gender Dynamics of Modernism (2010). Interestingly, while Faltejskova interrogates the roles of Barnes, Eliot and Emily Coleman in the revision of Nightwood, she takes on faith Curry’s claims that Eliot damaged The Antiphon, which lost its ‘original coherence and poignancy’ as a result of his editing (2010: 116). Faltejskova builds on the work of Cheryl J. Plumb, who in 1995 produced a ‘restored’ version of Nightwood, reinserting the parts she claims that Eliot encouraged Barnes to excise. As is the case with The Antiphon, access to these earlier drafts is illuminating and an invaluable resource for the Barnes scholar. Although we might pose similar questions (to the ones I ask here in relation to The Antiphon) about the faith in authorial intentions and indeed the demonisation of Eliot that Plumb’s project involves, one crucial difference is that Plumb’s work does not connect (implicitly or explicitly) the discourses of sexual and textual violation. In fact, as I argue in Chapter 3, a more convincing case might be made for the significance of Eliot’s censorship of Nightwood than The Antiphon. By ‘sex-negative’ I am of course referring to a particular strand of secondwave feminism, reflected here in the work of DeSalvo (in particular), but most famously represented in the anti-pornography stances of Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin and the foundational analyses of rape by Susan Brownmiller in Against Our Will (1975). Such feminisms share an emphasis on the constitutional role of violence and domination within sexuality. Indeed, in this letter, Muir goes as far as to say that ‘I myself feel that the second and third acts should stay as they are’. Although Curry notes Eliot’s claim that Act 2 was still too long, she does not mention his careful observation in the same letter that it in fact covered 93 pages, while Acts 1 and 3 covered 37 and 38 pages respectively. This information about the extent of the discrepancy indeed makes his request seem – from an editorial viewpoint – quite reasonable. In the Barnes archives at Maryland there are two undated files marked ‘Early Draft’: one for Act 1 and one for Act 2. It is my belief that these two acts do not match up, and while Act 1 is the remnant of a pre-July 1954 version of The Antiphon, and includes a substantial number of narrative strands and character names that were later abandoned or changed, Act 2 was written at some point between July 1954 and September 1955. Indeed ‘Early Draft’ Act 2 is closer to the 1955 ‘Copies’ than the 1954 versions are, in terms of the names and numbers of sons (and the complexity of their characters), the wording of specific lines and references to the griffon that appears onstage. I therefore argue that the first (surviving) draft of the play did not include the ‘hay-hook’ scene. It is worth pointing out, however, that just as feminist arguments in the

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15.

16. 17.

18.

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1980s were informed by a history of incest being denied, some early criticism of the The Antiphon failed to do justice to themes of sexual abuse. James Scott’s reading, for example, fails to account for the specificity of the trauma communicated and describes the play in terms of a general, androcentric, indeed Eliot-esque, anti-modernity stemming from ‘nineteenthcentury pessimism and the industrial revolution’ (1976: 131). The first production, a dramatic reading organised by Edwin Muir at Harvard in 1956 and attended by Barnes and Eliot, was a disaster; the second was a Swedish translation performed at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm in 1961 due to the championing of the United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld and was, as Harrie’s account below suggests, more successful. The play was performed in the Netherlands in 1989 and at least three times in the 1990s (all in translation), including a Paris production at the Théâtre de l’Europe in 1990 (directed by Daniel Mesguich) and a Frankfurt production in 1992. The most recent staging I can find evidence for was a Dutch-Belgian production in 1996 – see Julie Phillips (1996). I cite this from an English translation by Nancy Mazzocco, sent to Barnes on 4 August 1961. Equally, material other than that relating to sexual abuse was excised from The Antiphon. Jack Blow’s speeches, particularly in Act 1, were much lengthier in earlier drafts of the play, where Jack resembles much more closely Matthew O’Connor, whose speeches in Nightwood were also cut after suggestions from Eliot. Both Muir and Eliot were keen that Barnes reduce Jack’s lines – see, for example, Eliot to Barnes, 4 April 1956. For more on the other changes in the revision process, see my essay ‘Revising The Antiphon, Restaging Trauma; or, Where Sexual Politics Meet Textual History’ (2011). In the undated ‘Early Draft’ there are three, not two, brothers – Barnaby, Oliver and Kit – but by July 1954 there are two: Barnaby and Elisha (though Barnes is not entirely consistent with naming in her early drafts). In these early versions of the play their dialogue is less stylised, less opaque and more prosaic – indeed they speak in prose rather than verse throughout ‘Early Draft’ – and they have fewer outstanding lines. Extant in Act 1 of July 1954’s ‘Finished Copy’ are eight pages containing dialogue between the brothers that was subsequently cut. In prose in parts, their speech is less aphoristic than it would later become, containing more factual information about their lives such as: ELISHA: Wouldn’t we get into a jam like this, the first time we leave home. BARNABY: It’s not a total loss: we made contacts, we settled the matter of our foreign trade, chartered a possible business address, picked up a find or two – By September 1955’s ‘Copy 1’ the dialogue between the brothers (now Elisha and Dudley) is predominantly written in the dense verse we find in the final draft. The general trend in revision is that the brothers’ dialogue is reduced in quantity and transparency and made more condensed and

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19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

Notes stylised. See below for a discussion of Barnes’s revisions of the brothers’ attack on Miranda and Augusta. Kalaidjian does not explain what he means by the censorship of The Antiphon’s productions – I can find no evidence to suggest that productions of the play were censored or abridged in any way and he gives no details of any such performances. The work of Alex Goody, who is currently engaged in a project to stage The Antiphon, should also be mentioned in this context. Alex Goody’s forthcoming article ‘ “High and Aloof”: Verse, Violence and the Audience in Djuna Barnes’s The Antiphon’ emphasises the work as a play to be performed and situates The Antiphon beside other verse dramas of the 1950s, including those by Eliot, Christopher Fry and Archibald MacLeish. As I state above, I believe the first act of this undated draft to be the earliest extant version of the play (contra the undated ‘Early Draft’ of Act 2, which I think is rather later than Act 1). Barnes writes: ‘I have, for their effect on Augusta when discovering them looking down at her from the balcony, tosses [sic] in a few travellers on their way across country to port. These persons are not to be taken for chorus or for Furies, or anything ghostly – they are what the script says they are – odd people who are useful for their small part.’ These terms – the ones used in the final draft – are included in Copies 3 and 4 of the September 1955 versions, but not in Copies 1 and 2 dating from the same time, where there is no reference to the (lack of) ‘audience’ but Jack’s speech includes the line ‘The play upon the boards -- the actor gone!’ The exact lines marked for excision by Muir are: No tither, weeper, wit or cicerone No beadle, bailiff, barrister, no clerk – In short no audience at all, ---My hands will have to be your clamour lady.

25. Although, for Scott, this double meaning is between play ‘in the sense of sport, and the real play, the drama of the “antiphon” [which] is about to begin’ (1976: 128). 26. The fantastic quality of the women’s memories of bucolic innocence ruined is crucial. Barnes’s deconstruction of the opposition between natural childhood innocence and sexual experience is particularly evident in Ryder, where the ‘Rape and Repining’ chapter in particular suggests that sexual violence is a constitutive part of rural life for young girls. 27. On 23 March 1958 Barnes writes to Lewis Gallantière: ‘I wonder if it would play. Some think not, others think heartily yes.’ In a slightly later letter to Coleman, who has criticised the play, Barnes is in a more defensive, but still ambivalent, mood: ‘I did not intend it to be “staged” – that is, unless someone wanted to stage it’; ‘It could be a closet-drama. It depends’ (23 August 1958). On 7 September 1959, however, she refers to the forthcoming Swedish production when assuring Wolfgang Hildesheimer that The Antiphon could play: ‘You ask me do I think that The Antiphon could be done on the stage. But of course it could be done on the stage.’ 28. Bay-Cheng sees The Antiphon’s numerous theatrical references as

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29.

30.

31.

32. 33.

193

supporting a ‘reading of the play as theatrical criticism’, including the doll’s house scene which implicates the audience ‘in a complicit viewing of [Miranda’s] violation’ (133). Two drafts of this exchange may be found in Barnes’s archive among miscellaneous pages relating to The Antiphon. Both differ slightly from the final version in wording and in the distribution of the lines between the two characters. The second (unheaded) draft has a tab on the side of page with the word ‘funeral’ written in Barnes’s hand. In a letter to a team of translators, Barnes muses: ‘I wonder what The Antiphon would sound like? What would it be like as an Opera (music, naturally, by Montéverdi, or Mozart!)’ (Barnes to Cristina Campo et al., 2 October 1968) Caselli discusses the relationship between Blake and Barnes, noting that references to Songs of Innocence and Experience occur in Nightwood, the poetry and the short stories: ‘Barnes takes from Blake’s Songs the question of how can innocence be produced in language and, conversely, how can experience exist without the constantly evoked yet unattainable notion of innocence’ (2009: 139). See also Caselli (2009: 102, 109). Barnes glosses the ‘stallion yard’ as ‘a pizzle, a bull’s penis’ for Koschel and von Weidenbaum (4 October 1969). Barnes indeed revised these lines between the 1958 first edition and the 1962 Selected Works version. The most recent version is the most fully sexualised, with its reference to Miranda’s ‘rump’. In the 1958 text the lines read: Slap her ears down. Stand her on four feet! That’ll set her up! I’d say that’s one position Of which she hasn’t made the most in twenty years. (The Antiphon, 138)

34. James Scott (1976) compares The Antiphon to The Waste Land and Deborah Parsons, in Djuna Barnes (2003), emphasises the play’s wartime setting and Barnes’s apparent treatment of the destruction of European art and culture. 35. For DeSalvo, Barnes’s play ‘provides a cipher with which to reinterpret The Tempest’ (1991: 312). DeSalvo’s reading, in which the character of Titus is used to reveal how Prospero was actually a ‘seductive father’, figures repetition as a means of exposure, in the sense that insidious patriarchal oppressions are exposed and mastered. Similarly, Farfan reads the play as a parody of revenge tragedy and ‘best understood as part of Barnes’s ongoing feminist critique of the male-dominated literary tradition’ (2005: 46).

Chapter 2 1. Ryder was as listed as one of six best-sellers in September 1928 in the New York Times Book Review. The first printing of 3,000 copies sold out quickly, but interest had faded by the time Boni & Liveright released a second printing (Herring, 1995: 143).

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Notes

2. There are clear similarities between the Ryders and Barnes’s family. Both are rural families headed by a matriarchal grandmother and her polygynous son. Wendell Ryder, like Wald Barnes, has two families who live together under the same roof. The novel is, according to Field, ‘peppered with real family names’ (1983: 175). For further biographical similarities, see Herring and Field, but it is worth noting that information about Barnes’s childhood is rather incomplete. 3. A notable early exception to the focus on ‘the hidden and unspoken’ is Plumb’s Fancy’s Craft, which acknowledges the ‘juxtapositions’, ‘multiple chords’ and ‘double meanings’ in Ryder (1986: 76). Plumb stresses that the ‘diversity of Ryder demands, in effect, that the reader achieve a balance, or understanding, through the complexity of Ryder’s surface’ (1986: 89). I follow this emphasis on surface and multiplicity while suggesting the text requires not so much the ‘interpreting intelligence’ that Plumb describes but a mode of understanding based on affective identifications (1986: 89). 4. In Fielding’s novel, it is (wrongly) speculated that Tom’s mother, Jenny, became pregnant by her tutor. In the course of the novel the ‘mystery’ of Tom’s parentage is of course solved, as opposed to Ryder where no final answer is given. See below for a discussion of which text of 1928 (Ryder or Ladies Almanack) Barnes was alluding to in her comments about Tom Jones. 5. Barnes of course actually grew up in upstate New York, not Connecticut. 6. Caselli also acknowledges the focus on multiplicity in Ryder – and connects it to the novel’s intertextuality – although she sees this as a form of collusion with the politics its critiques, in particular with the over-proliferation of the enormously procreative Ryder: In a text in which the family stands for patriarchal control and out-ofcontrol proliferation, language is not a joyous celebration of the past or a reverentially innovative act towards literary history; it is an illegitimate resuscitation, an adulteration that by exposing itself as such wants not to escape travesty and establish legitimacy, but reflect on the impossibility of stepping out of it. (2009: 205) In contrast to Caselli’s focus on illegitimacy, adulteration and travesty, I understand Ryder’s relationship with literary history as more ‘generative’ (although through a temporal logic that defies the teleology and reproductive normativity implied by this term). 7. The possibility of a non-Freudian approach to dream texts is also suggested by Edmunds’s consideration of the ‘repeated, figurative use of the narrative of a young girl’s sexual violation’ that she reads in Julie’s dream (2008: 63). 8. Implicit in my critique of the Freudian approach to dream narratives in Ryder is a distinction between the models of the psyche and dreaming suggested by the Freudian tradition and those to be found in psychoanalysis following the Winnicottian/Kleinian object relations school. The psychic models elaborated in the object relations psychoanalyses of Christoher Bollas, Wilfred Bion and Michael Eigen, for example, are on the whole much more amenable to my reading. Christopher Bollas, who teaches us the importance of considering the operational intelligence of the dream

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9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

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and its ‘idiom of care’ towards the ‘I’ within the dream, suggests that the ‘Poirot’-like work of Freud has limited attempts ‘to be inside the complexity of subjectivity by concentrating attention on the identifiable samples of psychic life: the symptom, the obvious character trait, the narrated history’ (1993: 49). James Scott and Cheryl Plumb have both observed that the ‘Fourth Great Moment of History’ in Ladies Almanack follows the three ‘Great Moments of History’ related in Ryder. Stevenson understands Ryder as a feminist ‘countertext’ to the maleauthored Tom Jones (1999: 82). In addition to the possibilities that Barnes was comparing either Evangeline Musset or Wendell Ryder to Tom Jones, she could also be referring to Sophia or Julie Ryder as female versions of Fielding’s hero, or simply alluding to Tom Jones as an example of the picaresque tradition she draws upon in either/both of her 1928 texts. For Edmunds, Wendell and Sophia are grotesque parodies of mid-nineteenth century sentimental activists and social experimenters. Diane Warren writes that Sophia’s will is ‘at once radical and conservative’ because while she expresses her desire to be buried in a sexually intimate pose she does so in ‘the clichéd language of sentimental fiction’ (52). I would suggest that such a tension is already present within sentimental fiction itself. For an extensive discussion of the affective ambivalence of shame in relation to Nightwood, see Chapter 3.

Chapter 3 1. See, for example, Clark (1991: 11–12). 2. While agreeing with van Alphen’s premise that the experience of reading Nightwood is an affective one I would challenge his distinction between the ‘imaginative’ acts of hearing and seeing and the ‘bodily’ experience of pain. Both hearing and seeing are embodied acts that involve localisation in the eyes and the ears. For a discussion of Barnes’s emphasis on the embodied nature of reading, with reference to Ladies Almanack, see Chapter 4. 3. Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) was, famously, one of Djuna Barnes’s favourite books. 4. Cheryl Plumb’s 1995 edition of Barnes’s novel, Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts is based on the typescript of the first edition, which exists as a ribbon copy and two carbons, the second of which (TSC2) has been adopted as copy-text. The typescripts used for Plumb’s edition represent a version of the text before significant cuts were made by Barnes’s editors, T. S. Eliot and Frank Morely. See Plumb’s ‘Introduction’ to the ‘Textual Apparatus’ section of the edition for more information on editorial procedure (1995: 143–51). 5. In her pathbreaking ‘Laughing at Leviticus’ (1991), Marcus reads Nightwood as a study of abjection. Marcus understands this abjection not as a pathology in the Kristevan sense, but rather within the political context of the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe and in the context of Freudian sexual fascism. Karen Kaivola (1993) emphasises the association with degeneracy

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6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

Notes of the Blacks and Jews represented in Nightwood and contrasts this with what she sees as a more positive representation of lesbianism. Kaivola argues that, in contrast to her treatment of other Others, Barnes eroticises rather than essentialises lesbian sexuality. In her essay on Jewishness in Nightwood, Lara Trubowitz (2005) understands the trope of ‘going down’ in relation to decay, linking the doctor’s apparent physical deterioration throughout the novel to a breakdown in narrative. Similarly, Caroline Rupprecht claims that the novel is organised around ‘the idea of physical decay’ (2006: 102). Dana Seitler connects ‘going down’ with bestial devolution, arguing that Barnes’s ‘human–beast hybrids’ reflect the fascination with and fear of modern sexual perversity in ‘the discourses of evolutionism, degeneration theory, and sexology’ (2001: 526). Julia Kristeva hints at the subject’s possible mixed feelings about her state of abjection through the concept of jouissance: ‘jouissance alone causes the affect to exist as such. One does not know it, one does not desire it, one joys in it [on en juit]. Violently and painfully. A passion’ (1982: 9). However, the possible jouissance of abjection has not been fully explored by those writing on Nightwood, and while the abject exists, for Kristeva, as a ‘twisted braid of affects and thoughts’, these affects are, broadly speaking, understood to stem from what the self is, rather than to make self (1982: 1). As I suggest in my Introduction, Tomkins’s understanding of the relationship between affect and object differs from Freud’s. For Tomkins, all affects are only loosely bound to specific objects, and any affect may find an object to which it can attach itself. For Freud, drives take precedence and so affects emerge in relation to objects. In a letter of 27 August 1937 Emily Coleman told Barnes that she found Felix’s prominence in Nightwood detrimental to the novel. In a letter to Natalie Barney, Barnes complains about what she (sometimes) regarded as the impertinence of academic interest in her work: ‘K, Burke being rediculous [sic] on Nightwood; idiot children working on PhD’s, Who’s Who and dictionarys [sic], requests from colleges, and platforms, and all the time, not a soul really cares a damn’ (28 March 1967). The deleted phrase occurs in the typescripts, yet is marked for deletion in TS1 and TS2-B. Plumb explains that on TSC1 the phrase is bracketed by blue pencil, ‘likely Eliot’s’ and was ‘undoubtedly deleted because of censorship fears’ (Nightwood: The Original Version, 201). With the ‘nest’ into which the doctor may lay his ‘lost eggs’ Barnes suggests the stomach as a kind of phantom uterus and ingestion as a form of reproduction. This notion of homosexuality as a hopeless, sterile replication of pregnancy may be read as further evidence of the constituent role of shame in O’Connor’s queer identity (see below) or, less optimistically, as an example of Barnes’s homophobia. Indeed, the two readings may not be mutually exclusive. The image of O’Connor’s ‘lost eggs’ relates to the equally problematic one of the doll Nora gives to Robin which represents ‘the life they cannot have, it is their child, sacred and profane’ (Nightwood, 128). For instance, Nora says of Robin: ‘She is myself. What am I to do?’ (Nightwood, 115). For a reading that addresses the issue of lesbianism and narcissism in the novel, see Rupprecht (2006).

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12. This expurgated section covers three pages at the end of ‘Bow Down’ in Plumb’s Dalkey Archive edition (1995). 13. In Plumb’s ‘restored’ edition the phrase is more explicit: ‘I took out Tiny O’Toole’ (Nightwood: The Original Version, 111, my emphasis). 14. As I suggest in Chapter 4, Barnes’s Ladies Almanack suggests the possibility of pleasures of excess without shame. 15. Barnes describes O’Connor’s language as ‘common to men who “camp” ’ in an undated letter to Louis Gallentière. 16. Those emphasising hegemonic and chauvinistic traits in Nightwood have included Erin Carlston (1998), who discusses Barnes’s ‘failed flirtation’ with fascism, and Lillian Faderman, who criticises Barnes’s homophobic representations of ‘insane passion and degradation and doll games and roles’ (1986: 364–5). Those stressing the subversive potential of Barnes’s novel have included Jane Marcus and, more recently, Carrie Rohman, who argues that Nightwood ‘refuses the displacement of animality onto marginalized others in the service of imperialist and masculinist projections’ (2007: 57). Merrill Cole’s Lacanian reading argues that Nightwood ‘foists upon its reader a set of propositions about same-sex love that could be understood as some of the most wretchedly homophobic in the canon of modernist literature’ but argues that Barnes deploys homophobia, racism and misogyny as a means of apprehending the uncanny while refusing to make it bearable and ascribe it a place (2006: 391). 17. The notion that this communal element might be somehow reparative is suggested in the excised portion of this scene, discussed above, which describes the girls’ sexual pleasure. Equally, my understanding that this strange pleasure ‘volts forth’ to the reader underlines how she too participates in the scene of shame as a ‘form of sociality’. 18. Tomkins argues that there is a clear difference between shame and disgust or contempt, even when it is directed towards the self. Unlike shame, contempt/disgust and self-contempt/self-disgust do not contain traces of positive affect. Shame is more complex because, unlike self-disgust, it does not involve repudiation or splitting of the self that provoked the bad feeling. ‘Even when the self becomes the object of disgust’, Tomkins writes, ‘there is a minimum of self-consciousness of the self as subject. Indeed the distinction between shame and the other affects is nowhere clearer than when one compares shame with self-disgust, in which the self splits itself into subject and object’ (2008: II, 360). 19. Sedgwick discusses the ‘transformational grammar of “shame on you” ’ (2003: 61). 20. Plumb explains: ‘This passage was enclosed in red pencil parentheses, presumably by Morely for discussion. A red delete mark is in the red margin, and a blue pencilled question mark, presumably Eliot’s, is in the right margin. Beneath the blue question mark is the phrase “might better be out?” This comment appears to be Barnes’s. However, the passage is retained as it was certainly a matter of softening what both editors saw as material that might raise the censor’ (Nightwood: The Original Version, 197). 21. Plumb explains: ‘On TSC1, this passage was marked for deletion. Coleman wrote to Barnes that she had “taken out” this section because there were

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22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

Notes too many stories of the doctor [. . .]. Barnes responded that she had not taken the pasages [sic] out, that she would wait until Eliot decided. On 12 August, he wrote that he preferred “the shorter version.” Barnes’s concurrence does not appear then to be a matter of preference’ (Nightwood: The Original Version, 202). Using Sedgwick’s notion of ‘ressentimentality’, a structure in which sentimentality overlaps with ressentiment and which, Sedgwick claims, represents modern emotion in Nietzsche’s thought, Caselli argues that Nightwood’s ‘anti-sentimentality is also surrounded, tainted, and infected by the sentimental’ (Caselli, 2009: 176). Caselli relates Barnes’s inclusion of the denigrated sentimental to her argument that, in Nightwood, ‘the derogatory is never used as such’: ‘Nightwood sabotages the very possibility of holding an external perspective, and thus renders impossible either the knowingly well-meant rehabilitation of sentimentality (under the aegis of kitsch or camp) or its complete expulsion’ (2009: 184). More problematically, the other reasons Faltejskova gives for Eliot’s ‘not entirely professional’ editing of Nightwood are his ‘fear of women’ and ‘possibly his unresolved homosexual feelings’ (2010: 10). Faltejskova risks pathologising Eliot in her speculations about his ‘unease about women [due] to the relationship with his mother’ and his ‘possible sexual neurasthenia and physical revulsion from the female body’ caused by his marriage with Vivienne (2010: 76). This comment is reported by Virginia Woolf in her diary on 26 September 1922 (1977–84: II, 203). Many contemporary reviewers and early critics read the novel through Eliot’s authoritative, if somewhat sanitising introduction, often engaging with his words as much as with the text itself. Desmond Hawkins, for example, expresses his gratitude for Eliot’s ‘celebrated WARNING sign to make clear the right and wrong ways of reading Miss Barnes’s novel’. With Eliot’s permission, Hawkins can ignore the ‘lesbian love affair – to my mind the most boring subject on earth’ – and appreciate the novel’s poetry and metaphysical consideration of ‘the natural corrupt condition of mankind’ (1937: 51). Mark van Doren in The Southern Review (1937) also reads Nightwood in direct relation to Eliot’s introduction. It would seem that T. S. Eliot and Frank Morley were in general agreement about the kind of cuts that Nightwood needed. Plumb cites an observation in Emily Coleman’s diary of ‘E[liot] and M[orely] like brothers, conspiring’ (Nightwood: The Original Version, 1995: xxii). A line in which Nora puts her hands on ‘the upper parts of her legs’ was removed, along with the concluding phrase (referring to the dog whose head is along Robin’s knees) ‘and waiting’ (Nightwood: The Original Version, 210). In her most recent book, Kathryn Bond Stockton indeed discusses ‘The Possessed’, arguing that Robin is a queer child who enters into an ‘interval of animal’ in this final scene (2009: 94). Stockton imagines animal/child bondings in Nightwood as an outlet for the feelings that girls attracted to girls long to express. The dog here is ‘a witness, confidante, rebel, protector, and pretend lover’ which allows the girls to ‘run a gamut of emotions’, and also ‘a figure for the child herself, growing aside from the concept of a

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future altogether, since animals do not grow in human generations’ (2009: 53).

Chapter 4 1. Barnes’s contemporaries and recent critics have decoded Musset as Barney. While there is clear justification for this – Musset’s ‘Temple of Love’, for example, seems to refer to Barney’s ‘Temple d’Amitié’ – Barnes herself responded angrily to the impudence of such speculation. In a letter to Fabienne Benedict (the daughter of Mina Loy, who is often taken as inspiration for the Almanack’s Patience Scalpel), Barnes complains about the inaccuracies of George Wickes’s ‘rediculous’ [sic] book on Barney, insisting that she never ‘gave anyone authority to say that the Ladies Almanack was based on Miss Barney – including Miss Barney’ (29 December 1976). 2. Carrie Hamilton offers a convincing critique of Eagleton’s position: The recounting of happy memories need not involve a denial of oppression, or a ‘moving beyond’ or ‘letting go’ of the past. Nor do memories of past oppression necessarily prelude the recollection of happiness and hope in ways that may engender strength and signal agency. Rather than disabling change, such memories may act as an ingredient in formulating alternative futures. Far from being the prerogative of the privileged, happy memories may be especially important in sustaining political projects of the oppressed. (2007/2008: 67) 3. Barnes’s most cited comment about her sexuality is the ambiguous ‘I’m not a lesbian, I just loved Thelma’ (Field, 1983: 37). With reference to the Almanack, Barnes writes to Du Sautoy on 13 September 1969: ‘I should like it to be noted that I have now no great liking for Ryder as a whole, nor for the Ladies Almanack as wrenched from the formal former intention of being a privately printed matter for more or less frivolous consumption.’ However, in a letter written to Barney just two years earlier, Barnes casts the text’s apparently private and trivial nature in a different light: ‘The Almanack? that is in the private domaine [sic]; privately printed, written as a jollity, and distributed to a very special audience’ (3 December 1967). It seems that even the older Barnes could regard ‘frivolous consumption’ as an affectively positive activity (‘a jollity’). 4. While Jay claims that the women ‘preferred to ignore’ this apparently venomous side, she suggests possible hidden antagonisms, writing that Solita Solano, like Barney, ‘also reacted positively (in public at least)’ (1991: 186). Jay’s parenthetic implication of private displeasure is unsubstantiated in her article. 5. Karen Littau notes the emphasis by critics such as Laura Mulvey on the agency of the female reader in resisting the pleasures of the andocentric text. In such instances, pleasure for the feminist reader is a confirmation of agency, a negative pleasure in so far as it is realized in the distance from the text required, in order to recognize its ideological

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Notes traps without falling victim to them. Or, to put this differently, the negation in this pleasure is the negation of everything sensible and affective, in favour of alerting the mind to capabilities beyond such enjoyable traps. (2006: 137)

6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

While Ladies Almanack is anything but ‘androcentric’, I wonder if a similar negation of ‘everything sensible and affective’ governs some feminists’ readings, making possible Jay’s understanding of it as a ‘biting’ and ‘vicious’ satire. The negative slant of Freud’s ‘pleasure principle’ is also highlighted in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s comparison between the Freudian and Kleinian positions on the distinction between seeking pleasure and forestalling pain. While Freud ‘subsumes pleasure seeking and pain avoidance together under the rubric of the supposedly primordial “pleasure principle” ’, Klein distinguishes the two as characteristics of the ‘paranoid’ and ‘depressive’ (‘reparative’) positions respectively (Sedgwick, 2003: 137). As my use of Winnicott in this chapter suggests, it would seem that object relations psychoanalysis offers especially helpful paradigms for those wishing to take positive affect seriously. Caselli critiques ‘identificatory and revelatory readings’ of the text, which ‘fail to register the text’s ambivalence towards the coterie and its linguistic “thickness”; in such readings identification and revelation are non-interpretative activities, aligned with pleasure and opposed to meaning, thus resulting in not reading the text but reading beyond it or behind it to find out about an outside text’ (2009: 57). I would suggest that this argument is based on the understanding that pleasure is necessarily more simplistic than interpretation. I am interested in how being pleased might itself create meaning, rather than sit in opposition with it. While Caselli borrows the fort-da model she acknowledges its possible inappropriateness ‘to a text focused on the politics of representing the lesbian community’ (2009: 65). Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank discuss Silvan Tomkins’s listing, and its pleasures, in their co-authored essay in Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling (2003: 96–7, 105–6). Indeed, the elision between clothing and bodies is evident in the name ‘Tweed-in-Blood’. In some English translations of Barthes the terms ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ are used to denote the author’s two orders of pleasure. While attempting to trouble the opposition between such terms, I use the term ‘readerly pleasure’ simply to describe an exclusively positive (though not necessarily uncomplicated) affective experience for any reader. Barnes refers to the ladies of the Almanack as ‘noviates’ and (in inverted commas) ‘saints’ and ‘priestesses’ in her Foreword, written for the 1972 reprint of Ladies Almanack (87). Musset’s death is of course described again in the December section. Tyrus Miller has pointed out that ‘the overwhelming majority of the truly arcane words – words for which the typical reader must appeal to the wisdom of the Oxford English Dictionary – refer to items of clothing or fabrics’ (1999: 141). Miller offers a quite different reading of the

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Notes

15. 16.

17.

18.

201

significance of fashion in Ladies Almanack, linking it not to pleasure but to what he sees as the text’s emphasis on the problem of emphemerality. This connection between literary endeavour and the activity of shopping is reflected in the presence of numerous documents within Barnes’s archives that are both drafts of poems and shopping lists. When discussing the ‘New is bliss’ Barthes notes parenthetically: ‘(Freud: “In the adult, novelty always constitutes the condition for orgasm”)’ (1975: 40–1). As I suggest below, the fleeting ‘bliss’ of orgasm is not necessarily the primary pleasure for Barnes and her ‘ladies’. Laura L. Behling sees Musset’s fantasy as ‘destruction of lesbian sexuality by fragmentation’ (1999: 515). What Behling understands as ‘torturous fragmentation of the lesbian’s body’ (1999: 518), I am inclined to view with less suspicion. In her critique of the ‘promise’ of happiness, Ahmed notes that, in classical understandings in and contemporary nostalgia for the good life, ‘happiness is located in certain places, as being what you get for being a certain kind of being’ (2007/2008: 11). Claire Colebrook writes that human happiness is understood as being ‘tied inextricably to narrative, to a sense of one’s life as a whole and to the subordination of pleasure and animality to selfdefinition’ (2007/2008: 82).

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Index

Abel, Lionel, 54 abjection, 115, 195–6n5 vis-à-vis shame, 124 Abraham, Julie L., 33 absence, 78–81 affect, 1, 35, 74, 83, 85, 87, 95, 104–6, 110–11, 113, 137, 182–3 affective reading practices, 75, 86 ‘affective turn’ in theory, 146, 186–7n25 ambivalence of affects, 1, 33–5, 73, 76, 88, 93–5, 100–3, 108–9, 121, 124, 182 and the body, 13, 16–17, 88, 95, 107, 114, 183 and depersonalisation, 14–17, 104 vis-à-vis drives, 20–1 vis-à-vis emotion, 18–19 and modernism, 136; see also emotion: and modernism and its objects, 21, 196n7 particularity of affects, 20 and politics, 151 see also emotion Ahmed, Sara, 18, 95, 143, 146–8, 164, 186n24, 189n3, 201n18 Alcoff, Linda and Laura Gray, 45 Allen, Carolyn, 21 Altman, Meryl, 49, 57–8, 67 ambivalence, 74 of affects, 1, 33–5, 73, 76, 88, 93–5, 100–3, 108–9, 121, 124, 182 of shame, 113, 140, 142–3 and trauma, 37–8 anachronism, 28, 37 Anderson, Ellen M., 84 Antiphon, The, 28, 34, 36–73, 78 biographical readings of, 6

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as closet drama, 54 and poetry/drama distinction, 54–5 productions of, 45, 191n15, 192n27 and public/private distinction, 54–6 and repetition, 64–6 and ritual, 56–60 textual history of, 4–5, 38, 42–4, 46–7, 51–2, 63, 189n1, 189–90n7, 190n13, 191n17, 191–2n18, 192n21, 192n22, 192n23, 192n24 and theatricality, 36–7, 49, 51, 55–6 and trauma, 7, 36–73 antiphony, 37, 40, 59, 67–70, 72 anti-theatricalism, 49–50, 54 Armstrong, Tim, 22–3 auto/biography, 5, 76–7, 80–3, 194n2 biographical reading, 6–8, 74, 77–9, 81–2, 86–8 see also biographical readings of individual texts Bakhtin, Mikhail, 90–1 Barnes, Djuna archive, 4, 42, 137, 165, 184n6, 201n15 career as journalist, 12–13, 38 critical history, 4 early life, 6, 194n2 homophobia of, 184n5 and lesbian expatriate community in Paris, 145, 150 and lesbianism, 184n5, 199n3 maternal ancestral home, 189n2 and modernist historiography, 3 and patronage, 189n4 persona in later correspondence, 118 and psychoanalysis, 23

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Index

Barnes, Djuna (cont.) relationship with Eliot and Muir, 42–3, 190n9 relationship with Thelma Wood, 185n7, 199n3 sexual abuse/injury, 6, 38 see also separate entries for works Barnes, Elizabeth, 103 Barnes, Wald, 7, 88 Barney, Natalie Clifford, 91, 145, 150–1, 185n7, 199n1 Barthes, Roland, 145–8, 156–8, 170, 173, 177–8, 180, 201n16 bawdiness, 162–3 Bay-Cheng, Sarah, 54–5, 67, 189n6, 192–3n28 Beard, George M., 29 Behling, Laura L., 201n17 Bennett, Jill, 50, 86, 99, 105–8 Benstock, Shari, 3, 115, 185n7 Bergk, Johann Adam, 167 Berni, Christine, 151 Bersani, Leo, 25, 161 besideness, 74–7, 83–5, 87–8, 92–5, 182 body, 76, 87, 90–1, 111 and affect, 13, 16–17, 88, 95, 107, 114, 183 functions/processes, 89–90 grotesque, 89–91 and memory, 16 and modernism, 23, 187n31 and pleasure, 164, 175–6 and reading, 1, 146, 164–7, 183, 195n2 and shame, 114, 133 the text as, 113 and witnessing, 70–1 Bollas, Christopher, 194–5n8 Broe, Mary Lynn, 3, 7, 42 Brown, Laura S., 30 Brown, Wendy, 31, 39–40 Burgess, Susan, 133 Butler, Judith, 66, 115 camp, 122–4, 129 Carlston, Erin, 197n16 Caruth, Cathy, 2, 8, 10–11, 30–3, 60, 67, 184n2 Caselli, Daniela, 4, 7–8, 10, 12, 22, 33, 42, 54, 65–6, 96–7, 136, 151–2, 169, 185n13, 187n30, 193n31, 194n6, 198n22, 200n7, 200n8 Cather, Willa, 25

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censorship and Nightwood, 140 and Ryder, 79–80 Clark, Suzanne, 26, 76, 111, 113, 136, 143–4 closet, 132, 140 Clough, Patricia T., 11 Cole, Merrill, 197n16 Colebrook, Claire, 201n18 Coleman, Emily, 8, 117, 137, 140, 197–8n21 commodity culture, 100, 168 and happiness, 175–6 Cotsell, Michael, 48 Curry, Linda, 42–5, 56, 190n12 Cvetkovich, Ann, 8, 29, 34, 48–9, 55, 61–3, 185n12, 187n28, 188n40 Dalton, Anne B., 77–9, 83, 96, 98, 102, 105–6 Das, Veena, 106 De Lauretis, Teresa, 20, 112 Del Favero, Dennis, 108–9 Deleuze, Gilles, 105, 186n25 depersonalisation, 13 and affect, 14–17, 104 DeSalvo, Louise, 41–2, 61, 189n4, 193n35 Detloff, Madelyn, 29 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (APA), 30 Doll’s House, A (Ibsen), 41 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 83–4 Douglas, Ann, 100 drag, 83, 124 dreams, 85–6, 95 Eagleton, Terry, 149 Eberhardt, Richard, 54 Edmunds, Susan, 26, 78–9, 83, 97, 194n7, 195n11 Eigen, Michael, 108 Eliot, T. S., 5–6, 13, 24, 28, 42–3, 56–7, 136, 138–44, 184n5, 184n6, 190n9, 190n12, 198n23, 198n25, 198n26 Ellmann, Maud, 6 Ellmann, Richard and Charles Feidelson, 25 emotion, 18, 95, 143 vis-à-vis affect, 18–19 and modernism, 24, 143–4 as sensation or as form of cognition, 18, 186n24

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Index Eribon, Didier, 130, 132 Ernest Linwood (Hentz), 96, 104 eroticism, 101–3, 159–60; see also pleasure: sexual Espley, Richard, 61–2 excess, 123, 152–7, 181 Faderman, Lillian, 197n16 Faltejskova, Monika, 4, 136, 140, 190n9, 198n23 Farfan, Penny, 193n35 fashion, 167, 171 vintage, 168, 171–2 Feldman, Jessica R., 3, 26 Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub, 34, 50, 60, 67, 69–70 Felski, Rita, 3, 187n32 female spectacularity, 13, 186–7n17 feminism, 79, 190n10 and modernism, 3 and pleasure, 199–200n5 Field, Andrew, 6–8, 91 Flanner, Janet, 150 Flatley, Jonathan, 19 Freedman, Ariela, 29 Freeman, Elizabeth, 146, 182, 188n36 Freidman, Susan Stanford, 30 Freud, Sigmund, 2, 10, 20, 60, 84–5, 152, 184n2, 186n23, 195–6n8, 196n7, 200n6, 201n16; see also psychoanalysis Fuchs, Miriam, 138–9, 141 Galvin, Mary E., 3, 8 Garber, Marjorie, 131 Gernet, Louis, 68 Gerstenberger, Donna, 55, 139–40, 184n4 Gilmore, Leigh, 124 Goodspeed-Chadwyck, Julie, 29 Goody, Alex, 4, 17, 192n20 Gothic and modernism, 3 and Nightwood, 136–8, 142 Green, Barbara, 185–6n17 Gregg, Melissa and Gregory J. Seigworth, 186–7n25 Grobbel, Michaela, 188n41 Grossberg, Lawrence, 19 Gustafson, Zadel, 7, 81 Haaken, Janice, 41, 45, 50 Hamilton, Carrie, 149, 199n2

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217

happiness, 35, 145–81 and commodity culture, 175–6, 180 and fleetingness, 177–8 ‘happiness industry’, 146 and Ladies Almanack, 145–81 and materiality, 153, 157, 159, 167–8, 180 and performativity, 149, 172, 174–7 and the present tense, 150, 170, 172, 177–80 and sociality, 163–4 theorisations of, 146 and ubiquity, 157–8, 168, 181 vocabulary surrounding, 147–9 see also pleasure Harrie, Ivar, 45–6 Hawkins, Desmond, 198n25 Hendler, Glenn, 99, 104 Herman, Judith Lewis, 41 Herring, Philip, 7, 78, 137 history, 33, 175, 182, 183 and pleasure, 173–5 and shame, 135–6 Holocaust, 31 homophobia, 131, 134–5, 137, 150, 196n10 Horner, Avril, 137–8, 142 ‘How It Feels To Be Forcibly Fed’, 13, 17 Hulme, T. E., 23 hysteria, 45 identification, 17, 53–4, 96, 103–6, 126, 129, 130 impersonality, 11, 13 incest, 7, 41, 45, 88–9, 103, 189n5 insult, 130–1, 135 intertextuality, 1, 28, 64–6, 74, 76, 96, 109, 136, 149 interviews, 12 and hermeneutics, 12, 185n15 intimacy, 129 Jameson, Fredric, 168 Janet, Pierre, 9 Jay, Karla, 150, 199n4 ‘Jess Willard Says Girls Will Be Boxing for a Living Soon’, 13 Jewishness, 30 Jolas, Eugene, 92 Jonsson, AnnKatrin, 21–2 jouissance, 119, 147–8, 156, 160–2, 177, 196n6

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Index

Kalaidjian, Walter, 29–30, 47, 188n39, 192n19 Kannenstine, Louis F., 4, 57, 64–5, 96, 122–3, 150 Kaplan, E. Ann, 29, 31 Kermode, Frank and Robert Langbaum, 25 Kerrigan, John, 53 Klein, Melanie, 75, 200n6 Kristeva, Julia, 31, 196n6 Kuniar, Alice A., 142 ‘Kurzy of the Sea’, 66 LaCapra, Dominick, 31–2, 185n14 Ladies Almanack, 28, 35, 66, 76, 88, 91–5, 145–81 and the almanac form, 172–3 and happiness, 145–81 as a material object, 145–6, 165 Lanser, Susan Sniader, 150–1, 156 laughter, 88, 90–1 Levenson, Michael, 25 Levine, Nancy J., 12 Lewis, Wyndham, 24 Leys, Ruth, 31 Linnet, Maren Tova, 30 Littau, Karen, 165, 167, 199–200n5 Little Women (Alcott), 96, 98, 104 ‘Lou Tellegen on Morals and Things’, 12 Love, Heather, 27–8, 188n36 ‘Love Song’, 10 MacIntire, Gabrielle, 27 ‘Madame Collects Herself’, 15–16 Marcus, Jane, 122–3, 195–6n5 Martin, Ann, 83 Mass, 56–7 Massumi, Brian, 1, 19 melancholy, 151, 153 Messerli, Douglas, 12 meta-fiction, 49, 51–2 Miller, Tyrus, 3, 13–14, 29, 85, 184n4, 200–1n14 modernism, 3, 5, 138, 183 and affect, 136 and the body, 23, 187n31 as break from nineteenth-century, 24–6 and continuities with nineteenthcentury, 25–6 and ‘difficulty’, 137, 167–8 and emotion, 24, 143–4 and feminism, 3

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and the Gothic, 3 and the nineteenth century, 2 and queer theory, 3 and queerness, 26–8 and sentimentalism, 2–3, 22–3, 26, 76, 97, 111, 143 and temporality, 27 and women, 22–3 Morley, Frank, 140, 198n26 Muir, Edwin, 42–3, 52, 139, 190n11 ‘My Adventures Being Rescued’, 13 Newton, Esther, 131 Ngai, Sianne, 18–19 Nieland, Justus, 15, 26–7 Nightwood, 1, 20, 22, 28–9, 34, 110–44 biographical readings of, 6 and censorship, 140 and the Gothic, 136–8, 142 and melancholia, 21 and the nineteenth-century novel, 136–7, 141 and shame, 110–44 textual history of, 3, 128, 133, 138, 140, 190n9, 195n4, 197n20, 197–8n21, 198n26, 198n27 Noble, Marianne, 101–2 non-dichotomous difference, 2, 34, 40, 76, 112, 137, 149 vis-à-vis trauma, 35 nostalgia, 33 novelty, 172 and pleasure, 170–1 O’Neal, Hank, 184n5 Orlando (Woolf), 80 pain, 71–2, 102 Paris, 138 parody, 92 Parsons, Deborah, 4, 112, 186n23, 187n29, 193n34 passion, 136–7 ‘Passion Play, A’, 66 ‘Perfect Murder, The’, 32–3 performativity, 5, 33, 66 and happiness, 149, 172, 174–7 ‘Personal God, The’, 182–3 Phelan, Peggy, 9 picaresque, 83–4, 88–9 pleasure, 102 and the body, 164, 175–6 and feminism, 199–200n

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Index and history, 173–5 and modernity, 173 and novelty, 170–1 and queerness, 174 sexual, 158–9 see also happiness Plumb, Cheryl, 4, 17, 91–2, 115, 127–8, 140, 185n22, 190n9, 194n3, 195n4, 196n10, 197n20, 197–8n21 polygyny, 91 Ponsot, Marie, 78–9 Pound, Ezra, 6, 23–5, 143 Provincetown Players, 12 psychoanalysis, 86, 186n23, 194–5n8, 200n6 in Freudian tradition, 84–5, 194–5n8 see also Freud PTSD, 8, 30, 32; see also trauma Puchner, Martin, 50 queerness, 5, 34, 76, 129, 134 and backwardness, 188n36 and modernism/modernity, 26–8 and negativity, 147 and pleasure, 174 queer theory, 3 reading affective, 75, 86 and embodiment, 1, 146, 164–7, 183, 195n2 paranoid/reparative, 75 ressentiment, 39, 40, 52, 198n2 revenge tragedy, 40, 52–3 Rich, Adrienne, 159–60 Rise of Silas Lapham, The (Howells), 97 Rohman, Carrie, 197n16 Rupprecht, Caroline, 196n5 Ryder, 23, 28, 34, 66, 74–109, 111, 174 biographical readings of, 6, 74, 77–9, 81–2, 88 and censorship, 79–80 and sentimentalism, 95–107 and trauma, 7, 74, 76, 86, 96, 99–100, 105–9 Scott, Bonnie Kime, 3, 69, 184n3 Scott, James B., 4, 33, 66, 96, 150, 191n14, 193n34 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 19–21, 33, 74–5, 112, 115, 123, 126, 129–32,

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187n26, 187n27, 187n28, 197n19, 198n22, 200n6, 200n9 Segel, Harold, 23 Seitler, Dana, 196n6 Seltzer, Mark, 31, 39 sentimentalism, 17, 28, 34, 74, 76 death scenes, 95–6, 98, 100–1, 107 and modernism, 2–3, 22–3, 26, 76, 97, 111, 143 and Ryder, 95–107 Seremetakis, C. Nadia, 37, 58–9, 67–70 sexual abuse, 7, 39, 41–2, 62–3, 78, 108–9; see also incest sexuality, 92 and sociality, 164 shame, 23, 34, 102 vis-à-vis abjection, 124 ambivalence of, 113, 140, 142–3 and beauty/aesthetic pleasure, 122–3 and the body, 114, 133 and communication/community, 125–30 vis-à-vis disgust, 197n18 and history, 135–6 and individuation, 130 and Nightwood, 110–44 physical pose of, 114–17, 133 vis-à-vis pride, 112–13, 130, 132–5 and sexual pleasure, 118–21 and skin, 114, 126 and speech acts, 130 and theatricality, 131–2 and trauma, 130–1, 134 Smith, Victoria L., 21, 111–12 Snediker, Michael D., 146–8, 150, 161–2, 177–8 Solano, Solita, 150 Stevenson, Sheryl, 91, 195n10 Stockton, Kathryn Bond, 112, 123, 125–6, 143, 198–9n28 subjectivity, 17, 76, 95, 98, 104–6, 112 suffragist movement, 13, 17, 185–6n17 ‘Surcease in Hurry and Whirl – On the Restless Surf at Coney’, 14–15 sympathy, 104–5 tattoos, 123–4, 126 Terada, Rei, 18–19 testimony, 9, 67; see also witnessing ‘Three from the Earth’, 49, 66 Tom Jones (Fielding), 81, 89, 91, 194n4, 195n10

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Index

Tomkins, Silvan S., 19–21, 85–6, 102–3, 108, 110–13, 114–18, 125–9, 132, 186n25, 187n26, 196n7, 197n18 Tompkins, Jane, 97 touch, 106–7, 143 trauma, 2, 32, 47–8, 74, 76, 96, 105–7, 109, 184n1, 185n13 and ambivalence, 37–8 and The Antiphon, 7, 36–73 and belatedness, 2, 184n2 childhood, 76, 108 and Djuna Barnes’s biography, 7–8 expansion of definition, 30, 32 and memory, 86 and modernism, 29–30 and modernist intertextuality, 28 and modernity, 29 and narrative obscurity, 47 and non-dichotomous difference, 35 and pathology, 8 performative structure of response, 2, 8, 33–4, 36–7, 46, 49–50, 96, 109 personal, 31 and poststructuralism, 11 and queer theory, 48 and repetition, 10, 33, 36, 60–4 and ritual, 62–3, 102 and Ryder, 7, 74, 76, 86, 96, 99–100, 105–9 sexual, 9, 41, 46 and shame, 130–1, 134 ‘trauma culture’, 31; see also wound culture see also PTSD

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Trubowitz, Lara, 196n Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 98–101, 104 Van Alphen, Ernst, 21, 111, 195n2 Van der Kolk, Bessel, and Onno van der Hart, 9 Van Doren, Mark, 198n25 victimhood, 38–41, 53 victim/perpetrator dichotomy, 36, 42, 53–4, 63, 98–9 Walker, Julia A., 54, 56–7 Warren, Diane, 4, 195n12 ‘The Washington Square Players’, 16 What Katy Did (Coolidge), 104–5 ‘When the Puppets Come to Town’, 14 Wilson, Deborah, 137 Winnicott, D. W., 35, 176–7 witnessing, 5, 8–10, 28, 34, 65–72, 74, 76, 96 and the body, 70–1 see also testimony; trauma: performative structure of response Women Beware Women (Middleton), 52–3 Wood, Thelma, 185n7 Woolf, Virginia, 25; see also Orlando World War I, 29, 30, 188n38 wounds, 1, 9–11, 107, 189n3 ‘wound culture’, 38–9 Wuthering Heights (Brontë), 137

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