Nomadic Modernisms and Diasporic Journeys of Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles : Two Very Serious Ladies [1 ed.] 9789004314436, 9789004314429

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Nomadic Modernisms and Diasporic Journeys of Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles

Literary Modernism Series Editor Gernot Wimmer (University of Sofia, Bulgaria) Editorial Board Prof. William Egginton ( Johns Hopkins Krieger School of Arts & Sciences, usa) Prof. Patrick Fortmann (University of Illinois, usa) Dr. Cindy K. Renker (University of North Texas, usa) Prof. Simonetta Sanna (Università degli Studi di Sassari, Italy) Prof. Andrew J. Webber (Churchill College, uk)

Volume 1

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/limo

Nomadic Modernisms and Diasporic Journeys of Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles “Two Very Serious Ladies” By

Pavlina Radia

LEIDEN | BOSTON

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016029176

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2405-9315 isbn 978-90-04-31442-9 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-31443-6 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgments vii 1 Introduction: “Mobility, the Quest for the Sublime”: Nomadic Modernisms, Aesthetic Travels, and Diasporic Journeys 1

Part 1 Renegade Aesthetics of Djuna Barnes Introduction to Part 1 31 2 Short Stories and Renegade “Night Woods” 39 3 The Landless Race of Ryder and the Ryder Aesthetes: Mock Almanacs of Experimentation and Intermediality 52 4 “The Pastures in Which the Night Feeds”: The Heart Politics and the Music of Holy(Night)Wood 65 5 Métachorie as Decomposition Illustrated: The Dance of Aesthetic Synthesis in Barnes’s Journalism, Poetry, and One-Act Plays 81 6 “There’s Nothing like Destruction for an Aim”: The Antiphon’s Theatre of Ideas or State Politics? 103

Part 2 Nomadic Topographies of Jane Bowles Introduction to Part 2 121 7 Tawdry Nomadographies and Transcultural Frontiers: Two Serious Ladies and the Politics of Nomadism 125 8 Short Stories and the Vendetta of Nomadic Politics 145

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Theatre of Pastoral Cruelty 171

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Conclusion: “Two Very Serious Ladies” and Their Journeys 200

Works Cited 215 Index 232

Acknowledgments Nomadic Modernisms and Diasporic Journeys of Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles: “Two Very Serious Ladies” is the result of many years of research and revisions. Although inspired by its title, this book is a radical departure from my Ph.D. dissertation on nomadic modernisms/modernist nomadisms in selected ­ works of Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys, Jane Bowles, and Eva Hoffman. Focusing solely on Djuna Barnes’s and Jane Bowles’s specific modernisms, the book examines their engagement with literary and visual arts, philosophy, politics, and history. While the book brings these two writers’ works together, its structure emphasizes that biography is not destiny. Allowing for the kind of repetition, but also disjunctions and nuance that pervade their works, the book strives to open new alternative spaces of reading Barnes and Bowles without necessarily imposing a comparative judgment on one or the other. Certain aspects of this book have been published in peer-reviewed j­ ournals (“The Tawdry Frontiers and Nomadographies of Jane Bowles’s Two Serious ­Ladies” in Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 39.7 (October–­ November 2010); “Renegade Whos Aesthetics: The Recipe for an Uncooked ­Story” in ­Double Dialogues 12 (Winter 2010); “Formulated Flesh: The ­Inhuman Appetite of Modernist Poetics” in Double Dialogues 15 (Winter 2011); and “­Djuna Barnes and The Antiphon: From State Politics to Theatre of Ideas” is forthcoming in the Journal of Modern Literature). I would like to thank the journal ­reviewers and editors for their comments. These publications have been essential to the book’s overall journey. Special acknowledgments must be extended to Masja Horn, Editor Literature and Cultural Studies, Brill | Rodopi, the reviewers, and the editorial board at Brill | Rodopi whose insightful comments and editing suggestions enhanced the quality of the book. Special thanks go to Nicole Hilton for her keen editorial eye and proofreading skills. Last but not least, the completion of this book was facilitated by Nipissing University’s Research Grant (2015–2016). I would also like to thank Jason G. Speck, Assistant University Archivist, Special Collections Librarian, University of Maryland; Lauren Brown, Special Collections Librarian (Djuna Barnes Collection); Amber Marie Kohl, Special Collections Coordinator, University of Maryland; and Isabel Howe, Executive Director, The Authors League Fund.

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Introduction: “Mobility, the Quest for the Sublime”: Nomadic Modernisms, Aesthetic Travels, and Diasporic Journeys I believe in nature. I hate conventionality. I am flying from it. djuna barnes, Five Thousand Miles (121)

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I am a great admirer of the nomad, vagabonds, gypsies and seafaring men. I tip my hat to them; the old prophets roamed the world for that matter too; and most of the visionaries. jane bowles, “The Camp Cataract” (361)

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Our existence has no foundation on which to rest except the transient present. Thus its form is essentially unceasing motion, without any possibility of that repose which we continually strive after. arthur schopenhauer, “On the Vanity of Existence” (52)

⸪ To fly away from convention, to be out there in the world, to give in to unceasing motion are the themes that permeate the works of Djuna Barnes (1892–1982) and Jane Bowles (1917–1973), the two American modernist writers and experimentalists who are perhaps best known for their itinerant lifestyle and what is generally viewed as urban, emancipatory modernism. Their nomadic ethic was first acknowledged and celebrated by the resurgence of scholarly interest in modernist women writers in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Ellen G. Friedman’s and Miriam Fuchs’s 1989 collection of essays, Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction, and Ellen G. Freedman’s 1993 essay, “What Are the Missing Contents? (Post)Modernism, Gender, and the Canon,” applauded the works of Barnes and Bowles (among writers such as Jean Rhys, H.D., Gertrude Stein,

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004314436_002

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and others) for endorsing mobility as a vehicle for women’s empowerment, but also for their feminist aesthetic undermining cultural and social stereotypes of gender, sexuality, and race. Recent studies by Alex Goody, Diane Warren, and Rebecca Loncraine have started investigating transatlantic and inter-textual aspects of Barnes’s work.1 Bowles’s writing, on the other hand, apart from the resurgent interest in her first and only novel, Two Serious Ladies, is generally considered to have modest artistic value. Challenging their marginal place on the map of American transatlantic modernism, this book brings together Barnes’s and Bowles’s artistic trajectories in order to explore the rich nuances of their nomadic aesthetic that synthesize both regional and transnational influences. This book also comments on the complex dialectic that characterizes their artistic versions of American modernity: the embrace of mobility that finds its inspiration in the naturalist ideals of American Transcendentalists, on the one hand, and the persistent questioning of urbanization and its non-urban, yet equally immobilizing variations on the other hand. As this book shows, Barnes’s and Bowles’s works abound in characters whose restlessness propels them to embrace mobility as a mode of expression but also as a potential cure for the increasing nostalgia for a “simpler, more pristine America,” which was losing ground in the face of the new, commercialized America that was being celebrated across the ­Atlantic as a beacon of the machine-age modernity (Pells 2). For more than two decades, scholarly applications of Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s theory of nomadology have shaped the critical reception of Barnes’s and Bowles’s writings, but have also lost touch with the writers’ artistic process as a whole. Expanding on previous studies of Barnes and Bowles, this book aims to probe the ways in which their works problematize the nomadic ethic of American modernism as being locked in the desire for a precise delineation, and what can be called “reformalization” of space as form and/as border. In other words, Nomadic Modernisms and Diasporic Journeys of Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles: “Two Very Serious Ladies” investigates the ways 1 All these works emphasize the transnational aspects of Barnes’s modernism/s. See Alex Goody, Modernist Articulations: A Cultural Reading of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, and Gertrude Stein (London: Palgrave, 2007); Dianne Warren, Djuna Barnes’s Consuming Fictions ­(Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008); Rebecca Loncraine, ed. “Introduction.” The Book of Repulsive Women. By Djuna Barnes (Manchester: FyField, 2003) vii–xvii. For more recent scholarship on Barnes, see Caselli, Improper Modernism: Djuna Barnes’s Bewildering Corpus (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009) in which the author investigates Barnes’s “poetics of impropriety” primarily from a biographical context (2). See also Julie Taylor, Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh up, 2012). Taylor’s monograph investigates Barnes’s representation of trauma and affect from both biographical and socio-cultural perspectives.

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in which both Barnes and Bowles formalize spaces as texts while pointing to the burdens of corporeality and its attachment to specific locations—be they constructs of geographic, socio-cultural, or psychological conditioning. As their works reveal, the politics of displacement so pertinent to ­American modernism generated complicated and complex nomadographies that were both gendered and racialized, but were also as exhilarating as they were anxiety-producing. The 1920s was a particularly interesting era in American arts and literature. While, in Europe, Gerald Murphy’s 1924 painting of “Villa America” became symbolic of the new, “techno” America, lush with commercial success and economic power, most American artists were feeling isolated from a pervasive emphasis on individualism and material consumption, seeking solace in the frontier myth of the great American Dream.2 As Malcolm Cowley suggests in his memoir, The Exile’s Return, the feeling increased after the American involvement in wwi, when artists started questioning the pervasive mechanization of American society and yearned for a place where art would have a meaning. Journalists like H.L. Mencken, the founder of American Mercury, and American intellectuals like Harold Stearns drew attention to the spreading disease of commercialism and the lack of a communal, spiritual ethos. In his 1922 collection of essays, Civilization in the United States, Stearns encouraged artists instead to leave for Europe in order to enhance their appreciation of “local and regional peculiarities” (Cowley 29).3 These peculiarities, Cowley notes, were rooted however not so much in the sprawling cities of New York, Baltimore, or Washington, but rather in the American landscape and its nomadic spirit (94). This spirit was immersed in America’s pastoral mythography and its complex (post)colonial origins as a settler culture whose historical amnesia of the colonial conquest justified racial discrimination in the name of a virgin land settled by an “American Adam” (Shohat and Stam 141). As this book argues, propelling the nomadic spirit that was pervading much of the twentieth-century expatriate movements in and out of America such as the 1920s artistic expatriation in Europe, or the 1940s pilgrimages south of the border, was thus a unique, pastoral turn towards the American frontier, the “undefiled, green republic, a quiet land of forests, villages and farms dedicated to the pursuit of happiness” (Marx 6). Grounded in America’s (post)colonial 2 See Jocelyn Rotily, “A Picture of America by Gerald Murphy” in Sophie Lévy and Christian Derouet (eds.), Transatlantic Avant-Garde: American Artists in Paris, 1918–1939 (Berkeley: U of California P, 2004) 55–63. 3 See Malcolm Cowley, The Exile’s Return (New York: Norton, 1934); Elizabeth Hutton Turner, American Artists in Paris 1919–1929 (Ann Arbor: umi, 1988).

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history, the turn frequently relied on colonial and colonizing ways of thinking about space and borders while simultaneously advocating the possibility of a new, postcolonial utopia. According to Jean Baudrillard, “this dual operation of a deepening of…a radicalization of the utopian demand…and the immediate materialization of that utopia in work, custom, and way of life” defines ­America’s (post)colonial relationship to the landscape and space in general (America 76). Historically, the utopian thrust thus allowed for a very particular kind of historical amnesia, or “duck[ing] of origins” (76). Similarly, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam note that the view of a pastoral idyll or “the notion of an American Adam obscured the fact that there were already people in the New World when the settlers arrived” and imposed their cultural mythographies on the land whose idyllic lore they both invaded and cultivated (142).4 ­Accordingly, the nomadic spirit of 1920s to 1940s American expatriation abroad relied on the pastoral ideology that “ducked” the colonial heritage while promoting its (post)colonial varieties in the name of embracing the land as a mythical f­ rontier. In both Barnes’s and Bowles’s works, this turn is marked, and also resuscitated, by a deep sense of cynicism that questioned the mythography of this eco-friendly diaspora. Largely unexamined, the embrace, but also transformation of the pastoral—and frequently colonial and colonizing dynamic—into a nomadic aesthetic constitutes the primary focus of this study. The works of Barnes and Bowles are suspicious of, and frequently trouble the dialectic of, the urbanized, modern civilization as a site of progress and the countryside as a pastoral idyll. For example, in her 1917 story, “A Sprinkle of Comedy,” published in the New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine, Barnes deploys this tension as a trans-generational battle between a father and son, who is reluctant to buy into his father’s idea of progress. Filled with ennui, he tells his father: “It’s no use, you needn’t talk about the progress of civilization” (Barnes, Collected Stories 100). A similar attitude echoes through Bowles’s work where the urban-pastoral dialectic unfolds along gender and cultural lines. In her novel, Two Serious Ladies, or the short story, “The Iron Table,” “civilization” becomes a semantically loaded, gendered and racialized term. It signals not only the privileges of western culture, but also the ways in which western subjects impose their ideas of freedom and identity on the non-West. Both Mrs Copperfield in Two Serious Ladies and the wife in “The Iron Table” story are adamant about revising the strictly masculine, ­naturalized v­ ersion of civilization. 4 See also Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Woodstock: Princeton up, 2000). In this study, Mignolo speaks to the ways in which “the very logic of coloniality” in America was frequently “disguised with the rhetoric of modernity, of salvation and progress” (xvi).

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Gender, culture, but also race and ethnicity play an important part in the pastoral aesthetic that pervade Barnes’s and Bowles’s nomadographies. Mapping the pastoral moment in different temporalities and spaces (Barnes represents the 1920s expatriation in Europe while Bowles comments on the 1940s exodus to Mexico and North Africa), the works of Barnes and Bowles provide interesting insight into the complex latencies underpinning their nomadic modernisms as they negotiate between formal, cultural, and spatial (im)mobilities produced by their creative but also physical exile. While the physicality of crossing frontiers, be they geographic, cultural, gendered, or racial, creates the necessary Sturm und Drang propelling their oeuvre, the significance of their so-called nomadic sensibility lies in the ways in which these two authors translate movement into an aesthetic that transcends yet simultaneously sustains generic boundaries not only to animate the various and at times immobilizing (often gendered and racialized) effects of mobility, but also to communicate both their regional and transatlantic qualities. In other words, their preoccupation with space as a border or pure form goes against the Deleuzian notion of “open space” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 267), often associated with modernist mobility. Rather, the nomadic sensibility underpinning their work unfolds as a search for a pure form, a space that is its own limit, and is thus inevitably tied up with the complex mythographies of the American Dream. As this book shows, both Barnes’s and Bowles’s oeuvre thrives on formal mobility, yet simultaneously relies on the artistic ability to discipline the nomadic through an aesthetic, formal synthesis which “brings foreground and background elements in a visual, [textual], or auditory image or experience into the same social plane, superimposed or fused with one another” (Rothenberg 28). This is particularly reflected in Barnes’s ability to work across genres and to use ekphrasis, traditionally defined as a verbal representation of the visual image, in a more versatile, trans-medial manner as a poetic device that explores movement as an art form governed by universal laws that are nonetheless shaped by specific regional and generic tonalities (be it dance, music, walking, image, etc.). For example, in her journalism and early prose (Ryder and Ladies Almanack), Barnes uses primarily visual language to encapsulate the mobility of physical and artistic space by juxtaposing the visual and written forms of language to explore the ways in which representation participates in the bringing forth of the new. Although Bowles’s works often lack the kind of ­“painterly” artistry characteristic of Barnes, both authors share a common interest in ­bringing to the foreground the distinct effects of cultural (im)­mobilities and the aesthetic frontiers that such (im)mobilities enforce or u ­ ndermine. Like Barnes, Bowles was not only a fiction writer, but also a talented playwright ­interested in examining mobility from the position of the c­ haracters’ ­relationship to their

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­physical and inner landscape. Similarly, she was aware of the limitations language poses to representing the complex nuances of mobility in relation to artistic and physical conceptualizations of space and form. Just as the verbalization of urban noise and visual image is crucial to Barnes’s and Bowles’s oeuvre, so is the invocation of the landscape as a spiritual site, but also as a kind of para-site that embodies the various doxa and paradoxes that constitute their characters’ modernist “nature.” Barnes’s Ryder and Ladies Almanack therefore require at least a brief mention in this introductory section as modernist codas to different aesthetic variations (and appropriations) of the naturalist ethics. Further discussed in Chapter 3 of this book, Ryder and Ladies Almanack offer a unique synthesis of the nomadic aesthetic advocated by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc in their 1912 The Blaue Reiter Almanac and Henry David Thoreau’s ethics of the landless walker, the Sans-Terrer, whose only certainty is in his relationship to the ever-changing nature of the landscape. Barnes often imagines this landscape as a physical, literary, but also inanimate, disfigured corpus whose “national element,” to quote Kandinsky and Marc, “knows no borders or nations, only humanity” (250). The drawings that accompany Ryder and pervade Ladies Almanack animate the text, adding movement to the travel/travail theme to which Barnes persistently returns. As Barnes’s journalism, poetry, and drama show, the animation of the text by image evokes Kandinsky’s and Marc’s aesthetic of using “repetition of one art (e.g., music) by means of an identical method of another art (e.g., painting)” (191). But this animation of text also points to modernist experimentation as a nomadic and, as the following chapter explains, renegade travel/travail where mixing of genres goes hand in hand with the variation of artistic media applied to secure a unified synthesis of expression. In Nightwood, Barnes’s most accomplished novel, this travail of mobility as seriality is expressed however in the musical quality of her prose where the visual is verbalized through painterly language that sublimates unvocalized and unvocalizable events. In Bowles’s one and only published novel, Two Serious Ladies, cultural relations become the ultimate vehicle driving the narrative where other and othered landscapes speak (for instance, the caged birds in the Las Palmas Hotel, the increasing prominence of Pacifica’s voice towards the end of the novel, and so on). Her stories further the idea of the landscape as character, but also a kind of surrogate identity. Like Barnes, Bowles also engages with the dramatic form, employing various forms of surrogate personification, be it the use of advertising as puppet theatre, or the persistent emphasis on the moving body as an inanimate but also aesthetic corpus that embodies different aspects of humanity in crisis. Consequently, the works of Bowles and Barnes expose the ethical and philosophical conflicts underpinning the American zeitgeist of

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modernity that is best expressed in the words of Lady Olivia Lookover, a character in one of Barnes’s short plays titled Little Drops of Rain (1922), who strives to enlighten her young niece about the difference between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ sensibilities: Under the frock coat of your generation is but the torso of a gentleman, under the frills of the 19th century beats the heart of an indefatigable cynicism, made still sharper by a romantic twinge. You smile without satire; we curled the lip… We wept, you sigh. We died; you languish. Our wounds exposed the soul, yours can be covered by a single application of collodion. We believed in individual aristocracy, you in universal perturbation. We were the storm; you are the sunshine…. My life was lived without punctuation…Your life is riddled with colons and full stops. At the Roots 111

As Olivia Lookover intimates, different periods punctuate or deploy mobility and experience movement in distinct ways. Indisputably, the modernist embrace of mobility and nomadism served as an avant-garde aesthetic propelling artists to “go to life,” “sit on the sidewalk and contemplate the sewer,” as Helen Westley had put it when interviewed by Barnes (Barnes, I Could Never 254), but it also constituted an important aspect of gnosis (i.e., learning as a journey).5 The origins of such an aesthetic can already be located in the sublime poetics of Walt Whitman, in the musical poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, and in the melancholy preludes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. From the walking nomad philosophers like Democritus in 400 b.c. to the French and German Romantics like Jean Jacques Rousseau, Arthur Schopenhauer, or Friedrich Schiller, the idea of movement pervades the very essence of literary forms.6 Perhaps best encapsulating this notion that unrest is essential to human existence is Arthur Schopenhauer’s metaphor of a man running down the mountain. Imagine, Schopenhauer says, “a planet which would fall into its sun if it ever ceased to plunge irresistibly forward” (Essays and Aphorisms 53). Movement is associated with life experience, so is ancient philosophy. In antiquity, walking or any form of movement was associated with thinking and ideas, but it was also viewed as a means of “modulating alienation” and life in general (Solnit 15). Viewed in this context, Homer’s Odysseus, the archetypal 5 See, for example, Walter D. Mignolo’s notion of gnosis as “a way of opening up knowledge” (9). For more details, see Mignolo’s Local Histories/Global Designs. 6 See Rebecca Solnit’s incisive study of walking and its history, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (London: Penguin, 2001).

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traveller upon whom modernity models its expatriate aesthetics, can be seen as the ultimate embodiment of the nomad philosopher who must displace himself in order to feel alive (Solnit 15). The tradition of tying the feeling of being alive to figures of movement, restlessness, roads, and paths has been central to the conceptualization of American identity. From Frederic J. Turner’s 1893 frontier thesis to Lucy Hazard’s 1927 study of the American frontier, F.O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance to Christopher Morris’s recent theorization of the figure of the road as an aporia or a “pathless place” (9), critical studies of American literature emphasize the connection between mobility and American identity. But while Morris sees these figures as arbitrary, this book focuses on mapping the ways that Barnes’s and Bowles’s representations of mobility are reflective of their epoch’s sociohistorical and artistic trends, and thus inevitably also comment on larger issues mediated by art such as race, gender, and identity. This book traces the various cultural, philosophical, and transnational influences that contributed to these authors’ exilic ethics by exploring their aesthetics as a complex (and not always happy) marriage of literary devices and modes of expression that mobilize the past through a poetic synthesis of transatlantic, but also specific regional nomadographies. The individual chapters of this book ask whether the anxiety that propels Barnes’s and Bowles’s preoccupation with re-creating landscapes, nature, ­places, and localities, or what could be called their formal diasporas, is also an attempt to foreground and defend against the increasing commodification of cultural and national borders. Does the liquid nature of modernity, as ­Zygmunt Bauman argues, the shifting of geographic and cultural borders brought on by the two world wars, and the acceleration of movement via the railroad, the car, and air, constitute the defining, yet fluid signpost on the modernist map (14)? And if so, what is its relationship to the space or medium (be it textual or corporeal) that accommodates and/or embodies it? Last but not least, what international and regional significance does the nostalgia for the physical landscape as a site of freedom bear across cultures, borders, and other people’s spaces? Such queries not only inform both parts of this book and their chapters, but also serve as signposts to which both Barnes and Bowles persistently return in their writings. The major contribution of this book, however, lies in its examination of what makes Barnes’s and Bowles’s modernisms distinctly American, but also, inevitably, diasporic. Their representations of mobility show that nomadism, like exile, produces its own diasporic politics, its own yearning for a familiar landscape—a home away from home. This politics is grounded in the complex asymmetries of the diasporic experience that is, in case of Barnes and

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Bowles, not only translocal, but also transnational. These crossings, as their works indicate, are imbued with socio-cultural, gendered, as well as racial controversies and ambivalence. Recent works on Diaspora by Alina Sajed and Igor Maver have highlighted the link between mobility and diasporic (be)longing. Alina Sajed, for instance, emphasizes that “narratives of exile and migration produce a diasporic translocality fraught with questions of language and class [that generate] its own racial and gendered categories” (181). Igor Maver similarly cautions that while narratives of migration and mobility cannot escape “assert[ing] a sense of belonging” and a yearning for an idyllic location (ix), this location is also a form of dislocation from one’s historical, geographical, and physical place/space of belonging that simultaneously speaks to “those who are constructed and represented as indigenous to a geographical location” (Maver ix). Barnes’s and Bowles’s nomadic modernisms point to these asymmetries even though they do not always succeed in problematizing their own position of (literary, class, and racial) privilege. Instead, they translate ­migrant—translocal and transnational—experiences into narratives that investigate the complex relations and tensions that mobility and diasporic longing not only generate, but also obfuscate. Translating movement into an aesthetic, this book explores the pastoral turn that underlies their characters’ nomadic ethic as a search for a pure form or what Agamben calls terra aesthetica (Man Without Content 103), but also as a spiritual errand that exposes the subliminal latencies that informed modernist and social movements taking place across the continent between 1920s and 1950s. The search for an aesthetic embodied in the nomadic characters’ attachment to natural, rural, rather than strictly urban, landscapes not only represents a common thread throughout their works, but also stylistically revives the association of form with/as nature while inevitably pointing to its problematic (post)colonial dynamic that they both challenge and re-inscribe. So does their deep sense of alienation from the society they were born into and from the countries and places they chose to live in. Last but not least, the goal of this book is not to suggest that Barnes and Bowles embraced the same modernist aesthetics and nomadic ethics. They certainly did not. But what they do share are certain similarities of approach to the artistic process as the unity in motion persistently re-formalized, a motion that became increasingly a source of anxiety and creative impotence for both. While Barnes was a prolific writer in her early twenties and thirties, upon her return to New York in the late 1930s she suffered from writing blocks that caused depression, and abandoned prose writing almost entirely, focusing primarily on poetry. Similarly, Bowles struggled with writing, persistently revising and deleting what she had written.

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Even though this book challenges biographical readings of Barnes’s and Bowles’s works, it is worth noting that their literary stories and life maps intertwine in interesting ways. Both women were born in the State of New York. Barnes grew up on a farm in Cornwall-on-Hudson, in an unconventional family of artists. Her grandmother Zadel Barnes was a prolific and well-known journalist; her father, Wald Barnes, was a musician while her mother, Elizabeth Barnes, was a trained violinist and an aspiring poet. Unlike Bowles who was the only child and came from a well-to-do family, Barnes’s childhood was marked by poverty, dysfunction, and her father’s polygamous practice. In 1912, her parents separated, and Elizabeth and the children moved to New York where the financial responsibility for the family fell on the shoulders of the twenty-year old Djuna. Following the footsteps of her grandmother, Barnes started freelancing as a journalist for The Harper’s Monthly, The Brooklyn Eagle, and The Morning Telegraph. In spite of her largely dysfunctional childhood, she projected confidence. Phillip Herring, her biographer, recalls her gumption when at the age of twenty-one she entered the offices of Brooklyn Eagle and said “You need me” (75). When the McCall’s Magazine decided to send her to Paris on an assignment in the 1920s, her journalist voyage turned into a decade among the most famous of the expatriate bohemia.7 While Barnes was dazzling Paris with her theatrical, green make-up, long earrings, and black cape, Jane Bowles, then Jane Auer, was recuperating in Switzerland after the many surgeries for what was to become a life-long battle with her tubercular leg. Bowles was born to a family of second-generation ­immigrants—both her mother and father were Jewish. Her mother, Claire Auer, born Stajer, came from a Hungarian Jewish family, and Sidney (Isaiah) Auer, Jane Bowles’s father, had an Austrian heritage. Unlike Barnes’s family, Bowles’s parents were reasonably well off. Her father owned the Geisha Blouse Business, and her mother enjoyed their upper middle-class lifestyle. Although Jane was born in New York City, the family moved to Woodmere, Long Island, when she was ten years of age (Dillon, Original Sin 10, 15). Jane had private tutors and, before moving to Woodmere, she attended Madame Tisnée’s French School in Manhattan (Dillon, Original Sin 13). In 1932, she was forced to spend almost two years in Switzerland to treat her tubercular knee. Upon her return to New York in 1934, she wrote and lost her first manuscript Le Phaéton Hypocrite, but also travelled incessantly (Dillon, Original Sin 427). The trajectory of dedication and loss, confidence and depression, and, later, exile and return

7 For more biographical details about Barnes’s life, see Phillip Herring, Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes (New York: Viking, 1995).

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would become Jane’s life path, as would her constant struggle with physical pain due to her tubercular knee.8 While the McCall’s assignment became auspicious for Barnes, for the young Jane Auer, an aspiring author desperate to drown her physical pain in writing, it was the meeting of Paul Bowles, a composer and future writer, in 1937 that propelled her “out into the world,” to use her characters’ favourite line. Both authors ended up straddling continents in their thirties and forties. Barnes travelled mainly within Europe between the 1920s and 1930s, while Bowles spent most of the 1940s and 1950s shuttling between the u.s., Mexico, Paris, and Tangier. While the two women knew about each other through Paul Bowles, a friend of Barnes and Bowles’s husband, they remained ensconced in their own secluded environments: Barnes spent much of her life in Paris and later in her Greenwich Village apartment in New York, while Bowles moved between New York, Spain, and Tangier, until her stroke in 1957, not to mention her habitual drinking, made travel an effective means of avoiding writing (­Dillon, Original Sin 428). Both writers seemed to have been prolific primarily in their 30s and 40s. Barnes published her best works between the 1920s and 1930s. Before her arrival in Paris in 1921, she had had some 100 articles and more than 25 published stories under her belt as Herring notes in his biography of Barnes (77). Bowles was also very productive early in her career, publishing her novel, Two Serious Ladies, and most of her stories in the 1940s and 1950s. But the increasing sense of displacement, precipitated by the tragic events of the Second World War and the changing face of American culture, created a sense of absence in both of their trajectories that preyed on their will to live and write. Upon her return to New York, Barnes felt completely lost in the city that “should [have been] a little less nervous than Paris or a London, and yet so many [were] breaking down, taking to health cures, science, Christian or otherwise” (Herring and Stutman 269). She wrote draft after draft. Her last play, The Antiphon, took several years to write and another few years to revise. Twenty-­nine drafts of the play are now housed in the Maryland Archives (Broe 2, S­ ilence). Recently, Phillip Herring and Osias Stutman published a collection of some of her previously unpublished poems and memoires. As Hank O’Neal notes, Barnes would begin over and over again: “If an idea for a poem occurred after a notation for asparagus she would simply write it in and then proceed with ice cream and oranges” (75). Since the 1940s, Bowles experienced a similar paralysis, writing outline after outline of unpublished short stories and novels 8 For more biographical details about Jane Bowles’s life, see Millicent Dillon, A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles (Berkeley: U of California P, 1998).

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that amounted to seventeen full notebooks, now housed at the Harry ­Ransom Humanities Research in Austin (Caponi 135). Like Barnes’s shopping lists, Bowles’s notebooks contain outlines of stories overlaid with notes to the therapist, “full of startings and stoppings, wondering, wandering, and agonizing over the direction she might take in works she never really began” (Caponi 135). Unlike Barnes, Bowles never quite returned to America, spending most of her life shuttling between the u.s. and Tangier, Paris, and Málaga, where she was hospitalized off and on from 1967 and where she died in 1973 (Dillon, Original Sin 428). Both writers remained ensconced in their self-alienation not only throughout their lives, but also through their persistent writing and rewriting. However, if alienation is crucial to understanding as Bertolt Brecht theorized in his essay on “The Epic Theatre” in 1936 and expanded in the addendum called “A Short Organum for the Theatre” in 1949,9 then Barnes’s and Bowles’s persistent revisions and rewritings only further point to the nomadic, forever fleeting, alienating, and necessarily trans-medial nature of the aesthetic gnosis they seek. In this respect, to write about the century of increasing mobility, mass displacement, and exile means to produce art that transcends reality and gives life to what Schiller calls an “equipoise,” an aesthetic condition that expresses its “highest reality,” the kind of reality that is fluid, protean, persistently in motion yet contained by the very act of repetition (103). The following pages therefore also examine the socio-political context of Barnes’s and Bowles’s aesthetic equipoise, their brilliant syntheses of high and low art, their rejection of billboard America, and their pursuit of more effervescent realities grounded in the complex nomadographies and perplexities of (human) nature. At the same time, however, this book does not pathologize their sense of despair and paralysis through a proto-biographical analysis. Instead, it focuses on their literary aesthetic and politics, reading their works as a testament to Brecht’s well-known adage that “Whoever wishes to rise higher on earth must inevitably cause pain, that the need to pay for development and satisfaction is the unavoidable tragedy of life—i.e., the cruellest and most commonplace principle: that you can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs” (279).

Modernism, Mobility, and Nomadic Theories: A Brief Overview

Breaking eggs, to borrow Brecht’s words, or mobilizing fragments to achieve artistic synthesis is inevitably one of the most prominent leitmotifs of 9 See Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (London: Methuen & Co., 1957).

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­modernism. Whether gleaned from the Baudelairean perspective as a balancing act of the immutable and fleeting, or Ezra Pound’s imagist alchemy, modernism was identified with mobility. Be it in the form of artistic movements, the spread of technology, or the immigrant exodus from and to Europe, Africa, and the Americas, this mobility radically redefined the trajectories of time-space, socio-cultural, and gender relations, giving rise to a whole new aesthetic that encouraged formal experimentation. The underlying premise of modernist art was to master the art of juxtaposition. Or, as Virginia Woolf put it in her 1919 essay, “Modern Fiction,” which first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement and was republished a year later by the Little Review, its goal was to escape the tyranny of representation by abandoning materialist realism for a detailed examination of the human spirit. Highlighting this shift, she asked: “Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?” (Woolf, “Modern” 150). Modernist art honed this “unknown and uncircumscribed spirit” into an aesthetic. Concerned with mapping the unknown sensations and topographies of the soul, modernism became primarily the art of juxtaposition, preoccupied with the dialectics of time and space, movement and stasis. As Alfred Jarry, almost a decade before Woolf, noted in his essay “Time in Art” (1908), modern art was to be “set free from the shackles of time” and augur the “arrival of the moment” (210). For Jarry, as for many modernist artists, art took on the role of a spiritual science where juxtaposition of spatial planes, of the old and the new, the local and the international, brought out the pure reality of ideas through a synthesis of arts. In 1911, Kandinsky and Marc’s The Blaue Reiter Almanac developed the idea further by aligning such synthesis with a spiritual movement of sound as represented by the hooves of the “apocalyptic horsemen” (258). As the emphasis shifted to synthetic expression, the fusion of the arts reflected the dialectic of mobility and immobility while static arts like painting, sculpture, or architecture sought inspiration in the colourful tonalities of music, dance, or poetry. Modern arts in particular embodied the complexity of movement by marrying static with kinetic arts, using the body as a vehicle of artistic expression. In 1913, Valentine de Saint-Point, for instance, presented her theory of modern performance in her paper titled “Métachorie,” which she presented at the Arts Conference held at the Comédie des Champs-Elysées in Paris. She defined métachorie as a “fusion of arts” combining “immobile arts such as geometry, architecture, painting and sculpture” with “mobile arts such as music, dance, poetry” that was suggested “cerebrally” rather than emotionally (Sain-Point 51, translation mine). For Saint-Point, the role of a modern performer was to interpret a theme in a way that turns idea into a “living organism” that moves

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in a disciplined, “not roving, disorderly” manner (Saint-Point 57, translation mine). In her 1917 interview with Djuna Barnes, Valentine de Saint-Point, who came to New York to perform at the Metropolitan Opera House in April, 1917, further aligned her métachorie with the pastoral spirit. The symbol of métachorie were “[t]ents, any open place—in a tree, by a brook, under a hill, beneath the high grass” (Barnes, I Could Never 232). Similarly, American dancers performing in Europe developed their own theories of artistic expression. For example, the performances of Josephine Baker and Isadora Duncan combined such métachoric elements with references to nature (imitating birds, clouds, and leaves) since dance, like music, was considered the most non-referential of arts and hence capable of encapsulating the raw reality of thought (17).10 In the same vein, Marsden Hartley in his collection of essays, Adventures in the Arts, discussed the American attachment to the sublime and commented on the inclusiveness of modern art as a means of poeticizing the artist’s “sensations in order to comprehend them” (8). As is well documented, the embrace of nature often went hand in hand with the celebration of the cities as the centres of modern art. Just as Hartley advocated the native, “localized realization” of American art (64), artists like Gerald Murphy celebrated America’s urban and technological prowess through his portrayal of cylinders and consumer objects evoking the new, machine-age America. The city became an important embodiment of modernity’s embrace of the new order. Le Corbusier’s revolutionary design of Paris found inspiration in American cities, especially New York (Silver 29). In his contribution to the November 1922 issue of L’Esprit Nouveau, which he founded in October 1922 with Amédée Ozenfant, Le Corbusier publicly acknowledged the superiority of American engineers and his admiration of the American city. As Kenneth Silver writes: “Photographs of American grain silos and factories of American cities (their grid plans, skylines, thoroughfares, and ports), hotels, and office buildings, formed a visual leitmotif of the innovative publication. This was what the modern world should look like” (29). American expatriates in Paris, on the other hand, admired the city for its art, seeing it as the very embodiment of art. Not surprisingly, urban metaphors pervaded modernist art and fiction as figurative landscapes of the mind: among the most poignant is the 10

See for example, Isadora Duncan’s memoir, My Life (New York: Liveright, 1927); Josephine Baker’s memoirs, Mémoires de Josephine Baker (Paris: Editions Correa, 1928). Notable here are Djuna Barnes’s articles on Vernon Castle and Irene Foote, a famous American dance couple, “Yes, the Vernon Castles Have a Home and They Occasionally Tango Past It” or her interview with Valentine de St.-Point, “Recruiting for Métachorie: Mme. Valentine de Saint-Point Talks of Her Church of Music” (1917). For more, see Djuna Barnes, I Could Never Be Lonely without a Husband: Interviews by Djuna Barnes (London: Virago, 1987).

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Dublin of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), the Paris of Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight (1939), the London of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), or the New York cityscape of F.S. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). Modernism has been primarily defined as the “art of the cities” (Harvey 25). Malcolm Bradbury’s and James McFarlane’s Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1990, Peter Nicholls’s Modernism: A Literary Guide, Shari ­Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank, Deborah Parsons’s Streetwalking in the Metropolis, or most recently, Alex Goody’s Modernist Articulations all focus on the urban aspect of modernism. Goody’s emphasis on American machine-age modernism as a “narrative of rationality and progress” is perhaps most representative of this line of criticism (89). Contrasting this line of thought, however, is the new emergence of regional studies, highlighting the rural and agrarian aspect of American modernity. Recent studies by Dorothee Kocks, Dream a Little: Land and Social Justice in Modern America and Janet Galligani Casey’s A New Heartland: Women, Modernity, and the Agrarian Ideal in America that point to the role the countryside has played in the constructions of American modernity are particularly relevant to this book’s examination of Barnes’s and Bowles’s nomadic modernisms. Casey’s study specifically draws attention to the rural fiction of American modernism, highlighting the “theoretical importance of rurality to the imaginative construction of American modernity and modernism” (4). For Casey, the rural farm represents not only an important symbol of American character and imagination, but it is also a site where “gendered and nativist values were being rapidly reconfigured” (3). While her trailblazing study provides insight into the non-urban aspects of American modernity, its deployment of rurality as a counterpoint to urban modernism remains equally problematic. Contrary to Casey’s study, the purpose of this book is not to “deliberately invok[e] an apparent conceptual binary” (Casey 15), but to show the complex geopolitical intersections of urban and pastoral (not necessarily rural, but also postcolonial and colonial) ideologies. Since the rural countryside was often an equally institutionalized space as the city, the pastoral element became what Leo Marx refers to as a “quest, a journey in search of an alternative form of life ‘closer to nature’” (378). Accordingly, urbanism and pastoralism, as deployed by Barnes and Bowles, do not exist in contradistinction. Instead, they constitute a diversity of relational varieties and forms that expose the dialectic of nomadic modernity: on the one hand, its embrace of alienation and exile in the name of freedom and individuation; on the other hand, its exposure of modernity’s inevitable, albeit ambivalent reliance on alterity and estrangement. The kind of nomadic pastoralism with which this book is concerned therefore does not exclude the urban space. But rather, it delineates a utopian elsewhere where the alienated, exiled subject finds a spiritual, albeit temporary

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refuge—a kind of formal Diaspora—through more traditional forms of mobility such as walking, strolling, or travelling on foot. To seek such a refuge is to attempt both a flight towards and away from one self. As Solnit brilliantly puts it, it is to render “one’s solitude…geographical,” to endeavour “a kind of communion with the nonhuman” (186), but also to make the solitude “appear like a refrain, like a beat”—in other words, to give it voice (186, 192). Solitude then provides a means of detaching from the noise of everyday while simultaneously creating a space for more sublime attachments and, frequently, problematic cultural and, at times, colonial and colonizing appropriations. In addition, the emphasis on reconnecting with the being of things, by making life sound, was crucial to American modernists and theoreticians such as Marsden Hartley whose Adventures in the Arts (1921), like Kandinsky and Marc’s The Blaue Reiter Almanac (1911), defined American modernism as immersed in the transcendentalist ideas of Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo E ­ merson, and ­Henry David Thoreau. Like Kandinsky and Marc, Hartley, for example, advocates a synthesis of arts. He distinguishes American modernist arts as unique in the aesthetic genius of Native culture and rhythms, but also in what he r­ efers to as the “utter homelessness of the spirit” of America’s “vagabond element” (28). Building on this context, this book argues that Barnes’s and Bowles’s nomadic pastoralism speaks to the increasingly transnational, as well as regional, rather than strictly urban or rural varieties of American modernism. The nomadic impulse, as this book emphasizes, was propelled primarily by the desire to transform and spatialize human experience by transporting it to a utopian elsewhere, be it urban, rural, or a hybrid of both. Moreover, Barnes’s and Bowles’s works thwart the kind of universal celebration of urbanism by highlighting rather than blurring the distinct identities of geographic locales and places. In a geopolitical sense, 1920s Paris was distinct from 1920s Berlin and Vienna from revolutionary Moscow, just as the urban sprawl of New York was different from that of Chicago or Boston. In the u.s., urban designers especially privileged efficiency and fragmentation to the panoramic view endorsed by the majority of European architects. Typical of major cities like Chicago, San Francisco, or New York was the concentration of the commercial and industrial buildings at the heart of the city with an idyllic pastoral park area side by side, an area that would counter-balance the industrial elements with the frontier landscape as a sacred space within the urban dystopia while, in Europe, these were typically located in the outskirts.11

11

See Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Rise of the City, 1878–1898 (Ohio: U of Ohio P, 1933); Jon Teaford, City and Suburb: The Political Fragmentation of Metropolitan America, 1850–1970

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It is undeniable that the city embodied the socio-cultural mobilities of modernism that found their theoretical resonances in architectural and travel metaphors pioneered by Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, or Georg Simmel. Karl Marx’s circulation of capital as a “value in motion” or Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money (1900) drew numerous links between the increasing urbanization and the restless desire for mobility. In his essay, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1905), Simmel aligned this restlessness with the metropolitan culture of speed and spectacle. The depersonalizing, restless mentality of metropolitan culture described by Simmel also permeates Walter Benjamin’s conceptualization of the modern flâneur who relishes movement as a means of establishing and sustaining a certain degree of alienation and aesthetic distance.12 American modernist literature continues to be read through a similar, mainly European framework that deploys American modernity and its nomadic spirit primarily from an urban, machinic lens. Reinforcing this lens are also critical applications of Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s emphasis on diverse intensities and cultural forces in a mostly urban context where the modernist work takes on the potential of a “nomadic war machine” that subverts the “normalising, naturalising tendencies of American culture” (Goody 173). Such an approach not only fails to account for the “naturalizing” premise that lies at the heart of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theory of nomadology, but also downplays the most prominent aspects of American modernity and its unique strand of modernism whose urban aesthetic is persistently underscored by the landscape as a symbol of “moral [not machinic or hypermodern] geography” (Machor 10). As this Introduction has already mentioned, the relevance of landscape to American identity was further re-enforced by the early twentieth-century architecture. From Clarence Stein and Henry Wright Radburn cities to greenbelt cities built during the Roosevelt New Deal era (1935–1938), a combination of pastoral and urban elements or what Machor calls the “rus in urbe,” remained a dominant feature of most American cities.13 As the new cities and skyscrapers continued to sprout in the u.s. at the beginning of the twentieth century,

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(Baltimore: U of Johns Hopkins P, 1979); and Carter Wisemen, The Twentieth-Century American Architecture (New York: Norton, 2013). For more, see Benjamin’s essay on Baudelaire and the city in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken, 1985). See James L. Machor, Pastoral Cities: Urban Ideals and the Symbolic Landscape of America (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987). For American architects and the emphasis on creating cities that would wed urban and rural elements, thus giving American cities a more ‘natural look,’ see Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990) 127.

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American identity retained, if not cultivated, what Hartley called its “wandering minstrel” mentality, a mentality that was tied to the “country road” (155), and to what Marx refers to as the “green garden” (377), as it simultaneously wrestled with its new machine image. Since such notions underpin the works of Barnes and Bowles, this book is ­positioned in the context of the recent studies of modernism that advocate ­taking a translocal approach to modernism that highlights not only ­international and transnational, but also regional specificities and challenges of modernism. It takes its cue from anthologies and collections by Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou (1998), Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, where the authors argue for the “rethinking of limits” and “repositioning of Modernism” (xvii–xviii), or the more recent work by L­ aura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, and Modernity (2005) in which the authors highlight the “diverse modernisms [that] formed against and through each other” (1). Allison Schachter’s Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in the Twentieth Century, published in 2012, has also prepared the ground for a more detailed investigation of diasporic facets of modernism. In her study, Schachter emphasizes that a diasporic approach can provide more insight into the various cultural, racial, and gender asymmetries of mobility, exile, and displacement, specifically by acknowledging their local, not only translocal conditions, as well as their literary (re)production and reception (15). In the 1980s and 1990s, the works of both Barnes and Bowles were also often associated with postmodernism, or with specific strands of European modernism. While this book does not dispute the European and postmodern strands of Barnes’s and Bowles’s modernisms, it focuses on expanding the strictly cosmopolitan lens that is traditionally applied to their works by exploring not only urban, but also non-urban motifs pervading their works. It suggests that their works not only shed light on the 1920s and 1940s American artistic expatriation waves, but also provide interesting insight into the nomadic yet deeply naturalist sensibility of the rapidly changing socio-cultural landscape of twentiethcentury America. This sensibility is informed by a whole slew of socio-cultural events: the growing emphasis on commercial and cultural expansionism, the two world wars, waves of artistic expatriation, but also by an ironic embrace of utopian pastoralism rooted in the transcendentalist and (post)colonial ideals of the grand American frontier. As their works reveal, this nostalgia paralleled the rise of new technologies and forms of transportation in America, ushering in a whole plethora of mobilities and social realities. The emergence of the automobile industry in twentieth-­century America, for example, redefined what Urry calls the

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­“mechanics of space” (i.e., how bodies move in space, but also how space impacts bodies on the move) (48). By the 1920s, automobile purchases in America alone rose from 8 million to the astounding 23 million. The introduction of “Ford Weekly Purchase Plan” not only encouraged sales, but also put further pressure on young American families to purchase a piece of the American Dream through weekly instalments (Norton et al. 687). Since owning a car was touted as a mark of social success and a means to achieve happiness, roads had to be rebuilt and a whole new infrastructure of traffic control established. Consequently, the spread of the automobile enabled consumers to shop more easily and thus inevitably contributed to the urban sprawl: new department stores had to be built to stimulate consumption in and outside the u.s. Just as increasing commercialism internationalized capital, it also inevitably generated new forms of inequality, immobility, and resistance. The social changes brought on by the Coolidge government’s emphasis on u ­ rbanization and prosperity widened the gap between the poor and the rich, creating a breeding ground for racism and social discontent. As Jani Scandura and Michael Thurston acutely put it, “assimilation and nativism continually ­negotiated the boundary of ‘foreignness’ through a complex economy of embodiment and cultural memory with consumer capitalism as the determining glue” (7). The nativist sentiment particularly increased in the 1920s when the aftermath of the First World War and the Russian Revolution forced more than five-and-a-half million to seek refuge in countries other than their own (Hobsbawm 88). In the words of Eric Hobsbawm, “Many men and women migrated not only across oceans and international frontiers, but from country to city; from one region of the same state to another—in short, from ‘home’ to the land of strangers and, turning the coin round, as strangers into others’ home” (Hobsbawm 119). While the increasing influx of immigrants to America and the political achievements of the women’s movement revitalized nativist and conservative sentiments promoted by American historians like Madison Grant who in his book, The Passing of the Great Race (1916), advocated racial hygiene and restraint, the spirit of change and experimentation continued to thrive. As refugees from Europe were flocking to New York in hope of finding peace in the Promised Land, artists from America were arriving in Paris in droves, desperate to reconnect with the American nation, with which they felt they were losing touch, by creating artistic diasporas elsewhere. As Malcolm Cowley puts it, “the effect of living in Europe had been to emphasize the most national…­ elements in the [artist’s] character” (101). According to Elizabeth H. Turner, in 1921 there were about 100,000 Americans in Paris; in 1925, the number quadrupled to 400,000 (2).

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A similar paradox permeated the 1940s expatriation wave of American artists who, like the previous generation of artists, were disheartened by the pervasive commercialism from which they sought an escape. Moreover, just as the 1920s generation searched for the opportunity to reconnect with the more basic aspects of American culture, the next generation of expatriates hoped to find an Arcadian alternative south of the border or in the African North. Stuart Chase’s Mexico: A Study of Two Americas (1931) became the expatriation manifesto of the generation portraying Mexico as a naturalist utopia whose inhabitants led a healthier, happier lifestyle than Americans.14 Others travelled across the Atlantic to Tangier which became the Mecca of the Beats Movement. As in the 1920s, the 1950s expatriates to Tangier went abroad to seek freedom from Cold War America, but also from the spreading American individualism and increasing commodification of American identity. In both cases, the nomadic alternative presented an interesting dialectic: on the one hand, it served as an important means of grappling with the new mobilities and social changes at home; on the other, it meant embracing exile as a potential home. In the 1990s, a whole body of scholarship has been generated on the subject of the modernist conceptualization of exile as a form of dwelling. In Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement, Caren Kaplan provides a critique of the “modernist privileging of exile” that is removed from any political or historical context (28). Her study dismisses this approach as romanticizing exile as a location unto itself (36). And yet, such privileging of exile became paramount to the feminist revision of modernist texts written by women.15 In “My Art Belongs to Daddy: Incest as Exile, the Textual Economics of Hayford Hall,” Mary Lynn Broe, for instance, highlights the emancipatory role that exile 14 15

See Pells. This argument is variously re-drawn in the collection of essays on women’s writers and exile, Women’s Writings in Exile, edited by Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram (Chapel Hill and London: The U of North Carolina P, 1989). See also Shari Benstock’s study of modernist women writers’ expatriate narratives, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940 ­(Austin: The U of Texas P, 1986). For more studies that align women’s displacement with such a space outside socio-cultural limitations, see Janice Stout, Through the Window, Out the Door: Women’s Narratives of Departure, from Austin and Cather, to Tyler, Morrison, and Didion, (Tuscaloosa: The U of Alabama P, 1998); Delia Caparoso Konzett, Ethnic Modernisms: Anzia Yezierska, Zora N. Hurston, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetic of Dislocation (New York: Macmillan, 2002); Erica Johnson, Home, Maison, Casa: The Politics of Location in Works by Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Erminia Dell’Oro (London: Associated up, 2003). Clearly, as the emancipatory vein of these studies suggests, it is not true that women writers are mostly left out from “the discussion of exile as redemptive authorial practice,” as Kaplan infers (Questions of Travel 119).

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plays in the writing of modernist women writers.16 She argues that for many women writers home was a site of patriarchal oppression whereby voluntary exile provided a means of finding a new sense of dwelling within expatriate female communities (61). In a similar manner, Shari Benstock in her study of modernist women writers’ expatriate narratives, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940, argues that while most modernist women’s accounts “rewrite the myth that expatriation was always an enabling and liberating act” (454), it, nonetheless, enabled them to critique patriarchal oppression by establishing “a powerful mother culture beyond the bounds of patriarchy” (454). In Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity, Gerald J. Kennedy examines the American context of expatriate narratives of Scott F. Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Djuna Barnes only to conclude that the displacement pervading their texts becomes another form of emplacement. Whether gleaned from the lens of Heidegger’s theory of poetic dwelling or the Deleuze-Guattari nomadology, contemporary studies of Barnes and Bowles continue to view the nomadic as an urban and primarily emancipatory phenomenon. Exemplary of this approach is Goody’s (2007) study of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, and Gertrude Stein, in which she employs Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of a nomadic war machine to examine the three women’s modernist “becomings” (21). Although Goody promises to “activate” their text as a “productive machine, plugged into machines of culture (social production) and desire” (22), she ends up locking them into the “majoritarian principles and structures” from which she vows to release them by deploying these texts as the acme of urban, machinic modernism (23). As Caren Kaplan warned in her 1990s study of displacement, the danger of using Deleuze’s and ­Guattari’s theory of nomadology as a whole-sale approach to interpreting modernist texts lies in the lack of a specific socio-cultural context underpinning their theorizations (89). As outlined above, the historical events surrounding American modernism often re-enforced the American homage to America’s frontier sensibility while simultaneously mobilizing its boundaries. In spite of its technological advances, American modernity remains attached to the dream of the grand frontier as a nomadic space or nomos that is defined not so much in terms of the Deleuze-Guattari deterritorialization-reterritorialization binary, but rather in terms of a dialectic that points to an “indistinction” between what Agamben calls “the state of nature and the state of exception” (Homo Sacer 37). As this book emphasizes, the nomadic sensibility underpinning the American modernisms of Barnes and Bowles remains indebted to the pastoral spirit 16 See Women’s Writings in Exile, edited by Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram (Chapel Hill and London: The U of North Carolina P, 1989).

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of America, its complex mythographies and (mis)conceptions. The authors’ indebtedness to the mytholographies that make up American identity rather than the machinic technē distinguishes them from the futurist modernisms of Marinetti, but also helps to delineate the nomadic as an archetypal rather than strictly modern facet of American sensibility. The last section of this introduction therefore turns attention to some of the theoretical (de)formations of nomadic sensibility in modernist scholarship by embracing a more comprehensive approach to nomadism, specifically, by employing Agamben’s notion of nomos as a state of indistinction where exile and home, reality and fiction, urbanism and pastoralism create a syncretic, yet trans-locational dialectic.

Breaking Eggs for Omelettes: Theoretical De-Formations of American Modernism and the Nomafictions of Barnes and Bowles

As this Introduction has already suggested, in literary studies, nomadism continues to be deployed primarily as a vehicle of emancipation.17 Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theory of nomadology, particularly their emphasis on deterritorialization or displacement as a potentially empowering gesture permeates critical studies of Barnes and Bowles. While providing interesting fodder for thought, the majority of the Deleuze and Guattari concepts—be it deterritorialization, the rhizome, or the war machine—are often used anecdotally. Since most of their terminology is grounded in avant-garde theories and works of art (this influence is surreptitiously acknowledged through references to modernists like Paul Klee, F.S. Fitzgerald, or to the Russian Formalists, to name the most obvious), reading modernist texts solely through their theoretical concepts is often like failing to break eggs in order to make omelettes, to borrow Brecht’s term again. While a detailed critique of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s nomadology is beyond the scope of this study, several issues are worth pointing out. For example, their concept of deterritorialization as outlined in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, specifically in its emphasis on dismantling dogmatic representation, social dogma, and territoriality, owes much to the structuralism of the Russian formalists and the Prague Linguistic Circle, but also to Brecht’s conceptualization of the so-called “estrangement effect” as a necessary means of disrupting automatization, or as Viktor Shklovsky says in his essay, “Art as Device,” “to make a stone stony” (6). Similarly, the concept of nomadic “war machine” 17

See, for example, Friedman, Benstock, or Goody. Also cf. Deborah Paes de Barros, Fast Cars and Bad Girls: Nomadic Subjects and Women’s Road Stories (New York: Lang, 2004).

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owes much to Jarry’s “time machine” and Marinetti’s machinic art, as well as to ­Gordon Craig’s theory of the “The Actor and the Über-Marionnette” (1911). In this essay, Craig anticipates Antonin Artaud’s “body without organs” celebrated by Deleuze and Guattari as the effect of detteritorialization by highlighting the movement of the marionette as a body beyond “the flesh and blood” (154).18 Consequently, the Deleuze-Guattari notion of the smooth versus striated space, in other words, the nomadic nomos (meaning pasture, but also law, an important facet most literary critics continue to ignore) as a “space which is unlimited” and located outside socio-cultural paradigms has clear origins in the Transcendental philosophies of Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman’s national idealism that defined American identity as grounded in nature which, in his terms, is culture. However, failing to account for the dialectic that informs the American frontier sensibility, the Deleuze and Guattari definition of nomos leaves much to be desired theoretically, as well as logistically particularly when applied to the study of American modernists. Critical theorists like Caren Kaplan and Rosi Braidotti have been vocal on the potentially imperializing and sexist gestures pervading the Deleuze-­ Guattari nomadology, specifically its emphasis on excess as a liberating gesture. As both Barnes’s and Bowles’s work indicate, the nomadic aesthetic of American modernism works by subtraction rather than excess, by means of dialectic synthesis rather than destruction or annihilation of boundaries, but by a generation of a boundary-limit nonetheless. Such an aesthetic inevitably raises issues about the ethical consequences of expatriate movement and modernist exile. At the same time, however, it suggests that exile may as well be the very means of achieving or foregrounding the ethical in aesthetics. This is why Agamben’s theorization of nomos as a space that brings to light the complex dialectic and interrelationship between nature and exception becomes particularly useful when elucidating Barnes’s and Bowles’s relationship to the nomadic sensibility of American modernity. Returning to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Agamben in his Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life defines nomos as a sacred but also violent state (37). This book employs a combination of aesthetic, nomadic, and postcolonial theories by Alain ­Badiou, Rosi ­Braidotti, Ella Shohat, Robert Stam, and Sara Ahmed, for example. This ­approach provides an opportunity to engage with the dialectics, but also an opportunity to expose the nuances of that which remains inaccessible yet present in aesthetic transpositions that work by subtracted excess, or what 18

See Edward Gordon Craig, “The Actor and the Über-Marionnette,” Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documentaries, ed. Kolocotroni, Goldman, and Taxidou (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998) 150–154.

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Badiou in his Handbook of Inaesthetics refers to as aesthetic framing or “subtraction” where culture and nature, the urban and the pastoral, colonial and postcolonial, ­utopian and ­dystopian, enter into a dialectic relation (7). As the following chapters show, the works of Barnes and Bowles seek to strike a balancing act between the two: on the one hand, they acknowledge the inevitability of civilization; on the other, they expose the potential immobilities associated with the pastoral turn. This double entendre is perhaps best encapsulated in Bowles’s story, “The Iron Table,” where the husband wishes to escape civilization by going abroad, by seeking escape in nature while his wife remains sceptical about the so-called absolute freedom her husband associates with the nomadic, pastoral lifestyle. He encourages his wife to go to the desert, where they could “escape from the Industrial Revolution,” “from Western civilization” (466). But his wife merely retorts: “I don’t feel there’s any way of escaping it” (467). A similar paradox underpins Barnes’s story, “A Night in the Woods,” in which a runaway couple seeks “that remembered freedom of their youth” in the woods only to realize that “[l]ife is not freedom after all” (227). Both Barnes and Bowles deploy the urban-pastoral dialectic as an important social commentary on the ways in which America’s two major artistic expatriate movements relied on the pastoral ideal to justify their vision of what could be called nomadic utopia. From Barnes’s Ryder and Nightwood and Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies, to their short stories and plays, both authors expose the immobilities that drive the notion of a liberating elsewhere. Instead, they deploy exile as a conundrum of turns that interfere with the characters’ utopian dreams whether they pertain to personal relationships or cultural interpretations of individuation and freedom. Initially Europe-bound or travelling to Panama or Morocco, both Barnes’s and Bowles’s characters never quite depart, and even though they often come back to America, they never quite return. Through their interim sense of location, their sense of non-belonging, but also their understanding of the ways in which memory makes returns inevitable yet physically impossible, Barnes and Bowles point to the (im)mobilizing turns of the exilic solution and their gendered, cultural, and racially inflected implications. Both Nightwood and Two Serious Ladies explore American modernity in relation to its racialized and gendered others whose bodies are often tokenized in the name of nomadic utopia. For instance, in Two Serious Ladies Bowles explores the nomadic geopolitics of American modernism by exposing its reliance on otherizing discourses, but also by highlighting the non-linear gender and racial hierarchies that exist between an American female traveller like Mrs Copperfield and her Panamanian paramour, Pacifica. Barnes’s Nightwood is

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preoccupied with the foreignness of exile(d) bodies that are confounded by their persistent yet immobilizing restlessness while simultaneously exposing the ways in which exile results in a kind of bodily automatization that familiarizes otherness as a transcultural vehicle of modernity. Its transcultural aspect exposes modernity’s anxiety about bodily, cultural, ethnic, and racial differences while simultaneously pointing to its relentless courtship of alterity as an abstract aesthetic. Just as Bowles highlights the nomadic alternative as a “mere chimera” (Two Serious 163), Barnes deploys the exilic mythography of modernity as a “formless meditation” (Nightwood 59). In the famously restless “Go Down, Matthew” chapter of Nightwood, Dr O’Connor warns Nora against the utopian ideal of nomadic pastoralism: “the trouble with you is you are not just a myth-maker, you are also a destroyer, you made a beautiful fable, then put Voltaire to bed with it” (140). Both Barnes and Bowles delineate the American expatriate movements in the 1920s and the 1940s as courting the pastoral ideal as a possible alternative, a utopian dream whose nomadic and, often, ethnically, culturally, and racially-­ vexed spirit was grounded not so much in the urban mass culture, but in the mythography of the American frontier, the acme of the American Dream. Mythography has been an essential part of American identity, “bordered on one side by the primitive frontier and on the other by urban Europe” (Machor 92). In Barnes and Bowles, however, the notion of urban Europe is further complicated by transcultural influences that problematize the American nomadic impulse as a desire for an ethical transformation of what Machor calls America’s “moral geography” where “the personal conflict between self-fulfillment and group identification and the cultural tension between change and continued stability are reconciled” (10, 18). Such reconciliation is not only impossible, but also undesirable, as Bowles and Barnes reveal. Problematizing the emancipatory tenor of nomadic modernity, their works serve as important social commentaries whose utopian undertones provide insight not so much into history per se, but rather into the complex cultural nomadographies of American literary modernism. In this respect, both authors construct what this book calls their own historiographic nomafiction,19 a narrative space where the “utopia presents a narrative picture of history-information rather than the theoretical description of a fully formed historical [and strictly urban or rural] situation” (Wegner 115). This narrative picture has an exilic tonality; its nomadic rhythm presents a rich scale of ­transcultural 19

This term was coined by Pavlina Radia in “The Tawdry Frontiers and Nomadographies of Jane Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies,” Women’s Studies: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 39.7 (October-November 2010): 747–764.

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and (post)colonial variations on the same yet persistently deferred theme of a future that remains a dream, a promise never quite realized, yet always ­re-membered. In both Barnes’s and Bowles’s work, race thus constitutes a vexed territory that is sublimated and mobilized, yet not always thoroughly challenged, through their nomadic aesthetic. In this respect, their nomadic aesthetic exemplifies the (post)colonial facets of what Machor refers to as the American Dream’s “moral geography,” but also reveals its complexities. Finally, both Barnes’s and Bowles’s works contain autobiographical elements; however, their use of the third-person narrators spatializes the distance between personal and narrative experience. While their works continue to be read through a mainly autobiographical lens, the readings in the following chapters draw attention to their social, political, but also trans-colonial sensitivities that make up their historiographic nomafictions. If, however, as Dr O’Connor says in Barnes’s Nightwood, “ritual itself constitutes an instruction” (150), then Barnes’s and Bowles’s exiles are propelled by their disposition to find themselves enchained by the very freedom of their relentlessly aesthetic condition. The cruelty of this condition is reflected in the authors’ preoccupation with puppets, mannequins, and objects, be they eggbeaters, gryphons, suitcases, or alcohol. Mobilizing such images, their works point to the depersonalizing, and inevitably disfiguring facets of history while creating a space where the exilic subject can be apprehended in its physical and mnemonic displacement. In their engagement with immobilizing mobilities, their dramatic, short story, and fiction works evoke Artaud’s notion of text as a pure performance or “sacred rite” wherein the actor/dancer/exile steps into their own otherness, courting their doubles in the course of trans-cultural entendres.20 Consequently, this reading of Djuna Barnes’s and Jane Bowles’s works theorizes the pastoral moment to which their narratives persistently return as essential to their nomadic aesthetic, an aesthetic that sheds light on some of the regional and folklore aspects of American modernism, paying special attention to the relationship between American identity and its attachment to the landscape, the grand American frontier, as well as its colonial and postcolonial mythographies. As this Introduction and the chapters that follow emphasize, Barnes’s and Bowles’s works probe into this relationship through characters 20

For more, see Antonin Artaud’s Theatre and Its Double, particularly his essay “On Balinese Theatre,” in which he foregrounds the idea of metaphysical, ‘pure’ theatre as based on gestic, image-driven vocabulary rather than verbal rendering of the idea. In both Barnes’s and Bowles’s works, the characters’ gestic performances become as important as their verbalizations.

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whose complex nomadographies expose the intricacies of mobility, gender, race and culture relations that are grounded in transnational modernist aesthetics, but are also simultaneously rooted in the trans-cultural mythologies of the American Dream and its waning sensibility. The art of cultural and geographic juxtaposition so important to modernist aesthetic is crucial to the works of Barnes and Bowles in which exile, displacement, and alienation play a major role in foregrounding modern consciousness as (im)mobilized by increasing automatization and homelessness. However, as this book reveals, their works do not indulge in the kind of alienation and estrangement with which most modernist works are often associated, but rather bring to the foreground the exile’s complex, yet inevitable encounters with their runaway, raw, and naked selves.

part 1 Renegade Aesthetics of Djuna Barnes

⸪

FIGURE 1

“Patchin Place” (2012) by Pavlina Radia

Introduction to Part 1 The foreigner lies so bewitchingly; he is so cleverly bad. Perhaps it is because he is a better scholar of nature or a better liar—a scholarly man of unscholarly moments. He has the secret of unalloyed happiness and unalloyed pain. Recognition of both, acceptance of both…. djuna barnes, “Becoming Intimate with Bohemians” (235)

⸪ Dubbed the “immigrant without a ship” by Folke Isaaksson (qtd. in Field 245), Djuna Barnes (1892–1982) occupies an unorthodox, albeit iconic place in the Pantheon of American modernism. Barnes the artist, journalist, short story writer, novelist, poet, and playwright, remains overshadowed and thus inevitably marginalized by what is often viewed as her urban cult novel Nightwood (1936). Contributing to the Djuna Barnes legend is a critical preoccupation with her complex biography whose epic quality continues to garner attention. In juxtaposition to the biographical curios stands the piqued interest in Barnes’s extravagant persona, her auburn hair, prominent earrings, and acerbic wit that managed to pulverize even the great Hemingway, who after an incidental “mauling” of Djuna that took place in the 1920s in Paris’s Dingo Bar, got his earful.1 Not surprisingly, when Peggy Guggenheim published her Out of This Century memoir in 1979, in which she describes Djuna, sitting on the bed, writing in her underwear, looking beautiful with her stunning red hair, Barnes who was then 87, was not impressed. She wanted to be known not for her biography or her anatomy, but for her art. Having spent more than a decade in Paris and living the typically ambulant lifestyle of an American expatriate artist in Europe, Barnes’s iconic status was further sealed through critical discourses that celebrated the nomadic ethic pervading her narratives. As was the case with Jane Bowles’s oeuvre, Djuna Barnes’s works and her nomadic characters invited a vigorous critical re-­assessment in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the publications of ­Marilyn Broe’s Silence and Power, Ellen G. Friedman’s and Miriam Fuchs’s collection of essays, Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction, and Ellen G.  Friedman’s essay, “Where Are the Missing Contents?” all of which 1 For more details, see Herring and Fielding.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004314436_003

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aligned her errant characters with emancipatory subversions of patriarchal and ­cultural conventions. In a recent work, Alex Goody expanded on these studies by linking Barnes’s writing to the Deleuzian model of the nomadic war machine as a further example of America’s primarily urban modernity. Studies by D ­ aniela Caselli, Diane Warren, and Julie Taylor have started investigating Barnes’s transnational modernisms. Generally, however, Barnes’s representations of her characters’ errant lifestyle and beliefs have been primarily interpreted through the thematic prism rather than as an important contribution to experimental modernist aesthetics.2 In addition, while in most of the contemporary scholarship, Barnes’s narratives are associated primarily with urban, progressive, and inherently Eurocentric discourses of modernism, Part 1 of this book argues that, like Bowles’s work, Barnes’s oeuvre engages a very distinct American poetic of space. This poetic exposes the American anxiety over being the avatar of the new machine age by tapping into the pastoral mythographies of American identity as being located in a unique, pastoral, albeit vexed (post)colonial turn towards the American frontier. This is not to say that Barnes’s texts do not register ­American modernism’s fascination with the urban culture. They do, but what is frequently ignored by critics is Barnes’s engagement with the more regional qualities of American identity. This section therefore centres on exploring Barnes’s modernism as an interesting marriage of urban and pastoral, regional and transnational, as well as colonial and postcolonial aspects that allowed her to highlight, on the one hand, the American attachment to the landscape and its holistic potential, but also critique its blind spots and limitations, on the other hand. Barnes’s works thus reveal a whole spectrum of utopian and dystopian tendencies that pervaded American modernism. They are informed by the kind of diasporic consciousness that was characteristic of many American modernist works responding to the 1920s European expatriation and America’s increasing push towards urbanization and commodification. The diasporic consciousness represented by Barnes’s, but also Bowles’s, oeuvre extends the traditional understanding of diaspora as referring to the history of Jewish dispersion to a wider, more transnational perspective exemplifying the nomadic aspect of the 2 Although Daniela Caselli investigates Barnes’s poetics in her study, Improper Modernism: Djuna Barnes’s Bewildering Corpus (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), she examines what she calls Barnes’s “coded” aesthetic of (un)covering secrets primarily as an autobiographical strategy (22). Similarly, Julie Taylor’s Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh up, 2012) draws on the Barnes archives to explore the author’s representations of trauma and affect from various (but mostly biographical) perspectives.

Introduction to Part 1

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twentieth century. This perspective, as deployed by Barnes and Bowles, strives to speak to “multiple cultural contexts and illuminates how some of modernism’s abstract concepts, such as exile and homelessness, read differently for literary communities that encounter there historical circumstances of exile and displacement en masse” (Schachter 15). While Barnes’s work in particular is concerned with local and translocal cultural contexts whereby the critique of gender frequently sublimates America’s racial anxieties, Bowles focuses on the more transnational, global aspects of performing and writing modernism abroad. At the same time, however, both writers engage with local and transnational contexts to explore the (post)colonial heritage of twentieth-century, nomad America. These contexts speak to the various racial and gender asymmetries that are informed by the ways in which border-crossing, travel, and displacement are implicated by the authors’ white privilege, yet complicated by their class and gender. While they debunk the patriarchal underpinnings of (post)colonial relations, their critique of racial conflicts and asymmetries is sublimated at best through their representations of otherness as a global marker of cultural, racial, and gender difference. As this book shows, their nomadic modernisms speak to the vexed and ambivalent topographies—affective, cultural, political, and abstract—of diasporic othering. This othering inscribes the ways in which “writing and understanding diasporic practices is thus riddled with an inescapable ambivalence stemming from the imperative of going beyond colonial nostalgia (which tends to sanctify the ‘native’), and from the necessity of ‘acting out [colonial] memory’” (Sajed 199). As this section emphasizes, Barnes’s nomadic aesthetic does not always escape the nostalgia of America’s (post) colonial memory. On the one hand, her nomadic aesthetic resuscitates the vision of pastoral America as a promised (unpeopled) land through her works’ engagement with the landscape that is frequently gendered feminine and historically subject to the (colonial) conquest. On the other hand, it also troubles the (post)colonial reliance on virginal/landscape metaphors. In this, Barnes’s works inevitably uncover the challenges of American multiculturalism: its tendency to advocate the Promised Land as a hybridized utopia while transforming its violent, colonial heritage and racial anxieties into a palimpsest of virginal myths. Deploying America’s (post)colonial history as a bodily text and textual body, Barnes exposes what Baudrillard calls the “phantasy of emigration” and exile as a “form of interiorization of [one’s] culture” through the intertextual and intermedial nature of her oeuvre (America 75). Her narratives frequently contrast scriptures, chivalric romances, America’s foundational myths, and Transcendentalist philosophy, with the Whitmanesque embrace of the pulsating

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city, critiquing the modernist agenda to use exile and displacement as a means of “making it new” while longing for a place beyond time and space. By emphasizing the ambiguous nature of placement and displacement, mobility and immobility, but also the porosity of borders, Barnes echoes Ella Shohat’s and Robert Stam’s argument that multicultural and diasporic narratives contain “a clash of multiple intertexts” (141). These intertexts often blur the line between home and exile, longing and belonging, but also exemplify the nomadic aspect of diasporic consciousness: specifically, its unwillingness to confine itself to a simple binary paradigm. The ambiguity of the frontier—including who belongs and who does not—both inscribes and undermines the utopian dream.3 As Malcolm Cowley noted in his memoir, many Americans sought in Europe what they couldn’t find in America. And yet, in spite of their search for a more “cultured” art world and lifestyle, they frequently waxed poetic about returning to a “Kentucky hill cabin, a farm house in Iowa or Wisconsin,…a home to which they couldn’t go back” (12). For Barnes, it was a farm house in Cornwallon-Hudson, a place where she grew up and to which she often returned in her works, if only to problematize the so-called idyll of the rural environment, but also to map and critique the historical and geopolitical complexities informing American identity and its attachment to the landscape. Recently, critics like Dorothee Kocks or Leo Marx noted the unique relationship between American modernism and its nostalgia for the “green garden,” the ecological utopia of forests where the characters encounter themselves (Marx 155). As Part 1 shows, in Barnes’s work, this pastoral imperative is not only prevalent, but it also exposes some of the peculiarities of American modernism through what Kocks refers to as a “geographic embrace” (xii). As Barnes’s narratives suggest, this geographic embrace produced not only its own geopolitics, but 3 See, for example, Sudesh Mishra’s Diaspora Criticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh up, 2006) in which he describes diasporic consciousness as informed by utopian ideologies of home and return, displacement and emplacement. Mishra here refers to William Safran’s 1991 article, “Diaspora in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,” in which Safran highlights the “eschatological concept” of diaspora; specifically, its emphasis on “holding out utopia— or eutopia—that stands in contrast to the perceived dystopia in which actual life is lived” (qtd. in Mishra 42). Although diasporic politics is frequently immersed in the (post)colonial nostalgia that surrounds notions of belonging and borders, it does not advocate or rely on “an oversimplified understanding of diaspora as a reversible condition” (Schachter 18). By contrast, as Allison Schachter notes, it acknowledges its hybrid and hybridized conditions and realities. For more see, Allison Schachter, Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford up, 2012) and Alina Sajed, Postcolonial Encounters in International Relations: Politics of Transgression in the Maghreb (New York: Routledge, 2013).

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it also triggered a new, different kind of exilic intensity that lent itself to creating imaginary diasporas—be it through characters’ literary errantry or formal experimentation. This formal experimentation takes on a renegade quality that Part 1 of this book refers to as Barnes’s renegade aesthetics. Although the following chapters provide a more detailed examination of this aesthetic, a brief explication is necessary here. The chapters argue that Barnes’s aesthetic deploys the exilic nomad as a renegade of sorts: both a deserter and a rebel, a turncoat and an apostate.4 Drawing on the Oxford English Dictionary definition of the renegade as a rebel whose changeable quality allows them to participate in a whole network of transpositions—creative, historical, cultural, and socio-political— Barnes’s nomadic aesthetic emphasizes the diverse and often asymmetrical relationships between historical events and their geographical (dis)locations, including diasporic consciousness and its hybrid (re)presentations. In this sense, her aesthetic echoes Alain Badiou’s notion that art is “the appearance of an unfounded or nondiscursive truth, a truth that is exhausted in its beingthere” (Handbook 2). It is a form of inaesthetic, a constant transposition of ethical and aesthetical into an in-ethic, a kind of “passing into” or “passing over” (Radia, “Renegade” n. pag.). The constant transposition exemplifies a moral, but also cultural conundrum which the term renegade connotes.5 This notion applies to Barnes’s preoccupation with the creative process as a renegade act that escapes the author’s agency and/or intent. For Barnes, whether the artistic process strives to encapsulate the politics of making art or its historical, (post) colonial contexts, the aesthetic production refers to the subject’s local manifestations, as well as inscribes “the coming to light of an indiscernible of the times, which, as such is neither a known or recognized multiple, nor an ineffable singularity” (Badiou, Being and Event 17). In investigating the relevance of the American frontier to Barnes’s work, the renegade notion of the border is particularly important as it connotes the fluidity and mobility of boundaries— be they cultural, racial, gendered, or geographic. The following chapters thus distinguish themselves from Daniela Caselli’s notion of “an aesthetic of ineffability” whereby the very process of naming eradicates the “object of representation” (45). By contrast, Barnes’s aesthetic enfolds (post)colonial anxieties into the pastoral ideal. Her debunking of socalled virginal landscapes becomes an important commentary on gender, but 4 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the renegade is an “apostate,” but also a “rebel,” “a person who deserts, betrays, or is disloyal…a traitor” (n. pag). 5 This term was first used in Pavlina Radia’s article, “Renegade Whos Aesthetics: The Recipe for an Uncooked Story,” Double Dialogues 12 (2010). For more details, see Radia.

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also race, albeit in a sublimated form. While Barnes is no way a champion of race as a political cause, nonetheless, her renegade approach to race can be interpreted as an acknowledgment of her white privilege, an attempt to expose the ways in which the frontier fantasy was wedded to the colonial logic that American modernism so desperately tried to mythologize and transpose into a pastoral ideal. At the same time, however, this tacit acknowledgment does not escape participating in the cultural and literary forms of appropriation she so often critiques. As the following chapters show, Barnes’s engagement with geography celebrates nature as both a centre and outer margin, where American modernity encounters but also re-affirms its itinerant character located in the heritage of American colonization. Her work deploys nature as an important symbol of American identity, but also as the ultimate margin where “social values disappear and are replaced by a strict code of the woods” as Richard Chase points out (51). As a modernist, Barnes transforms this code into what this section refers to as her renegade aesthetic, an aesthetic where oppositional forces and territories, or diasporas—be they rural or urban, gendered or racialized—are variously intertwined and mobilized. While Barnes approaches such daring, yet eco-friendly diasporas with a fair degree of cynicism, her work, particularly her earlier short stories, her ­carnivalesque novel-romance Ryder, and her equally melodramatic ­Nightwood, deploy the deeply pastoral tenor of American modernity. However, this deployment is not so much through transcultural conversions of the mythographies characteristic of Bowles’s work (discussed in Part 2), but rather through a form of spiritual atheology,6 a kind of erring and errant ethic that sublimates in Barnes’s renegade poetics of space. Her characters are foreigners in search of secret lands, courting their own estrangement and nostalgic for the past that no longer is. But their errant journeys also point to the many ethical blunders they commit in their search for both freedom and self-knowledge. They are “scholar[s] of nature,” who err “bewitchingly,” to use Barnes’s own words (“Becoming Intimate” 235). No matter how engaged with or challenged by the encroaching urban space, be it the small town of Cornwall or the city of New York, Paris, London, or ­Berlin, Barnes’s characters’ encounter with themselves often takes place on the margins of the city: in nature, where, in the manner of Henry David Thoreau’s “Walker Errant,” they embrace what Thoreau calls the “savage within us” and their “darkest wood” (674). Exposing their nostalgia for what one of Barnes’s 6 The discussion draws on the aberrant quality of writing as detailed in Mark Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology (Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1984).

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characters refers to in the story, “A Night in the Woods,” as “freedom out-ofdoors” (Barnes, Collected Stories 221), Barnes aligns their errant notoriety with a spiritual atheology whose nomadic foundations are less in coherence with the Deleuzian notion of nomos, defined as unlimited space that stands in opposition to polis (the city). Rather, they are more in alignment with Agamben’s definition of nomos as being a site where the two intertwine in a kind of “topological zone of indistinction” where “the state of nature and law, outside and inside, pass through one another” (Homo Sacer 37). The indistinction between outside and inside, between nature and law, points to the ways in which the natural world encroaches on the urban space and vice versa, exposing it as a site of suspension, but also inevitably as a site of potential violence where traditions and identities are undone. This dialectic evokes the early settler conceptualization of America not only as “a spiritual set of individual regeneration” (Machor 47), but also as a society whose cityscapes are wedded to their inherently frontier, or to put it differently, exilic nature. The following chapters explore how Barnes’s  “urban-pastoral ideograph[ies],” to use Machor’s words (10), specifically the thematic references of nature and city, allow for a complex mapping of the human character or lack thereof, and how specific geographies inform her characters’ exilic positioning—be it via movement or a static state. They argue that the relationship between geography and nature (and the characters’ positioning and functioning within them) expose the ethical aspects of the exilic or frontier mentality that, analogically, produce a particular range of what this section terms as Barnes’s renegade aesthetics, but also provide insight into the nuanced dialectic within American modernism. The individual chapters of this section build on the denotative meaning of renegade as an apostate whose ethics are not only fluid and questionable, but also driven by a disciplined honing inward, rather than a celebration of excess.7 Drawing on a combination of theorists—Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Mark Taylor, Part 1 explores Barnes’s spiritual atheology as an apostasy whose renegade ethic generates an extremely mobile yet disciplined (in)aesthetics. It borrows the term (in)aesthetics from Alain Badiou who defines it as “the impersonal production of a truth that is addressed to everyone” ­(“Fifteen Theses” 3), a desire for stability, or to put it in Taylor’s words, an errand that cannot deny its errant quality. As the following chapters reveal, such a renegade ethic pervades Barnes’s complex aesthetics spanning diverse genres and media from short stories, fiction, poetry, and journalism to visual art and drama to 7 The emphasis on excess in Barnes’s work has been discussed by a whole line of critics from Broe to Goody, Warren, and Caselli.

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indicate that no form of progress—be it artistic, socio-cultural or ­political— can be achieved without moments of regression and suspension that thwart but also propel human subjects towards questioning their own ontology and space. Consequently, the Barnes section also counters the rather limiting interpretations of diaspora and diasporic consciousness as tied to a particular geopolitics and space. Rather it takes heed from James Clifford’s incisive broadening of the term as grounded in multiplicity and a “co-presence of ‘here’ and ‘there’” that is frequently “articulated with an antiteleological (sometimes messianic) temporality” (264). Mapping these multiplicities, the section attends to Barnes’s representation of nomadic and exilic politics as informed by diasporic consciousness that re-imagines home in many different, albeit exilic forms as an errant and erring site of familiar estrangement.

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Short Stories and Renegade “Night Woods” As already briefly mentioned, Barnes came from an artistic family: her father was a musician, painter, writer, and a free thinker; her mother was a violinist; and her grandmother Zadel Barnes, a major influence on Barnes, was a wellrespected journalist for the Home Journal and Springfield Republican, as well as a writer and poet. When her parents divorced in 1912 and her mother moved with the children to New York, Barnes was forced to quit her studies at Pratt Institute and at the Arts Students League in New York, where she initially took up drawing and illustration, to instead support her family by entering into a career in writing. She started freelancing as a journalist for newspapers like New York Press, New York Morning Telegraph, Dial, Vanity Fair, and McCall’s while also writing short stories, one-act plays, and poetry. By the 1920s, she had made a name for herself among the artistic circle in Greenwich Village and was sent out by McCall’s to Paris to write articles about the American expatriate Bohemia. Though Barnes returned to New York in the late 1930s and became a recluse, writing poetry in her one-bedroom apartment at Patchin Place, her writing never quite parted with the rural ideographies that shaped her newfound urban identity.1 Barnes grew up with her mother, step-mother, her Bohemian father, Wald, and her grandmother Zadel who presided over the family’s abode in the woods, on a farm in Cornwall-on-Hudson.2 In many ways, Barnes’s rural upbringing reflects the ways in which American modernity remained tied to its rural past and distinguished itself from its European counterparts. During the first decade of the twentieth century, emigration from Europe started flooding into major American cities, while at the same time more and more Americans were moving from farmlands into the cities to seek success and prosperity. This m ­ ajor movement, however, went hand in hand with an increasing sense of nostalgia for the old, rural America (Norton et al., 683). As Machor explains, originating in America’s colonial heritage, the close tie with the rural landscape was essential to the definition of American identity as free, but also separate from its imperial motherland. While reframed by the twentieth-century developments that propelled America onto the world’s stage as a major empire, American modernism thus developed as an extension of the urban-pastoral ideal whose 1 For more details, see Fields and Herring. 2 For biographical details, see Fields and Herring.

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dystopic elements are persistently juxtaposed, yet simultaneously challenged by this very synthesis. Barnes’s stories embody this synthesis as they progress from rural to urban topographies. They both entertain and reject the characters’ attachment to and nostalgia for nature as a kind of “a/theology,” to use Mark Taylor’s terms, while they search for a sense of meaning outside of the world of technology, materialism, and consumption. Their return to nature thus frequently takes on the form of a quest for a socio-cultural diaspora and spiritual renewal that are marked by a sense of, and a commitment to, the continuous displacement that they are desperately striving to evade.3 While their renegade sensibility evokes the quest for American renaissance, which was a prevalent tendency among American modernists—be it in art, politics, or society,4 Barnes’s stories provide interesting insights into the historical context of American modernity, particularly its dual investment in the desire for progress, on the one hand, and the need to remain grounded in nature, on the other.5 This duality anticipates some of Barnes’s later work, while simultaneously returning to the same through-line: the renegade nature of art and humanity. Given that Barnes’s stories span more than five decades of publishing history, it might be useful to divide her writing into three major periods: pre-Paris (1914–1920), Paris (1920–1938), and post-Paris (1938 to the 1980s). Each period is unique in its focus and each depicts a particular social context while sharing a similar aesthetic concern: an engagement with the impact of American modernity on the characters’ sensibility and sense of location or lack thereof in light of the rising position of America as the world’s beacon of technology and power, but also as a mythical land of success.

Fine Horses and the “Earth” Riders: Pre-Paris Stories

Barnes’s pre-Paris stories (1914–1920) express an increasing sense of anxiety about the changing American landscape through characters who feel either alienated from their homeland due to modern progress or seek a new start in 3 Further elaborated in Chapter 5, this notion becomes particularly relevant to the rise of the Provincetown Players, an experimental theatre group of which Barnes was a member. See also Cheryl Black, The Women of Provincetown, 1915–1922 (Tuscaloosa and London: The U of Alabama P, 2002). 4 See Chapter 1 for more details. 5 As noted in Chapter 1 and further discussed in Part 2 of this book, Bowles’s work echoes a similar sensibility.

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the land of promise. Both types of characters feel overwhelmed by their sense of alienation, as well as by the space of the American frontier that they find not only spatially but also culturally challenging. By highlighting her characters’ national plurality, Barnes comments on the paradoxes of American identity, specifically its plural, multicultural aspects, but also its grounding in nature. The stories pay homage to the vastness of the American landscape and its frontier elements that are frequently incorporated in the cityscapes through the utopian space of the green park areas and the not so idyllic dystopias of immigrant ghettoes. Set in urban and rural areas, Barnes’s pre-Paris stories examine the sense of displacement of the American identity by drawing on natural motifs to explore the relationship between diverse human ecologies that urban and rural spaces generate. One of the refrains pervading Barnes’s short stories (a refrain that further resonates in Bowles’s writing as well) is the characters’ deep-seated scepticism about America’s rising power as the beacon of civilization. In “Sprinkle of Comedy,” a 1917 story published in The New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine, to which Barnes frequently contributed, Barnes questioned changing social expectations through the protagonist, Roger, whose son, unwilling to have what his father deemed a successful “career,” mocks the machinic ideology of modernity: “It’s no use, you needn’t talk about the progress of civilization. We’re nothing but expert monkeys” (Barnes, Collected Stories 100). While the story explores the intimate conflict between the father and son, particularly the son’s yearning for independence, the conflict is extended to the larger socio-political context: the increasing urbanization and commercialization of America that threatens to invade the intimacy of the domestic space through new, consumerist values represented by the new generation. Roger has difficulty acknowledging that his son is ready to pursue his own dreams without his father’s approval. In fact, the son is ready to sneak out in the middle of the night to make sure that his father does not sabotage his future. The son’s renegade tactic here signifies what Agamben refers to as “metaphysics of the will” (The Man 72). The son’s pursuit of his own will not only exposes progress as paradoxically tied up with regression (i.e., his father’s desire for his son’s professional success inevitably entails remaining dependent on his father’s opinion), but also suggests that true progress is a matter of being in touch with one’s nature, which requires both courage, cunning, and ultimately independence. Roger is forced to make certain acknowledgements at the end of the story when he says, “The child was right. We are monkeys, or something –we do not change. As soon as we can, we go; if it is a bird, it flies; if it is a calf, it walks…” (Barnes, Collected Stories 106). Roger recognizes that progress is a part of human instinct, not just an urban disease.

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Much has been written about Barnes’s use of natural imagery to problematize modernity’s obsession with urban spaces. In Refiguring Modernism, ­Bonnie Kime Scott, however, reads Barnes’s natural imagery primarily as a feminist critique of gender stereotyping by blurring the boundaries between the human and the animal. In Scott’s words, “[t]his blurring of distinctions between the animal and the human is part of her general tendency to focus on intermediate grounds that lie between accepted, overdetermined categories” (1: 73). While Barnes’s stories do problematize gender stereotypes, they do not solely centre on power inequities between men and women, but also (implicitly) echo America’s ambiguous relationship to race and ethnicity. They explore such inequities in the context of what Agamben calls “bare life,” which he defines as “situated at the margins of political order” where “total humanization of the animal coincides with a total animalization of man” (Homo Sacer 6; The Open 77). Nature thus becomes an important marker of racial, ethnic, and cultural marginalization. Indeed, the story’s ending suggests that only by acknowledging that “we are nothing but expert monkeys,” we are actually strengthened in our humanity (Barnes, Collected Stories 100). In troubling the binary between civilization and nature, humanity and animality, Barnes deploys the frontier as a site of conflict where essentialist positions are pluralized and diversified, but also dangerously re-inscribed through the characters’ pastoral nostalgia. Barnes’s story “The Earth” (June 10, 1917, New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine) brings this notion home by revealing that power inequities are not necessarily limited to and by biological essentialism, but rather they are an important part of humanity’s dual nature. This duality is represented by two sisters, Lena and Una, Polish immigrants who, like true pioneers, set out to make a new life in the American wilderness.6 They are compared to “fine horses, horses one sees in the early dawn eating slowly, swaying from side to side, horses that plough, never in a hurry, but always accomplishing something” (Barnes, Collected Stories 110). Through these characters the story explores America’s angst over its identity as a melting pot of the natural(ized) and the civilized, the pastoral and the urban. Una and Lena work all day long on the farm and, in the evening, also look after their mad uncle Karl. “Madness to us means reversion; to such people as Una and Lena it meant progression. Now their uncle had entered into a land beyond them, the land of fancy” (111). Like them, Karl toiled all his life, quietly, without thinking or feeling. With madness, he passed into the state of a 6 As Part 2 of this book emphasizes, Jane Bowles relies on similar pairings and doubling to illustrate the ambivalent relationship between nature and culture, urban and pastoral worlds, as well as national and transnational boundaries.

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“scholar” who “spoke of things that only people who have renounced the soil speak of” (111). Karl’s madness is associated with feeling disconnected from the land, from having “renounced the soil” (111). The story foregrounds the argument that nature might be indeed smarter than the educated human. In the story, the dilemma of bare life versus civilized humanity is treated through the juxtaposition of Una’s educated wit and Lena’s common sense. Unlike Una who took a few classes to educate herself, Lena cannot read or write. Not having “learned that left arms sometimes steal while right arms are vibrating under the handshake of friendship” (113), Lena entrusts her bare life in her sister’s humanity. “She did not even speculate on the way Una looked upon matters. Una was her sister; that was sufficient” (113). But Una, unlike her sister, was “an unbroken block of calculation” (114). One day when their uncle gets lost and is brought back home by a Swedish man who works on a nearby farm, she figures that, by “mark[ing] this Swede for her own” and marrying him, she would get an unpaid help and thus raise her profits (115). As a result, she would not need her sister any more: only her land. Soon after, Una cunningly dispossesses Lena of all her land by coaxing her to sign off her half under the pretence that she is merely confirming her ownership. Angry and upset, Lena leaves the farm. As she departs, she takes two stallions, but also Una’s man. A year later, Lena returns with the Swede and a baby, having made a life for herself. In spite of her lack of education, she however ends up being the brighter one of the two. Her willingness to accept her exile and seek a fortune of her own suggest that humanity in all its “wide-eyed silences” and “half-mad expression[s]” wins the day, outshining the craftiness of the so-called civilized mind (111). However, Barnes does not seem to claim or in any way assert the supremacy of nature through her stories. Rather, she suggests that being in touch with nature means to be aware of one’s margins. The frontier experience so important to the American identity becomes a crucial testing ground for the assertion of an individual freedom as a kind of “bare life” that is “situated at the margins of the political order” (Agamben, Homo Sacer 9). Not surprisingly, most of Barnes’s characters assert their freedom within the realm of the woods, evoking the American tradition of literary outlaws like Natty Bumpo or Hester Prynne. As Leslie Fiedler notes, an important part of American mythology, the woods represent a site where the human outlaw comes face to face with his limitations, but also where he emerges as an individual strengthened in his independence and freedom (52). The link between the frontier and American identity was firmly established by the end of the nineteenth-century when an influx of immigrants forced America to re-evaluate its identity. When Frederic Jackson Turner delivered

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his address to the American Historical Association on July 12, 1893, the mythology of the grand frontier was sealed (Baym et al., vol. 2, 677). In 1920, Turner’s The Frontier in American History was published and his idea that American life unfolded along the “perennial rebirth” and “fluidity” of the frontier was re-affirmed, but so was the notion that “pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds…has its dangers as well as its benefits” (qtd. in Baym et al., vol. 2, 678–79). Barnes’s 1917 story, “A Night in the Woods” published in the New York Morning Telegraph Magazine, evokes this frontier concept of liberty. In this story, the Trenchards, modest and happy-go-lucky French bakers, not only represent the American melting pot as naturalized citizens who came to America in their early twenties, but also the embodiment of the American Dream by valuing hard work and, most importantly, freedom. The story opens with Mr Trenchard working hard in the bakery, dreaming of freedom which he associates with both the woods and the town jail. Working all day and night in “his little cellar where he baked his bread, this square and rickety edifice seemed something holy” (Barnes, Collected Stories 221). But when the Trenchards land in jail after having been accused of poisoning a couple with their bread, they re-align their desire for freedom with “the woods, the great, clean, sheltering woods, with the moss and the leaves that he has so often longed to explore, but which he has never had time to so much as visit” (226). The association of freedom with nature and nature with freedom is a prominent motif in the story. After an interlude of bickering and loving embraces, the Trenchards decide to pursue the “longing of their lives”: their freedom (227). While they are proud of having orchestrated their escape, the moment they find themselves in the woods, their dog betrays them by barking. The story bemoans the slow but persistent encroaching of the city on the countryside. Like the Trenchards, most of Barnes’s characters seek escape in nature, which violently, albeit naturally, betrays them. And yet, it is precisely this dialectic that informs the pastoral-urban synthesis in Barnes’s Pre-Paris stories, including “A Night Among Horses” published in 1918 in Little Review where the horseman, having dressed up to impress the elites, is not recognized by his own horses and thus deprived of his identity. Instead of remaining loyal to his background, he is swayed by Freda Buckler’s “mechanical buzz” and her “objects of ‘culture’” (250; 251). Culture is thus frequently aligned with a (post)colonial dynamic that strives to “naturalize” and thus stifle rather than engage the conflict unfolding on the frontier. Similarly, in “The Rabbit” (October 7, 1917), Barnes presents us with yet another naturalized protagonist, an Armenian immigrant, Amietiev, who left his country because “it was necessity; he was pushed out” to pursue a timely inheritance of

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a tailor shop in New York that allowed him to “educate” himself and become “a man of the world” (199). In his voyage, Amietiev evokes the American Dream, toiling in his tailor shop in the lower part of Manhattan. While Amietiev’s move to the metropolis signals his corporate success, the story deploys the urban space as a site where the human spirit is destroyed and cut off from nature. In the big city, Amietiev is confined to a “room not much more than twelve by twenty-four…he held the room up in his eye by the scruff of its neck, as you might say, and shook it in the face of his lost acres” (198). Claustrophobic and hemmed in, Amietiev feels imprisoned by the urban space that surrounds him. The dystopian feel of the city is further enhanced by the animal carcasses hanging in the butcher’s shop across the street. Not surprisingly, Amietiev’s nostalgia increases as he watches the “bright quarters of beef, calves’ heads and knuckle bones; remnants of animals, pink and yellow layers of fat” (197). This “very harvest of death” is what, paradoxically, bolsters ­Amietiev’s longing for “a country life” (208). A similar theme runs through Barnes’s story, “The Robin’s House,” published in Little Review in 1920. The protagonist is an artist, Nicholas Goldwein, who escapes New York City to find refuge in the country, which reminds him of “Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony” (309). Nicholas, like Amietiev, Una and Lena, or the Trenchards, echoes Barnes’s preoccupation with nature as a site of encounter or what Agamben calls nomos, a sacred yet violent space where “not only the exception and the rule but also the state of nature and law, outside and inside, pass through one another” (Homo Sacer 37). Like Barnes, Agamben associates such passing with a “negative theology,” a kind of union of opposites (Homo Sacer 18, 37). To put it differently, the landscape becomes a form of spiritual a/theology, providing the characters with the illusion of a temporary respite from civilization that they must “find again” as the character Katrina Silverstaff says in another Barnes’s story, “The Doctors,” while simultaneously reminding them that any such respite is “out of reach” (Collected Stories 322).

Expatriate Lullabies: Paris Stories

To “find again,” as Katrina Silverstaff exclaims in “The Doctors,” is a motif that threads through Barnes’s stories about the American expatriation in Paris in the 1920s. Pervading these stories is once again a yearning for “life and the seasons” (357), but this yearning is often juxtaposed with the need to find something new, inspiring, and spiritually stimulating. For example, in “Madame Grows Older: A Journal at the Dangerous Age” published on March 9, 1924, in Chicago

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Tribune Sunday Magazine, Barnes explores the “spirit” of the expatriate age through the confessional narrative of a widow “past forty” who “yearn[s] to take up art” (358). “I could mean a great deal to some new movement if I could only get it before it had moved much” (358), says widowed Alice who reads children’s books in her spare time while sitting by the pond, contemplating “the inhumanity of man” (358). Pondering the complexities of human nature, the story explores art as an escape from (but also inevitably a return to) nostalgia for “lost youth” (361). Echoing T.S. Eliot’s emphasis on art as a means of doing away with the artist’s personality, or what he calls an “escape from personality” (Eliot 30), Barnes’s story touches upon the tenets of American modernism that connect creativity with human nature by highlighting the relationship between art and landscape as being essential to American identity. Indeed, it is this complex dialectic that points to the marriage of art and nature, already foregrounded in the works of American revivalists like Jonathan Edwards or the Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. When viewed in this context, Barnes’s persistent weaving of nature with creative and spiritual elements evokes what Agamben refers to as “intimate strife” (The Open 71). Drawing on Heidegger’s concept of Streit, Agamben points to the interrelatedness of the two. In Barnes’s work, the various intimacies generated by nature and art point to the renegade aspects of nomadic ethic, but they also highlight the ways in which they drive rather than cleave her aesthetic. Barnes’s story, “Aller et Retour” published in April 1924 in Transatlantic Review, further elaborates on this intimate strife between art and nature through the confessions of Madame von Bartmann, a Russian widow who travels from Marseille to Nice to teach her daughter about knowing herself. During her travel, Madame reads Flaubert’s Madame Bovary as a manual to life-turnedart. She insists that her daughter does “everything” before coming back to her. But to know “everything” is an art. It is an art whereby one learns the values of detachment (Barnes, Collected Stories 370). Madame’s insistence on turning life into art, or a masterful detachment, echoes Eliot’s notion of transforming the artist’s personal experience into a new material that is depersonalized or, to put it differently, estranged from the artist’s “personality,” as Eliot suggests in his essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (Eliot 30). In Barnes, the space associated with such estrangement is often associated with the “lost youth” (Collected Stories 361)—in other words, with nostalgia that is yoked by the past while emotionally attached to a space beyond the present and the past, a space that Agamben describes as a space of exception, a utopian future that resides in the realm of imagination. Evoking such aesthetics is Barnes’s 1924 story, “Madame Grows Older: A Journal at

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the Dangerous Age,” originally published in Chicago Tribune Sunday ­Magazine (March 9, 1924) in which Madame summarizes her nostalgia for the past through two final entries: the first one foregrounding her wish to “kill [herself]” and the last entry stating—“I have killed myself!”—with which the story ends (361). Madame’s “killing herself,” however, can be also interpreted as an artist’s figurative doing away with oneself, a poetic transformation whereby the self becomes “simply a medium…in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways,” to quote Eliot (28). It could be argued that the double move of going and returning, echoed in a sequence of “Madame” stories, “Aller et Retour,” “Madame Grows Older,” and “The Grande Malade,” acts as a metaphorical framing of Barnes’s renegade aesthetic that highlights the embrace of nature as a creative, artistic but also physically inaccessible moment. As Madame says in “The Grande Malade” (published in 1925): “Horses hurry you away from danger; trains bring you back. Paintings give the heart a mortal pang…Music incites to the terror of repetition” (Barnes, Collected Stories 370). This terror is further invoked by what ­Madame refers to as a “great memory in the present” (395), a memory of the past but also a desire for a new future. This new future is predicated on the fluidity of the frontier; in other words, with constant movement (i.e., travel). “The Grande Malade” furthers the ­American expatriates’ renegade politics by recounting the travels of two sisters, Moydia and Katya, who exemplify the modernist expatriate in their constant comings and goings. Their geographical estrangement goes hand in hand with the fact that they are “Russian…Jew and not Jew…Polish when [they] are in P ­ oland, and when in Holland [they] are Dutch” (394). Following the sisters’ movement, the story highlights the errant spirit of the American modernism, the emphasis on trying to find a new spiritual direction in the ideology of “moving on” (403). As Katya says: Now I have come to Paris and I respect Paris. First I respected it in a great hat. I am short and a great hat would not, you see, become me, but I wore it for respect. It was all a jumble of flowers and one limber feather; it stood out so that my face was in the middle of a garden. Now I do not wear it any more. I have had to go back in my knowledge, right back to the remembrance…. (394) The passage highlights the compulsive aspect of their travel. The point is hardly a self-exploration, but rather an escape from oneself: one’s culture and identity. For many Americans, Paris represented a para-geography, an imaginary and imagined space where longing or what Svetlana Boym calls “reflective

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­ ostalgia” took precedence over belonging while at the same time allowing n the ­artist to explore “the border, not its abolition” (xviii; 242). As Katya suggests and Boym’s theory of nostalgia affirms, the exploration of the border inevitably engenders “diasporic intimacy” as an affect that consists of both utopian and dystopian elements (252)—this is cleverly evoked in Barnes’s juxtaposition of a “jumble of flowers” and a “garden,” both indicating a utopian space that can go awry at any minute. Most importantly, as Barnes’s biographer ­Andrew Field reveals, most American artists created an “American colony of writers and artists” in the Latin Quarter (118). As a Parisian Greenwich Village, the Latin ­Quarter relied on the kind of diasporic intimacy Boym discusses in her work The Future of Nostalgia as not necessarily suggestive of “an unmediated emotional fusion,” but rather as a form of “precarious affection” (252). This affection (and affectation) is what drives the two sisters’ travels. However, while providing a temporary respite, their nomadism merely enhances their sense of displacement and exile. Instead of feeling rejuvenated and empowered, they end up suffering from a traveller’s ennui. Their “moving on” is hardly a way forward; instead, it becomes a means of standing still.

“The Fleeting Shadows”: Post-Paris

The “precarious affection” associated with and generated by the diasporic intimacy of Paris might have ended in the late 1920s, but its “fleeting shadows” haunted artists even when the days of the Left Bank artistic commune were over, as Baronessa Otterly-Hansclever bemoans in Barnes’s 1929 story, “A Duel without Seconds,” published in the November issue of Vanity Fair. The story describes the post-Bohemian era when many artists were making their return, and when the impending financial crisis, economic depression, and socio-­ political upheavals put an end to the creative ambiance so many American artists flocked to in the early 1920s. The sense that the creative diaspora was “tragically over” pervades the narrative (Barnes, Collected Stories 413), but also further evokes the kind of duality of nostalgia: the immense sense of longing that feeds memory while simultaneously exiling the nostalgic subject to what Agamben calls a “state of exception,” where life is made bare but also rendered sacred by way of its exposure to non-potentiality; in other words, where violence and law become indistinct, but also where the future takes on an almost sacred role as a mystical rather than real or realistic time frame (Homo Sacer 19). The story’s setting evokes the non-potentiality of a bare life through the haunting ambiance of the room where Baroness Otterly-Hansclever contemplates “the days that were

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no l­ onger” while dining with her husband in a dilapidated room that “brooded darkly over the couple” (Barnes, Collected Stories 412). The mahogany table that separates the Baroness and her husband in this story creates a barrier between the “loud” silence and the “echoes of the past” (412).7 Reflecting on the days when the room “swelled with confidence and gaiety,” alive with guests (413), the Baroness feels an overwhelming sense of despair. [T]o the Baroness the very silence was loud with echoes of the past and to her wistful eyes the fleeting shadows now seemed to take form, almost to assume the outlines of phantom guests crowding around the table in a staccato pattern of talk and color as vivid as in the days, not so long ago, when this same room had buzzed with conversation, had rung with laughter. (413) But the room is now merely a place of ghosts of the past where artists, wives of politicians, kings, and princesses, mingled together like “a sentimental refrain running through an operetta” (413). The story persistently returns to the fact that “those days were tragically over” (413). Their riches are gone, so are their guests and when, one day, the Baroness decides that only death can allow her to assert that she “had sacrificed herself to an idea” (419), she realizes that the pistol her mother gave her is gone. Barnes’s story not only evokes a post-Paris nostalgia for the expatriate years, but also points to the intrinsic paradigm shifts, external events such as the impending war, the economic depression, and the rising upheavals in the colonies, which inevitably disrupted the diasporic intimacy and forced the expatriates to return to, what was an ailing rather than boisterous, America. As Miss Kittridge emphasizes in “Saturnalia,” a story that was published in Douglas Messerli’s edition, 50: A Celebration of Sun and Moon in 1995: “When I came back to America I found people behaving very oddly—all looking for something, beating the old gods up into hundreds of new forms, trying to find something…” (Barnes, Collected Stories 461). In their search for spiritual “advancement” (463), Americans were flocking to the ideals of South America, 7 Bowles’s Tangier story, “The Iron Table” (1950), shares similar imagery to explore the ambivalence of exile and the American expatriates’ nostalgia for a pastoral, albeit exilic idyll. In Bowles’s story, the conflict between nostalgia and reality is taken up by a husband and wife who are debating whether the civilization is going to pieces—with the wife being sceptical of a utopian home away from home, be it the dream of pristine America or an exilic diaspora. For a further discussion of the story, see Chapter 8.

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psychiatry, and Zen; they were desperate to balance their notions of God and life, as Señorita Carminetta Conchinella expresses to the group of guests gathered at Mr Menus’s, Miss Kittridge’s nephew (461). Set in the West Indies, this story invokes America’s colonial past (especially, its history of cultural conquest and appropriation). It also queries its complex relationship to the landscape, a relationship further re-enforced by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal that represented a return to America’s pastoral ideography and highlighted the farmer as the tiller of the land, the pruner of civilization, in other words, the frontier woodsman (Norton et al., A People 735). The urban-pastoral dialectic so prominent in Barnes’s stories permeates all her work—be it fiction, drama, or journalism. The dialectic speaks to the (post)colonial dilemma: the desire for progress (urbanization) and the yearning for the prelapsarian “garden” occupied by new settler-immigrants. But it also highlights the racial anxieties pervading twentieth-century America, specifically the challenge of writing about race in the context of America’s history of colonialism and racial discrimination, not to mention slavery. Barnes’s immigrant characters tend to be predominantly white, albeit of various cultural backgrounds and ethnicities. In fact, even during the Paris years, Barnes, like most of her fellow American contemporaries and fellow expatriates,8 persistently returned to the pastoral, regional aspect of the American garden or its “curative [and destructive] charms,” as Mr Menus says in “Saturnalia” ­(Collected Stories 456). In light of the expatriate artists’ desire for a spiritual regeneration of American culture, the pastoral turn filled the role of religion, p ­ roviding an escape from history. This escape facilitated a temporary sublimation of racial anxieties (from the early twentieth-century era of racial segregation to the post-Civil-Rights decades when Barnes focused primarily on poetry). Unlike the representatives of the Harlem Renaissance, for example, Barnes’s (and Bowles’s) works address race from a tangential perspective that uses class and gender as major indicators of cultural inequality and social asymmetries.9 8 The emphasis on the regional, pastoral aspect of America pervades the works of American modernists from Jay Gatsby’s idyllic garden in F.S. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to Ernest Hemingway’s Spanish bullfights, the return to nature serves as a means of staying connected to the spirit of the land. For more examples see, F.S. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925); ­Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926), or Nella Larsen, Quicksand (1928). 9 See, for example, the works by Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay. For more extensive discussion of the Harlem Renaissance, see Houston A. Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987). Drawing parallels between the Afro-American and white modernisms, Baker exposes the ways in which white modernists frequently sublimated race and racial issues through their bravura of aesthetic abstraction or a “claim to… the unrepresentable” (5).

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Nonetheless, as Barnes’s stories show and anticipate, the relationship to the land, invoked in the exilic impulse of the 1920s and 1940s expatriate generations, exemplified the racial conflicts and challenges that America was facing. ­Generally, Barnes’s work falls short of an extensive racial commentary. ­However, as this book argues, the very gaps and silences become an important testament to the complex double speak of American modernism—its nomadic immobility and errant absences. In this, Barnes exposes the ways in which race remained an errant subject in twentieth-century America. As Mark Taylor suggests, “history ‘ends’ when erring ‘begins’” (151). If we understand history in Taylor’s terms as “an unending search for a presence that saves” (151), then erring represents the saving presence in absentia that accommodates the longing for the state of exception where utopian and dystopian elements meet in a divine orgy of history as man’s renegade meta-fiction where art creates life, life history.

chapter 3

The Landless Race of Ryder and the Ryder Aesthetes: Mock Almanacs of Experimentation and Intermediality …America, that outlandish country! djuna barnes, Ryder (43)

⸪ Exposing the renegade quality of nature’s violent potential through characters whose engagement with the American frontier myth provides an interesting commentary on American modernity, particularly by tracing its origins back to America’s settler history, is Barnes’s first novel, Ryder. Written in 1928 within a few months of Thelma Wood’s (Barnes’s then lover and partner) convalescence, the novel represents an interesting tour de force, although Barnes’s intentions, as she reiterated in her letters and in her later discussions with Hank O’Neal, were far from viewing the novel as a serious piece of work (O’Neal 101). Critically, the novel has garnered attention for its generic, thematic, and stylistic versatility. Read primarily as a coded autobiography and a mock-testament to the expatriate experimentation in Paris, the novel continues to be hailed for its subversion of patriarchal discourses and embrace of experimentation as a means of challenging social dogmas.1 Sheryl Stevenson, for instance, applauds the novel for its “carnivalesque” aspects that undermine the patriarchal order through female laughter (85). On the other hand, critics like Bonnie Kime Scott or Susan Edmunds examine the natural motifs pervading the novel, suggesting that Barnes’s animal imagery 1 Most critics read Ryder as an autobiographical account of Barnes’s extravagant family. For instance, see Louis Kannestine, The Art of Djuna Barnes: Duality and Damnation (New York: New York Press, 1977) 34. For more, see Marie Ponsot, “A Reader’s Ryder,” Sheryl Stevenson, “Writing the Grotesque Body: Djuna Barnes’s Carnival Parody,” and Frances M. Doughty, “Gilt on Cardboard: Djuna Barnes as Illustrator of Her Life and Work” in Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, ed. Mary Lynn Broe (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois up, 1991) 94–112; 81–91; 137–154. Other critical studies of Barnes’s Ryder include Susan Edmunds, “Narratives of a Virgin’s Violation: The Critique of Middle-Class Conformism in Djuna Barnes’s Ryder,” Novel (Winter 1997): 218–236. See also Herring, Caselli, and Warren. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004314436_005

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challenges binaries and overcomes essentialisms.2 Historicizing the novel as a “narrative of virgin’s violation” (220), Edmunds, for example, deploys the novel as a parody of Transcendentalist and reformist ideals advocated by Mormon and Oneida communities (225). More recent examinations of Barnes’s Ryder have started engaging with the novel’s stylistic, generic, and thematic intertextuality, focusing primarily on European influences.3 While, apart from Susan Edmunds’s 1997 essay, most critical readings of Ryder remain focused on its aesthetic and intertextual qualities in Barnes’s work, to date, there has been no indepth analysis of the relationship between American pioneer history and the frontier aesthetics that underscores Barnes’s writing. This chapter argues that Barnes’s Ryder is not only part travelogue, part novel, but it is also a unique mockument of American pioneer history, as well as a reflection on American modernity’s often problematic conceptualizations of gender, sexuality, and space. The novel tells the story of the Ryder family, a strange motley of vagrant artists, outlaws, runaways, and immigrants who live close to the woods, in a crowded farm house called Bulls’-Ease. Part artist, part bohemian, Wendell Ryder, the man of many names, saunters through the narrative in pursuit of his religiously sexual errand to conceive as many children as possible for the sole purpose of creating “the Race that shall be Ryder” (Barnes, Ryder 278). His mother, Sophia Ryder, supports her son’s errant and erroneous genius partly because he resembles her own “humorous” nature and partly because, when she loses her artistic salon, he remains “her only courtier” (10, 15). Amelia, his immigrant wife, has left England for America to live with Wendell whom she deems as having “a look, back and front, of [her] own” (57). Kate Careless, a runaway street-organ player and Wendell’s lover, finds her way into the Ryder homestead when she tires of her husband’s steady drinking and their floating houseboat. Sophia, who runs and supports the Ryder clan by being the “mendicant of the most persistent temerity” (16), approves of Kate’s arrival by telling her to “call her ‘Mother’” (105). Sophia, Wendell, Amelia, Kate, and their children share a two-bedroom log cabin in the woods of Storm-King-on-Hudson. Isolated from society, Bulls’Ease, the Ryder cabin, is a home like no other, open to polygamy, truancy, and endless straying.4 It is a site of natural freedom where everything is out of place, where “[t]hose bent on heaven and those bent on hell have got fearfully 2 This argument was first pursued by Scott in her 1993 article, “Barnes Being ‘Beast Familiar’: Representation on the Margins of Modernism,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 13.3 (Fall 1993): 41–53. 3 See, for example, Caselli, Goody, Taylor, and Warren. 4 Storm-King-on-Hudson alludes to the “Storm King Mountain Estate” in Cornwall-on-Hudson owned by Wendell’s brother, Justin, who worked as a doctor. According to Herring, Justin

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confused as to direction” (91). While Amelia and Kate look after the house and bear Wendell’s children, Wendell pursues his mission to “sow no seed of doubt” by “bedding in all beds” (279). Published in 1928, a period when a majority of American expatriates returned to America only to be confronted by the landscape changed by urbanization and increasing immigration to the cities, the novel draws attention to the ways in which American modernity wrestled with its settler, primarily rural past and the impinging urban sprawl that was radically changing not only large cities like New York, but the overall sense of American identity. All of which ignited nativist reactions and instigated a return to the land. As Janet Galligani Casey emphasizes, rurality played an important part in shaping American modernism “both as an ideological foil for modernity’s anxieties and instabilities and as a nationalist legacy that needed to be accommodated within the matrix of experience and representation understood as modern” (7). An antithesis of the increasing influx of immigrants to the cities and the rising economic depression, the farmer embodied the hard-working spirit of an American pioneer. He became the beacon of freedom and independence, ideals embedded in the American Constitution but also pervading reformist discourses of the time. However, as Casey points out, with President Theodore Roosevelt’s Commission on Country Life in 1908, the rural ideal was viewed in direct relationship with, rather than contradistinction to, the increasing urbanization (Casey 27). Not surprisingly, the rhetoric of the rural embrace intensified in the mid-1920s when most of American expatriates made their return, looking for a sense of “belonging to something” (Cowley 222). As Malcolm Cowley notes in his memoir, disheartened by the urban dynamic, consumerism, and spiritual wasteland, many opted for a secluded farm-life in Connecticut (222), a seclusion that was on par with the Puritan errand in wilderness, but also resuscitated the waning spirit of the “artist proper” as a “crusader” who treated art as religion (152). Barnes surreptitiously refers to this so-called “exodus” to Connecticut in the opening chapter of Ryder by tracing the origins of the Ryder race to the “reckless” mentality of Jonathan Buxton Ryder from Connecticut (Ryder 6). Through such references, the novel examines the radical shifts in the A ­ merican ­socio-political landscape riven by modern values and expectations that have redefined not only America’s role as a colony turned empire, but also re-­ visioned the American settler as both a pioneering yeoman and ­immigrant— while the former embodied the very ideals of American independence, the latter attested to A ­ merica’s migrant, outlaw past as defined by exile, displacement, and dislocation. financially supported Wendell’s family and often gave money to Elizabeth and her children after the divorce (Herring 32).

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In the novel, Barnes links the American heritage of migration with Amelia, Wendell’s first wife, who leaves Britain for “this outlandish country” in spite of her sister’s remonstrations about what she describes as a “land swarming with pitfalls, and wild men, and murder!” (52). Following her heart, she believes that being married to Wendell will be an adventure. She is certainly not disappointed: she ends up giving birth to one child after another, her dreams of pursuing her art squished by hard labour, farming, and childrearing. As Wendell takes on another wife, Kate Careless, Amelia is angry that her life has been reduced to domestic labour and reproduction. Kate Careless, on the other hand, is a street-organ player who does not mind Wendell’s antics as she herself has an appreciation for cuckoldry, “bearing not a child but littering children” (110). Unlike Amelia who resents all things domestic, Kate is a “wench who committed nature on its own scale” (110), and as Barnes mockingly suggests, “the nation’s ideal” (109). Barnes deploys Amelia and Kate as prototypes of the two radically different conceptualizations of the modern woman: the Eurocentric vision of the New Woman, i.e., the urban suffragette and artistic urbanite, and the American maternal feminist, a pioneer and ersatz Mother who was in charge of raising new, temperate citizens. In aligning Kate with the national ideal, Barnes comments on the mid-1920s celebration of the farmer wife as the ultimate representation of American modernity and as a much needed antidote to the urban feminist who was bent on pursuing her dreams (like Amelia who takes up violin and singing lessons) instead of taking on the responsibilities of childbearing and domestic labour. As LeGates emphasizes, American modernity was tied to the rhetoric of republican rather than liberal feminism which brought together religious morality with the role of the Mother as being responsible for the civic education of future generations (LeGates 151). American Republican feminism was very much grounded in the pastoral ideal of a rural female, a strong farmer wife whose life was dedicated to childrearing, service, and labour. In other words, the New American Woman was borne out of the growing feminist trend that had paradoxically a more or less rural rather than strictly urban, liberal base as reflected in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics (1898), for example. Arguing for women’s domestic labour as a site of production and hence economic value, Gilman’s work became essential to Mary Meek Atkeson’s 1924 treatise, The Woman on the Farm in which she celebrated the “new farm ­woman” as a mother, on the one hand, and labourer-producer, on the other.5 5 For more details, see Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics (1898). Also see Janet Galligani Casey’s A New Heartland: Women, Modernity, and the Agrarian Ideal in America

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Popular magazines and periodicals like The Ladies’ Home Journal and The Farmer’s Wife re-enforced the rural myth as a modern alternative to urban excess.6 Ironically, the rise of the first-wave feminism in America and the increasing migration to the cities propelled the farm woman into being an avatar of maternal feminism and rural modernity that “confounded both orthodox and emerging social categories for women” (Casey 37). Consequently, Barnes’s Ryder provides insight into several aspects of ­American modernity: tensions between the country and the city and changing gender roles, but most importantly, the nostalgia for a return to nature as an important response of America’s anxiety about its impending rise to power as a colony turned empire and its lack of a longstanding literary and cultural tradition. Not surprisingly, Barnes aligns America’s rise to power with the rhetoric of the Country Life Movement that is feminized and further aligned with aesthetics, particularly with the artist as a “rider” or a “crusader.”

The Rider’s Pastoral Movement and His Nomadic Politics

Wendell is a farmer and artist, the self-appointed “Prophet in the Wilderness” who, like a typical woodsman pioneer, lives with his family in “a small cabin of two rooms, one above the other in the pine woods” near his brother’s “palatial mansion” (Barnes, Ryder 22). Once again, Barnes establishes the dualities underpinning American history through characters that represent the opposite extremes. Mocking the American artist who courts the pastoral idyll as a potential site of creative (re)production, Barnes links Wendell’s creativity with “bedding in all beds” as he believes himself predestined to create “the Race that shall be Ryder” (279). In establishing Wendell as a farmer and artist, Barnes not only comments on the idealization of the countryside that pervades American modernity, but also locates the dislocated expatriate artist on the margin of society as a kind of “homo sacer,” to use Agamben’s words, or a “sacred man” who is “situated at the margins of the political order” in a “zone of irreducible indistinction,” who, like a high priest, brings cultural and artistic enlightenment to a society gone bad (Homo Sacer 9). Indeed, Wendell aspires to such divine heights as he describes himself as “all things to all men” (Barnes, Ryder 214). He says: (2009) for a ground-breaking discussion of the role the farm women played in the American feminist rhetoric. 6 As Casey emphasizes, both periodicals endorsed the farm woman as “the salvation of modern culture” (8).

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I am all things to all men, and all women’s woman. At one moment I am a young and tender girl, with close-held legs, and light bones becoming used to the still, sweet pain that is a girl’s flesh, metaphorically speaking, of course. …Sometimes I am a whore in ruffled petticoat, playing madly at a pack of ruffians…. Yet again, I am a man-with-a trowel, digging at the edge of my life for the tangible substance of re-creation…. (214; emphasis added) By linking Wendell’s creativity with physical production (i.e., insemination) but also with a quest of a spiritual kind, Barnes exposes not only the cult of rural virility as the essence of American identity, but also the ways in which the expatriate Bohemia contributed to the myth by entertaining the possibility of re-creation in the countryside through fostering art as a new religion and divine right. At the time when Barnes was penning the novel Ryder in Paris, America was being swept by proselytizing agrarians like Liberty Hyde Bailey who argued that “the future farmers of America must truly be a superior race” (Casey 25). While critics of the novel have focused primarily on the novel’s polyphonic character, highlighting its generic versatility, it would be a mistake to see this narrative as merely a parody of European literary traditions. In fact, the novel locates itself in a specific moment in American history when the increasing impact of America’s rising power abroad triggered a whole plethora of anxieties at home, anxieties that were an inevitable by-product of the ways in which modernity has shaped, but also redefined American landscape. The narrative engages with America’s historical as well as literary traditions to question not only the rising nativist ideologies, but also to explore how the gendered and racialized ecology of the woods contextualizes America’s cultural heritage. When viewed in this context, Wendell, the nature-free-loving artist, is the embodiment of Thoreau’s Errant Walker (1861),7 who crosses boundaries, rejects traditions and society, and embraces “Mother Nature.” Indolent and dreamy, Thoreau’s American Errant Walker treats nature as a “Holy Land” but also as a “vast, savage, howling mother” (Thoreau, “Walking” 672, 680). In his emphasis on becoming one with nature, the “great mother” from whom “we are so early weaned” (“Walking” 680), Thoreau associates errantry with a primordial return to the figure of the mother. It is important to note here that for 7 Thoreau describes the errant as the “fourth estate—outside of Church, State, and people” (672). His notion that “the wildness is the preservation of the world” (672) resonates with recreating himself in the “darkest wood” as a “sanctum sanctorum” (676), a notion that Barnes further examines in Nightwood.

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the errant walker, nature is not only the “great mother” but also a site where he seeks strength (“Walking” 680). It is a “sacred place” where he “recreate[s] [him]self” and where he embraces the savage within (Thoreau, “Walking” 674, 679). The character of Wendell in Ryder is very much attached to his mother, Sophia, who is his supporter as well as the ultimate source of wisdom, as her name indicates.8 She represents the law that grants Wendell his natural sovereignty as the preferred son and crusader of the “Race that should be Ryder” (Barnes, Ryder 278). Wendell Ryder, the self-appointed “Father of All Things,” thinks that only from nature and its wild swamps can the true Ryder race be borne (278). In a manner similar to Thoreau’s errant walker, he makes nature into his ­“sanctum sanctorum,” a sacred homeland for his imagined community, which would stand outside of the social law and its taboos (Thoreau, “Walking” 674). Like Thoreau’s errant character, Wendell advocates “absolute freedom and w ­ ildness” and believes that not everyone can engage in errantry because it is “a direct dispensation from Heaven” (“Walking” 661). However, as Thoreau tells us, errantry “produces a certain roughness of character” (“Walking” 663). Through her characters, Barnes is able to explore this “roughness” as a trademark of Wendell’s assumption of sovereignty. Giorgio Agamben’s definition of the sovereign is particularly useful here. According to Agamben, sovereignty incorporates both law and nature. It is a combination of physis and nomos where the sovereign takes on the role of a sacred subject who has the power to condone a “state of exception,” or to put it differently, the power to occupy the space of nomos as an inevitable “rupture in the form of a suspension of every law” (Homo Sacer 37). Drawing on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Pindar’s Fragments, Agamben sees this space as a site where opposites come together, as a nomadic space where violence and justice exist side by side. Last but not least, Agamben aligns this space with John Locke’s conceptualizations of the new world, America, in particular (38). Through this lens, Barnes’s Ryder can be understood as a historical text of a spiritual and aesthetic “a/theology,” to borrow Taylor’s term. The novel locates Roosevelt’s glorification of rurality in America’s colonial heritage and its rhetoric of conquest that deployed natural wilderness as a female body pregnant with possibilities. Supported by the increasing popularity of magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal, The Farmer’s Wife, or The Progressive Farmer and Southern Farm Gazette, by the mid-1920s, the resuscitated rhetoric of the landscape as body was politically gaining ground, taking on the role of a religious errand, 8 The name Sophia, from Greek, means “wisdom, skill, but also shrewdness and cunning” (oed).

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reminiscent of the Puritan errand in the wilderness. However, as Barnes shows, American history is full of dualities that are not necessarily reconcilable but rather point to the errant and erring character that lies at the foundation of America’s immigrant past. At the same time, the novel playfully mocks the American expatriate artists’ quest for new forms and ideas, for a kind of art that would free mankind from its bondage to history.9 Wendell Ryder not only represents, and covets, the role of an artist crusader whose errand is to produce a new race and “sow no seed of doubt” (Barnes, Ryder 279), but also represents the renegade quality of American identity and its pioneering, frontier spirit. Not surprisingly, Wendell treats landscapes of any kind as sites of divine Creation upon which he can sow his lust “openly and sweetly like the beast” (317). And yet, as Barnes cheekily asserts, his symbiotic relationship with nature makes any need for social identification pointless—hence his insistence on changing his name frequently, something that goes against the colonial expectation of imposing a name in order to claim a territory or paternity for that matter. Like Wendell, Thoreau’s Errant Walker rejects the very essence of names because they are, in his view, “mere appendages of social marks” ­(Thoreau, “Walking” 680). Wendell’s embrace of nature therefore depends not only on blurring the line between the landscape and the (female) body, but also on a kind of linguistic errantry whereby naming and un-naming become one. A synthesis is hence formed through this intersection that represents the end result of Wendell’s pro-creative apostasy, which intimates a spiritual, ­divinely-inspired errand. As Wendell says: “I name myself as I find myself. What I would be, that I say I am, and thus, eventually, I become” (Barnes, Ryder 215). Wendell prides himself in his many names and identities, even comparing himself to “a young, tender girl,” a “whore,” and a “man-with-a-trowel” (214). “A name,” he believes, “is a battalion to walk beside you, weak or strong, according to its wording” (220). Wendell’s name-changing can be read as resistance to colonial coding. But it is also a form of feminizing and queering the performance of masculinity, as well as a parody of Mother Nature and her surrogates. Through depictions of ravished landscapes, bastard children, and bodies constantly pregnant in exile (as well as being pregnant with exile), Barnes deploys the pastoral nomos as blurring the line between freedom and violence. The pastoral thus becomes a site where incest, taboo, and polygamy ­dangerously intertwine with the Jeffersonian pursuit of happiness as a n ­ omadic errand or 9 Barnes here echoes Friedrich Schiller’s emphasis on the transcendent quality of art, ­particularly his notion of the restorative power of what he calls the “aesthetic condition” (Schiller 12).

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with Roosevelt’s celebration of the farm as a national ideal placed in juxtaposition to what was perceived as the decadence of the urban world. As Scandura and Thurston note, “modern America was reconstructed through a simultaneous remembering and forgetting of the Other within, debates about Americanization, assimilation, and nativism continually negotiated the boundary of ‘foreignness’…with consumer capitalism” (7). Indeed, from the Puritan Exodus to America referred to as an “errand in wilderness” in Samuel Danforth’s 1670 speech (Zakai 164),10 or the 1924 Immigration Act that curbed the influx of Eastern European migrants to America, to the imperialist and potentially fascist undertones of the Ryder race, Barnes’s Ryder problematizes the diasporic impulse of American modernity. It suggests that it contributed to, if not enhanced the naturalization of violence associated with European visions of an America that is a beacon of urban progress and industrialization. From Ryder’s Spiritual A/theology to Queer Ideologies of Ladies Almanack Much has been said about the novel’s aesthetics, particularly its intertextual and theatrical character. Deemed a mock epic, a medieval romance, and a grotesque parody, the novel has received a variety of generic labels and has been read primarily as an autobiographical text.11 Recently, critics have started exploring the novel’s intertextuality by examining Barnes’s references to G ­ eoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard, and the Bible, to name the most obvious.12 In addition to a wealth of intertextual references, Barnes’s Ryder, like Ladies Almanack (a text written concurrently with the novel during Thelma Wood’s convalescence), relies on a creative juxtaposition of the visual and written text. In her 1998 essay, “Troubling the Master’s Voice,” Irene Martyniuk, for example, draws attention to the role that visual language plays in Barnes’s work. Martyniuk describes Ryder as “a novel which ‘illustrates’ the dual literacy that is needed to articulate and communicate the ‘unspeakable’” (7). Further adding to this discussion are the studies by Warren and Caselli. While celebrating the 10 11

12

For more, see Samuel Danforth, Puritan minister (1626–74), “A Brief Recognition of NewEngland’s Errand into the Wilderness” (1670), a typical New England jeremiad. Most critics read Ryder as an autobiographical account of Barnes’s extravagant family. For instance, see Kannestine 34. For more, see Ponsot, Doughty, and Edmunds. See also Herring. For example, see Warren and Caselli.

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intertextual quality of Barnes’s work, Caselli nonetheless deplores what she calls the “obscurity, unintelligibility, difficulty, and impenetrability of Barnes’s corpus” (3). Although Barnes’s work abounds in intertextual references, suggesting that her narratives are obscure fails to engage with the creative process of her writing as a whole. It also fails to engage with the modernist art movements that have insisted on self-referentiality or what Alain Badiou calls “the undivided awareness of its operations” (Handbook 8). Visual arts and music in particular played an essential role in the process of creating a new artistic spirit. One of the prerogatives of modernist artists was to create a visual purity that would challenge writing as the “dialectical other” (Geczy 18). Although critics acknowledge the importance that visuality plays in Barnes’s work, the general tendency is to downplay her visual art as a poor imitation of Pierre Louis Duchartre’s and René Saulnier’s Imagerie Populaire, Aubrey Beardsley’s Yellow Book japonesques, or Albert P. Ryder’s homeless landscapes.13 Barnes’s technique however suggests a departure from such influences as neither Ryder nor Ladies Almanack employs the Beardsley-esque decorative line. Nonetheless, the Beardsley influence is undeniable in Barnes’s book of poetry called A Book of Repulsive Women, published in 1915, though her visual style was perfected during her journalist years where the decorative line of Beardsley-esque dotting gave way to a strictly Barnes’s style.14 Although Barnes never finished her art education, she did a year at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn from 1912–1913 and then another year at Art Student League where she studied drawing and illustration.15 Douglas Messerli recently published a collection of Barnes’s drawings titled Poe’s Mother: Selected Drawings of Djuna Barnes in which he notes that Barnes would frequently outline her themes by sketching and drawing rather than verbalizing her ideas in writing in order to “seek truth, to see through the masks and stances of human beings” (Messerli, Poe’s Mother 8). This drive for authenticity and purity underpins Barnes’s work. Her use of diverse media or intermediality allows her to represent both the errant and the static facets of modernity, but also to produce a kind of spiritual a/­theology or inaesthetic that draws attention to the “intraphilosophical effects produced by the independent existence of some works of art” (Badiou, Handbook 1). Werner Wolf defines intermediality as a meta-fictional aesthetic that brings together a variety of media to highlight the non-verbal aspect of literature and thus e­ nhance the textual component of literature through visualization 13 14 15

For example, see Kannestine, Ponsot, Doughty, Warren, and Caselli. See Chapter 5 for the discussion of Barnes’s poetry and journalism. For more details, see Herring.

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or ­musicalization (49). Given that self-referentiality is essential to intermediality, Barnes’s texts are then inevitably intraphilosophical and inaesthetical in a sense that they explore the fine line between art, ethics, and aesthetics. Barnes’s Ryder is a visual but also musical text that engages with a variety of genres and literary traditions (from medieval romance to epistolary novel and poetry), to enhance the novel’s theme of the spiritually inspired errand of an errant race. The novel Ryder complements Ladies Almanack in its emancipatory vision. Both works draw on the American tradition of farm almanacs, but also draw interesting connections between the older literary traditions and the emancipated modernist manifestoes by mocking the degree to which both these types of narratives served as an important platform for propagandist discourse—be it political or artistic. In Ladies Almanack, Evangeline Musset, described as “the dame with a whip,” presides over “women’s crying and ­moaning” (11), much like Wendell Ryder as he is described on his valiant steed Hisodalgus. Both protagonists are artists-savants. They are the pioneers of the new in art, the self-appointed leaders on “the Road of Destiny” (Barnes, ­Ladies Almanack 7). The almanac consists of monthly accounts of Evangeline Musset’s fellow female artists and savants like Patience Scalpel (alias Mina Loy), Doll Furious (alias Dolly Wilde), Lady-Buck-and-Balk (alias Lady Una ­Troubridge) and others who challenge the “very condition of woman” as being aligned with Nature, “Her Tides and Moons” (55).16 In a contrapuntal manner that creates an interesting inter- and intra-medial relationship between the two texts, Ladies Almanack mocks Ryder’s rejection of all social conventions, particularly Wendell Ryder’s not so gallant embrace of Nature. Not only do these two pieces of “satirical wigging,” as Barnes saw them (Lanser xvi), serve as a testament to the contradictory discourses that contextualized American modernity—the juxtaposition of nature and culture, urbanization and pastoral nostalgia, the permanent and the fleeting—but their renegade in-ethic are further reflected in narratives that wander, digress, and cross many generic and stylistic borders. And yet, this excess is also persistently honed down, controlled and disciplined through formal subtraction (be it switching from one literary form to another, or through one artistic medium to another). Such code-switching allows Barnes to highlight that which escapes meaning. This formal apostasy provides an aesthetic, experimental means of suturing in the complex trans-historical context that characterized the pastoral nostalgia of American modernity as a partial response to increasing commercialism

16

See Susan Snaider Lanser’s introduction to the New York University Press edition of Barnes’s Ladies Almanack (New York: New York up, 1992).

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and industrialization, but also as a response to the mass immigration waves that were altering the original American landscape in the 1920s, and further, as a response to America’s complex history of being both a former colony and a colonizing force. Aesthetically, the visual framing constitutes a boundary or a frontier that forecloses historical events, while simultaneously encouraging new ways of interpreting, ordering, and understanding such events by dematerializing but also, to some extent, shedding light on the blind spots of history. Such a call for dematerialization lies at the heart of modernist almanacs like The Blaue Reiter Almanac edited by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. Published in 1912, the main objective of this almanac was to advocate for art that would “tear down all the walls” between various artistic media by embracing the savage, erring aspect of human nature (Kandinsky and Marc 37). As Geczy emphasizes, for Kandinsky and Marc, “dematerialization is the purest kind of image, but it is also the remotest from what can be articulated or grasped by the conscious mind” (56). In using visual images as a means of ­harnessing prose—and, by extension, historical narratives, Barnes’s Ryder and Ladies Almanack evoke the experimental impetus of The Blaue Reiter Almanac by engaging in a kind of textual errantry that calls attention to the hybridity of American literary and cultural heritage. Generically dislocated and homeless, both narratives rely on “the unthinking returning of themselves to themselves” (Barnes, Ladies Almanack 58). Such “unthinking returning” reflects the Kandinsky-Marc artistic vision of “mystical inner vision” and “synesthesia” that would produce a new kind of ­spiritual thinking and engagement, an “epoch of great spirituality” that would circumvent the increasing consumerism and commodification of art ­(Kandinsky and Marc 250). Hence, intermedial and intramedial linking or ­concatenations not only echo the kind of inaesthetic Badiou mentions in relation to the works of art, but also inevitably invite an insight into history by striving to give voice to the “intraphilosophical effects” born out of the artistic transformation of history into an errant and erring fiction, but also by engaging with the deeply personal aspects of history that do not always find their way into official historical accounts. Barnes’s renegade aesthetic similarly evokes the ­complexities of human nature by plunging into the depths of human ­character—its moralities and disingenuities. Both Wendell Ryder and Evangeline Mussett are artists whose desire is to transform the “Road of Destiny” by sharing their ideas as they produce them, as erroneous and problematic as they might be. Barnes therefore reminds us that transformation, even of an artistic kind, skirts the fine line between violence and justice, culture and nature, ethics and the lack thereof. Art transforms and incarnates, but also violates. As Badiou says, “art accomplishes what philosophy itself can only point towards”

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­(Handbook 3). In their engagement with the protagonists’ foibles and errant humanity, both Ryder and Ladies Almanack teach us something: they force us to open our eyes to the connections between historical events and literary expression, between human foibles and personal choices. Most importantly, they remind us that art as a form of creative expression can give voice to the ­“affectations of the soul,” to quote Badiou (Handbook 5). In this, they also, inevitably, pave the way to Barnes’s novel Nightwood and its “ruined gardens” of the heart (52).

chapter 4

“The Pastures in Which the Night Feeds”: The Heart Politics and the Music of Holy(Night)Wood All forms of music…are sedimented contents. In them survives what is otherwise forgotten and is no longer capable of speaking directly. What once sought refuge in form subsists anonymously in form’s persistence. The forms of art register the history of humanity with more justice than do historical documents. theodor adorno, Philosophy of New Music (37)

⸪ In his preface to Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936), T.S. Eliot acknowledged the complexity of the novel, suggesting that any kind of introduction of the novel to the reader is an “impertinence” (qtd. in Barnes, Nightwood xi). A novel about the end of the siècle, the 1920s American expatriation in Europe, but also a novel about shifting gender, ethnic, and racial relations, Nightwood speaks to the early twentieth-century nomadic zeitgeist by focusing on characters who are both physical and psychological exiles. While they yearn for some “green garden” that they could call their own, what connects them is their inability to commit to any particular venue, a landscape, or a relationship. The novel opens with the Jewish “knight errant,” Felix Volkbein, who shows up in the world with nothing but two portraits and a fake identity. His quest for paternity is an attempt to circumvent his sense of marginalization in early twentieth-century Europe. However, by marrying Robin Vote, an American, he merely furthers his sense of alienation. Soon after giving birth, Robin leaves Felix for Nora Wood, an American socialite whose salon brings together various artists and wanderers. But, like Felix, Nora cannot “keep” the itinerant Robin committed to their relationship. In its rejection of sentimentality, Barnes’s Nightwood centers on the porous nature of intimacy. As Barnes shows, exiles have difficulty creating lasting bonds: their identity is a shifting sand; their attachments temporary. Moreover, such attachments are of ephemeral nature, linked by shards of memory and mediated by Dr O’Connor, an Irishman, whose philosophical discoursing on human suffering provides the characters with a momentary, albeit much necessary respite from their lack of intimacy and belonging. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004314436_006

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In broad strokes, Nightwood is a novel about various malaises of modernity: the sense of alienation, the abrogation of national and gender boundaries, and the questioning of heteronormative relationships. But it is also a novel about the corruption of the American Dream. Like Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Barnes’s Nightwood questions the myth of the American green garden. The dream of Gatsby is in many ways a dream of Felix Volkbein, but also of Nora Wood, whose love for Robin, and for people in general, leaves her exhausted, spent, and ultimately consumed by desire that cannot be fulfilled. ­Searching and wandering in and out of their deracinated woods, the characters of ­Nightwood chase after “secret land[s]” that they cannot but also do not wish to reach (Barnes, Nightwood 7). Like Gatsby, they hold onto some Platonic conceptualization of life, love, and self that they cannot quite attain nor do they really seem to want to. Their persistent erring can therefore be seen as a conscious errand to avoid, but also ironically, to craft some form of emplacement or self-re-invention no matter how illusory. This is particularly exemplified in Barnes’s critique of antiSemitic views pervading Europe, views that she deploys through the complex linkage of femininity, queer identity, Jewishness, and blackness. From Felix Volkbein, Nora Wood, Robin Vote, to Doctor O’Connor, Barnes’s characters suffer from the predicaments of their nomadic consciousness, consciousness borne out of the marginal spaces that they occupy. The novel strives to document such experiences through language that is both abstract and impenetrable, poetic and philosophical, visual and musical. Lauded and simultaneously critiqued for what some critics describe as the novel’s impenetrability and abstractness (Caselli; Jonsson), Nightwood continues to be hailed as a cult novel of American modernism. While Barnes passionately fought against such an association, the novel is an intriguing testament to the ways in which American modernism remains ensconced within the poetics of the American frontier that shapes Barnes’s renegade aesthetic. Nightwood in particular brings to the forefront the formal complexities of representing human emotion and gaging what Badiou refers to as “the affectations of the soul” through aesthetic means that capture both the physicality and ephemeral nature of human emotion (Handbook 5). Exploring the nuanced politics of the human heart as an allegory of the woods, Nightwood invokes the tradition of American romance as a “border fiction” whose forest sequences connote the “radical forms of alienation, contradiction, and disorder” (Chase, American 19; 2). In Nightwood, as in most American romances by Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, or Edgar Allan Poe, the deep sense of characters’ alienation is associated with their emotional capacity or lack thereof; in other words, with the intensity of feeling. This intensity unravels in relation to space

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and specific sites that echo and refract the errant nature of human emotion through what could be called their figurative songs of woe. Love and desire are perhaps the most physically palpable yet formally intangible of the human emotions. Like music, the emotion associated with love and desire cannot be verbalized or visualized, but rather expressed through feeling. While the notion that music as a non-referential and non-material art form allows for giving voice to that which escapes representation can be traced all the way back to Aristotle’s Poetics, modernist artists often drew on the Romantics and the Symbolists, as well as German philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Schiller, to express what Wassily Kandinsky in his essay, “On Stage Composition,” called the “delicate vibrations of the human soul” (qtd. in Kandinsky and Marc 190). The notion that “the world sounds” rather than appears was essential to the modernist notion of doing away with mimetic modes of representation by striving to grasp the immediacy of feeling (see Kandinsky and Marc); an immediacy that, as modernists believed, defined mankind’s inner world, but also, more importantly, the historical events that shaped it. Theodor Adorno’s notion that art in general, and music in particular, “can ­register the history of humanity with more justice than do historical ­documents” encapsulates the aesthetic choices shaping Barnes’s Nightwood (Adorno, ­Philosophy 37). While the novel continues to be generally interpreted as one that makes the “darkness visible” and relies on ekphrastic references to visual arts (Caselli 163), its reliance on music is equally important to the intermedial, rather than purely intertextual, quality of Barnes’s work, which deploys history as a public but also deeply interpersonal narrative where events are propelled and stifled by human affect. In early studies of Barnes, critics like Louis Kannestine and Wallace Fowlie commented on Nightwood’s musical, fugue-like narrative, suggesting that its musical and poetic motifs capture the characters’ sense of estrangement and alienation. Similarly, T.S. Eliot in his preface to Nightwood noted the novel’s “musical pattern” and its “beauty of phrasing” (qtd. in Barnes, Nightwood xii). Both the musicality and abstraction of Barnes’s language give voice to the estrangement and alienation that the characters feel. While estrangement and alienation are among the favourite tropes of modernism, their local context is inevitably culturally defined. Unlike their British contemporaries, American modernists like Barnes, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, or Stein were self-conscious about their lack of historical and literary tradition— they felt homeless by definition (Cowley; Hartley). However, as this chapter argues, it was this sense of homelessness that triggered the need to return to the American landscape and its locales, a return that elevated exile into a s­ acred

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diaspora of feeling and emotion. As Cowley noted in his memoir, for many American writers, “[t]he effect of living in Europe had been to emphasize the most national—it would be wiser to say the most personal—elements in [the artist’s] character” (101). Embedded in America’s colonial heritage, American modernism couldn’t help but re-enforce the myth of the American frontier in order to pave the way towards new aesthetic topographies or what Cowley in his memoir refers to as “new countries of emotion” (152). As this chapter will show, the relationship between exile and the diasporic idealization of space drives the overall narrative structure of Nightwood, whose messianic and intrinsically utopian dialectic allows for digestion of the errant facets of history as static insignia built for comfort, though a comfort that simultaneously disturbs. In Nightwood, the characters’ sense of alienation is ­primarily aligned with the urban landscape of American expatriation (­ Parson 178). And yet, the expatriate cities of Paris, Vienna, and Berlin frequently ­collapse into forest sequences that revere in natural, intimate spaces no matter how sullied they are by the tokens of the machinic world. The characters’ hearts incessantly return to the “pastures in which the night feeds” (83), ­pastures that Dr O’Connor, the savant and self-proclaimed gynaecologist of creative arts, associates with the ravages of the human heart that sings. Barnes understands that the drama arising from tensions between history and humanity, as well as love and desire, cannot be grasped or ­elucidated through written language alone. In Nigthwood, a novel that explores the ­nuanced layers of historical and human experience through the individual politics of the heart—politics that stage amorous sequences as frontiers of ­desire—music serves as an essential means of deploying the dialectic valances of human emotions that are driven to their limits. As Malcolm Budd suggests, unlike other art forms, music as the most non-referential of arts deploys the “dramatic possibilities inherent in key relationships as structures in which melodies of contrasting characters are embedded and subjected to melodic, rhythmic and harmonic change” (167). This change however depends on “the unification of diverse materials,” as Budd emphasizes, and the “reconciliation of multiplicity within unity, a so-called ‘unity’ in diversity or organic ‘unity’” (171). In Nightwood, this “unity in diversity” is achieved through narrative errantry that cleaves the heart but nurtures the soul by transforming suffering into a kind of melancholy, songful art. Consequently, Barnes’s much celebrated Nightwood serenades the reader with vignettes of European cities where the main characters roam and sing of their estrangement. These vignettes serve merely as an overture to the final errand in the wilderness where neither Felix Volkbein’s fake history, nor Dr O’Connor’s nomadic narrative can save the main characters, Nora and Robin, from the hour of reckoning that takes place in the mythical space of

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the American woods, the “strangest salon in America…couched in the centre of a mass of entangled grass and weeds” (Barnes, Nightwood 50), that place where “early American history was re-enacted” (51). Referencing the multicultural fabric of American history, Barnes’s Nightwood is preoccupied with the foreignness of exiled bodies that are confounded by their persistent yet immobilizing restlessness, while simultaneously exposing the ways in which exile results in a kind of bodily automatization that familiarizes otherness as a transcultural vehicle of modernity. Its transcultural aspect deploys otherness as multiplicity, in other words, as an unfolding sequence of others who expose modernity’s anxiety about bodily, cultural, and racial difference while simultaneously pointing to its relentless courtship of alterity as an abstract aesthetic, but also as an errant crusade for what one of Barnes’s short story characters, Dr Katrina Silverstaff, calls “something impossible again; to find again” (Barnes, Collected Stories 320). Such an aesthetic partakes in the utopian impulse to re-imagine the past in a melancholy yet forward-looking manner, a manner that in most American romances is associated by the narrative return to and embrace of the frontier as a site of illumination and individual encounter.1 It is not surprising, therefore, that Barnes’s Nightwood ends in the sacred space of the forest, in a small chapel in the woods, where the renegade occupies a space that is both sacred and profane, utopian and dystopic, where the symphony of the human heart and the drum beat of history meet to compose a mythography of exile and estrangement.

Renegade (K)Nights Errant

Nightwood provides an intriguing account of renegade (k)nights who err in the woods of their cultural, amorous, and sexual deracination, searching for imaginary lands, Gatsbyesque “green gardens” that replicate their persistent sense of desertion and loneliness. Felix Volkbein, a European Jewish Catholic, hopes to recuperate his origins through cultural and amorous identifications that only further distance him from the sense of national belonging that he seeks to achieve through his paternal goal of producing an heir. Like Felix, R ­ obin Vote, an American, seeks out homes everywhere and nowhere. Nora Wood

1 This utopian impulse pervades frontier romances like James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers and The Last of the Mohicans, or Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. As studies by Richard Chase and Leslie Fiedler emphasize, the frontier here serves as a physical and figurative boundary between the past/present and the future, as well as nature and civilization.

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and Jenny Petherbridge, the other errants of the night, collect their own losses through their amorous engagements. And finally, Dr O’Connor, an Irishman of many names and professions, whose life reflects his own cultural and sexual dispersion, is as trapped in his own historical metafictions as the rest of the characters are lost to (and in) their own imaginary landscapes. As a testament to the 1920s literary expatriation, Nightwood nonetheless resists urban utopia by recalling what Dr O’Connor calls “Life, the pastures in which the night feeds and prunes the cud that nourishes us to despair” (Barnes, Nightwood 83). From the winding city streets of London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna where the characters aimlessly roam, we are frequently brought back to the original historical site of American modernity, represented by the uncultivated landscape of the ruined garden where Nora and Robin come face to face with “something that was everywhere in millions, irrevocable and ineradicable,” but also “has always been prey of the million little things” (Barnes, Collected Stories 135). At the heart of Barnes’s notion of this landscape is the religion of space whose sublime ecology cum spirituality worships at the altar of America’s Promised Land mythography, modernity’s ultimate apostasy. This spatial ecology promises a respite from history—its political, social, gender, and racial anxieties, a respite that simultaneously provides an important insight into how these anxieties are managed and (re)negotiated as an atonal symphony of multiple, clashing intertexts. Barnes’s wedding of history and/as fiction comments on 1920s America’s struggle with its (post)colonial, but also transcultural heritage, throwing into sharp relief America’s tense relationship with transcultural difference. In Nightwood, as in most of Barnes’s work, racial and ethnic tensions represent their own kind of (nomadic, ever-shifting) frontier. Obfuscated by diasporic otherness and the various affective, as well as social inequities that inform America’s nomadic zeitgeist, Barnes’s representation of difference marches to the beat of its own (dis)embodied drum. The opening chapter, “Bow Down,” suggests the fall of European empires as a form of bowing out of European culture from the world stage of influence, preparing the ground for the grand American romance between Nora and Robin, but also between America’s early twentieth-century rise to power and its ­desperate courtship of its own historical estrangement from Europe. Not surprisingly, Barnes deploys this tense historical courtship through the ­complex histories of the Jewish Catholic Felix Volkbein and his Irish sidekick, Dr O’Connor, whose queer sensibility and historical displacement comments on the errant facets of history that are, as he calls them, “untidy” (Barnes, N ­ ightwood 118). Drawing attention to the estrangement underpinning ­European history by noting the renegade position of the Jews and the Irish in European nation states, Barnes prepares the stage for America’s ­transnational

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and ­contrapuntal past by deploying Felix as the orphan child whose self-­ constructed mythologies and dreams become the fodder for Dr O’Connor’s philosophical discoursing on being a part of the marginal populace. The renegade nature of Felix Volkbein and Dr Matthew O’Connor is aligned with landscapes that transcend the metropolitan vistas of Europe by mocking the closed-in architecture of the historical buildings that only further confirm Felix’s Jewish and Dr O’Connor’s Irish sense of estrangement. Both Felix and Dr O’Connor find their home in the realm of the itinerant circus acrobats, the world of “splendid and reeking falsification” (11). Liminal spaces where the night meets the day, the circus becomes a museum, the ruined garden a dystopian metropolis, expose the utopian space of the pastoral idyll as “not what can be positively imagined and proposed, but rather what is not imaginable and not conceivable” (Jameson 412). In other words, such spaces provide insight into the ways in which the characters’ exile catapults them into diasporas of their own making. An essential aspect of the Expatriate Bohemia in Europe was its persistent reliance on exile becoming a diaspora, a space of at-homeness while remaining a dystopic non-place of melancholy and longing. Artists like Barnes relished their exile only to feel nostalgic about their sense of alienation and ­displacement from their homelands. Such a spatial dialectic informs Barnes’s modernist aesthetic, but also exposes the complex emotionally-vested nuances of exilic topographies that define the expatriate movement. In the words of Adorno, “the anxiety of the lonely becomes a canon of the aesthetic language of form” of the early twentieth century (Philosophy 37). Indeed, the diasporic space that the characters occupy and persistently re-create not only refers to the fall of the European Empires after the World War i, but also to the transculturation of America at the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. As historians have noted, after the First World War the post-war fragmentation of Europe’s imperial identity into new, independent nation-states ­resulted in a confusing migration of people into specifically designed territories that never quite became home (Hobsbawm 88). As Hobsbawm notes, people ­“migrated not only across oceans and international frontiers, but from country to city and from one region of the same state to another—in short, from ‘home’ to the land of strangers” (119). Growing anti-Semitism and racial pogroms led to mass migrations to the United States, the Promised Land that many had seen as a site of ultimate redemption from years of oppression and humiliation (Hobsbawm 13). Barnes establishes the collapse of the European utopia in the opening chapter of the novel where Felix’s bowing down to the old ­Europe evokes the dystopic tensions that permeated Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, tensions that Barnes juxtaposes through spaces

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that mediate the nomadic dystopia through the characters’ re-imagination of the negative into a “world whose constituents, being alien, force the mind to succumb to an imaginary populace” (Barnes, Nightwood 3). Like the circus, ­history, Barnes suggests, is a site of alterity whose errant nature remains subject to persistent erring.

Expatriation and American Circus as an Art Form of Alterity

As critics like Kannestine, Marcus, and Warren have noted, the space of the circus is essential to Nightwood. But while most critical scholarship focuses on the carnivalesque function of the circus as a site of subversion, this section directs attention to the significance of the circus as a space of mobility where various re-enactments of alterity (be it in the form of Nightwood’s transcultural populace or their sense of affective estrangement) serve as paradoxical stand-ins for the pastoral idyll that remains inaccessible, forever deferred. Through their estrangement from post-war Europe, Felix Volkbein and Dr Matthew O’Connor represent the ultimate prototypes of the American settler. At the same time, however, they are the very antidote of the white American settler. Jewish and Irish immigrants to America were historically marginalized and frequently linked to African origins. According to Thaddeus Russell, the general view by 1890s was that “while the Irish were no longer black, the Jews were certainly of African origin” (161). In the opening chapter of Nightwood, both are linked to the circus and (marginalized) alterity. Dr O’Connor’s ethnicity is aligned with transgender identity while Felix’s Jewishness is connected to Nikka, “the nigger who used to fight the bear in the Cirque de Paris” (Barnes, Nightwood 16). While Nikka’s body is tattooed from head to toe, Felix turns the portraits that he adopts as his so-called lineage into a figurative skin, but also into a frontier of sorts.2 Their otherness thus embodies America’s problematic relationship with racial and ethnic differences. In “Laughing at Leviticus: Nightwood as Woman’s Circus Epic,” Jane Marcus sees this link as Barnes’s critique and anticipation of fascism. Arguing that Nikka’s tattooed body represents “the body of the Other—the black, lesbian, transvestite, or Jew” (221), Marcus describes his liminality as a “communal book of resistances of underworld outsiders to domination” (221). Expanding on Marcus’s notion, this section emphasizes that the characters’ bodies represent the frontier that is both inscribed upon 2 Here, Sara Ahmed’s definition of the skin as “a border or a frame…that…call[s] into question the exclusion of the other from the subject” is particularly useful (Strange Encounters 45). In Ahmed’s terms, “‘the skin’ marks and polices the difference between inside and outside. It is a boundary that guarantees separation” (Strange Encounters 45).

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and appropriated, but not necessarily resisted. Rather, the inscriptions—be they in the form of Nikka’s tattoos or Felix’s fake portraits—evoke the asymmetries and atonalities of America’s multicultural and transcultural relations, desires, but also intertexts. Reminiscent of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Nikka is to Felix what ­Queequeq is to Ishmael. Racial and ethnic ambivalence pervades Barnes’s Nightwood; however, as this section argues, Nightwood strives to expose the errant nature of the frontier: its colonial and postcolonial encounters, their asymmetries and challenges. Like Queequeg’s tattooed body, Nikka’s body is an open portrait of America, the “counterpane…patchwork” that is both its “shadow” and “true substance” (Melville 29; 42). Like Nikka, Felix represents Dr O’Connor’s own fabulated shadows, shadows that uncover a particular “sort of ‘odour of [colonial] memory’” (Barnes, Nightwood 118). Felix and Dr O’Connor thus embody the conflicting (racial and ethnic) topographies of America’s settler history. As Barnes states, “the Jew and the Irish…often meet, spade to spade, in the same acre” (31). This ‘acre’ is an imaginary realm of the “pasture where the night feeds,” to quote Dr O’Connor, that is, the Promised Land that might as well be the circus (83). Aesthetically, the circus consists of kinetic and static art forms: music, dance, painting, written and spoken word, but also sculpture and architecture. Fox and Parkinson emphasize that geography is essential to the circus as it depends on spatial availability while simultaneously crafting its own space in the countryside. In America in particular, the circus became an important art form that validated “the national lore” (Fox and Parkinson 10). Not surprisingly, it was often linked with museums sponsored by American philanthropists and entrepreneurs (Adams 77). While European circuses like Viennese Prater, for example, were mostly stationary, in other words, they crafted their own utopian space within the city and moved only seasonally, American circuses became famous for their itinerant nature and one-day stands that were “designed to get up and go” (Adams 135). Staging history as a mobile and persistently renewable narrative, the circus is an American art form inspired by European influences, influences that sideline partly as a cultural lore and conquest, partly as cheap entertainment. In Barnes’s Nightwood, the circus, in its relationship to space and geography, becomes the embodiment of the pioneer, frontier spirit that is so crucial to the cataloguing and museumification of the American identity.3

3 As Fox and Parkinson emphasize, geography was essential to the American circus in two ways: firstly, the circus depended on the availability of a vacant space (53), but it was also intrinsically a mobile art form that served to educate the masses as Adams notes in his study of E. Pluribus Barnum’s museum enterprise (Adams 76).

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However, it also serves as a site of historical evasion where racial, gender, class, and ethnic differences become amalgamated rather than queered by “the carnivalesque overturning of boundaries and order” (Goody 165). The frontier thus becomes a site of forgetting where transcultural otherness disappears into the margin that homogenizes, instead of troubles, “the relationship between human and non-human, from beasts to puppets” (Caselli 157). In ­Nightwood, the expatriate circus populace consists of the Jews, the Irish, and the African Americans who do not necessarily represent subversive positions of grotesque becomings, as Goody suggests (165). Instead, they stand for the colonial memory and nostalgia whose erasure they embody, mocking America’s quest for the melting pot wherein the line between race, gender, class, and ethnicity is blurred, if not eliminated. As Thaddeus Russell emphasizes, the linking of the Jews and Irish to the African continent was a common strategy to evade America’s transnational conundrum: how to assimilate non-white races and ethnicities without quite altering the supremacist imperative of the nation (161). From ethnologists like Daniel G. Brinton to William Z. Ripley’s 1899 study, The Races of Europe, and Arthur T. Abernethy’s The Jew a Negro (1910), historical perspectives on America’s multicultural make-up affirmed the intensity of its (unresolved) racial and anti-Semitic sensibilities (Russell 160). Nightwood strives to acknowledge these sensibilities by deploying them as spatial ecologies whose errant spirit indicts, but also inscribes the very frontiers they queer. Commenting on America’s nationalist crusade for multicultural assimilation, Barnes inevitably uncovers the errant and racist fictions that inform the expatriate pastoral idyll. An exile from the European history to which he clings but does not quite belong, Felix Volkbein evokes the American rather than the European conceptualization of the circus as an archive of his “falsifications.” The product of his parents’ “fantastic museum of encounter” (Barnes, Nightwood 5), Felix, like Dr O’Connor, is a master raconteur, a historian of his orphaned roots, who believes that “the great past might mend a little if he bowed long enough, if he succumbed and gave homage” (9). Like a historical document, Felix is “the accumulated” who emerges from “some secret land that he has nourished on but cannot inherit” (9). Orphaned by birth, Felix is forced to imagine rather than recollect his past in order to collect himself but also to translate himself, to himself, through the spaces he visits and occupies. Like a modernist artifact, his biography is a creative work in progress. Homeless in Vienna, Paris, and Berlin, Felix quite literally feels himself into being through persistent movement which allows him to project his estrangement onto the urban spaces that he temporarily inhabits, though which inevitably alienate him. While he supports his identity with two fake proofs of his Baron status—the two life-size

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portraits of actors—and a collection of “edicts and laws, folk story and heresy… [that] his mind dimly and reverently reverberated” (10), it is music that best captures the renegade aspect of his exilic existence. He finds solace in striking “the wood in the rhythm with the music, as if he were playing only the two important notes of an octave, the low and the high” (123), in the utopia of the dramatic music or as Adorno calls it musica ficta that stylizes his identity as a “mediated [expression]” and “a semblance of the passions” (Philosophy 35). Consequently, music provides Felix with an important avenue to restage his otherness as desire that “eludes direct speech and presents itself as an elsewhere” (Buci-Glucksmann 138). It is therefore not surprising that when Felix discovers Robin Vote, an American expatriate, in the hotel Récamier where she lies sprawled among “a confusion of potted plants, exotic palms and cut flowers, faintly over-sung by the notes of unseen birds” (Barnes, Nightwood 34), he feels like a Christopher Columbus who has just landed on the shores of the American terra incognita. When they marry, and have a child whom Robin soon after abandons, Felix’s sense of Robin’s abandonment only further affirms his estrangement, but also inevitably re-enforces his diasporic yearning to re-create his identity through the creative tenets of his own imagination. If, as Fredric Jameson suggests, dystopian elements sustain utopia as a pastoral idyll where “re-awakening” and a “revival of futurity…and alternative futures” are possible (434), then Felix’s marriage to Robin Vote, the renegade American who abandons him, is essential to keeping his utopia alive. Referencing the fall of the European Empire and the end of the Habsburg clan through the death of the Volkbeins, the first chapter establishes a ­historical continuity that prefaces Felix’s “discovery” of America as a site of otherness upon which he can project “the mingled passions that made up his past” (Barnes, Nightwood 8), including his “obsession for what he termed ‘Old Europe’: aristocracy, nobility, royalty” (9). Through Felix and the equally displaced sidekick Dr O’Connor, Barnes sets up Europe as the cradle of arts by leading us through a whole library of historical, literary, visual, and musical references from the Tudors to Queen Victoria, Goethe, Loyola, Mme de Sévigné, to Wagner, references that are interlaced with the metropolitan meccas of European modernism: Vienna, Paris, and Berlin. By highlighting Felix’s displacement and disconnection with what he claims to be “his” European history, but also by relying on Dr O’Connor’s persistent mockery of the greatness of the European arts, Barnes prepares the stage for crafting a space for the American(ized) aesthetic that inscribes, but also ­challenges what Marsden Hartley and American modernists like Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, or H.D. viewed as “a definitely localized idea of ­modernism”

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(60). Such an aesthetic acknowledges the multicultural, pioneering, and inevitably renegade aspect of American history associated with “the twilight of the acrobat,” or, as Marsden Hartley puts it, “the wandering minstrel who keeps generation after generation to the art of his forefathers, the fine old art of the pavement and country road” (155). But it also points to the conflicting history of the wandering minstrel as a settler-turned colonizer whose desire is suspect at best, propelled by the kind of nomadic in-ethic that strives to evade historical and cultural realities by following errant desire. The salon of Nora Wood, where itinerant artists, poets, and radicals meet to remember stories of “covered wagons; animals going down to drink; … where in the dark another race crouched in ambush,” attests to this dialectic. It is a site that distinguishes American art of paved and country roads from the old Europe and its architecture, where neither Felix nor Dr O’Connor feels at home (Barnes, Nightwood 51). But it is also an allegory of historical obfuscation that exemplifies (post)colonial memory. Like a settler’s colony, Nora’s house is “couched in the center of a mass of tangled grass and weeds” where “early American history was being re-enacted” in the “ruined gardens” (50). Nora herself is an embodiment of the American mythology: a strong-minded pioneer who presides over the salon meetings, yet at the same time “rob[s] herself for everyone” (52). Once again, Barnes delineates human nature as shaped by the space that defines it. Acknowledging the European aspects of American history, Barnes nonetheless suggests that the Promised Land might be a “more intense orchestration” (52), where every settler is also an artist and colonizer, collecting their history from the “stories they had heard” (52). Moreover, if “the architectural utopia is the beginning and the end of the geographic utopia itself” as Bloch suggests (198), then the coupling of the American and European space allows Barnes to explore the Anglo-American mythography and its modernist conversions in the contrapuntal music of human emotion. Like most of her American predecessors, Barnes connects the mythography of American history, particularly its errant nature, with romance that highlights the matters of the heart as an intrinsic part of human nature, but also as an essential aspect of the errand in the wilderness where history is a labour of love; love—a labour of history. Just as America’s romance with its own history remains frustrated and the pastoral, forest idyll inaccessible and elusive (Chase, American 183), Nora’s relationship to Robin remains suspended in the never-never land that cannot end anywhere but on the frontier where it began. From circus to forest and night sequences, Nightwood aligns the frontier with abstract yet natural spaces, spaces that are evocative of what Agamben calls a “threshold” or “irreducible indistinction” whereby difference is simultaneously appropriated and resisted (Homo Sacer 9).

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In this context, Barnes’s Nightwood returns to the renegade ethics that shapes her work. The errant and abstract space rather than the closed-in architecture of the European art world, with its museums where individual insignia are locked into their “magic circle,” to use Benjamin’s words (Illuminations 60), is what ultimately makes a difference in the politics of renewal, a politics underpinning not only American history and its mythographies, but also the modernist aesthetic of the “country road” highlighted by Hartley as a moral responsibility of an American artist. For example, when Nora closes down her salon and moves with Robin to Paris, she commits herself to turning their home into a sacred, magical space whose carefully-crafted pastoral idyll turned diasporic colony is to serve as a monument to their amorous connection. She buys an apartment in Rue Du Cherche-Midi and enshrines it with garden objects, circus chairs, wooden horses, cherubims from Vienna, and spinet from England (Barnes, Nightwood 56). In this, Nora’s aesthetic choices mimic the European vision of the Promised Land in which Robin figures as the New World.4 Essential to Barnes’s aesthetic is also the emphasis on the complex transcultural valences of the dialectic that defines American modernity: the push towards the creation of its own cultural art scene by renouncing yet inevitably inscribing the reliance on European influences and the pull away from the European notion of space towards the pioneer conceptualization of the forest as the archetypal geography framing American identity. The location of Nora’s house in particular speaks to the frontier ecology, but also to the spirituality of the woods that Nora embodies.5 Like the “ruined gardens” of her house, Nora’s nature is “savage and refined” (50), “the weather-beaten grain in her face, that wood in the work; the tree coming forward in her, an undocumented record of time” (50). Robin, on the other hand, is “an image of forgotten experience; a mirage of an eternal wedding cast on the racial memory” (37). While Robin yearns for a home, Nora generously provides it. Not surprisingly, the more she tries to define their home as a closed-in, culturally-defined space, the less she is able to retain the amorous connection with her lover, Robin. Robin, like many of her predecessors, be it Cooper’s Natty Bumpo, Melville’s Ishmael, or Hawthorne’s Heather Prynne, represents the pioneer spirit of the “wandering minstrel” whose commitment to the woods and the country road evokes the 4 See Victoria Smith, “A Story Beside(s) Itself: The Language of Loss in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood” in which she argues that Robin’s “innocence and anarchy” allude to “the frontier-the American-West—the rough and tough virgin land emblem of America” (198). 5 Jane Bowles’s novel, Two Serious Ladies (1943), inscribes a similar dynamic: Miss Goering chooses to live in the woods to “work out [her] own idea of salvation…in some more tawdry place” while Mrs Copperfield shuttles between New York and Panama (17). Cf. Chapter 7.

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acrobat’s sense of space, or what Marsden Hartley calls the “geometrics of the trapeze, the bar, and the wire” (160). But this renegade commitment is mired in oppressive strategies, ancestral references, and agrarian taxonomies that it strives to abandon in the first place. Not surprisingly, Nora and Robin meet in the Denckman circus that is also a second home to Nora. Not only do the circus performers participate in her artistic salon, but she also sidelines as their publicity scrivener. In many ways, Nora, like Felix, figuratively scripts the errant Robin who is loyal to the spirituality of the road into specific spaces, be it her home or her ruined gardens. To put it differently, while Nora represents the permanent pole of modernity’s restlessness, Robin evokes the fleetingness of its abstract worlds. Unlike Nora, the divine guardian of the night, Robin sings herself out of the sacred places Nora defines for her. The more Nora attempts to subject Robin’s history to a coherent narrative, the more Robin blurs the line between “love and anonymity” through her singing that gives voice to “a company unaware” that “rang clear in the songs she sang” (Barnes, Nightwood 55): …sometimes Italian, sometimes French or German, songs of the people, debased and haunting, songs that Nora had never heard before, or that she had never heard in company with Robin. When the cadence changed, when it was repeated on a lower key, she knew that Robin was singing of a life that she herself had no part in; snatches of harmony as tell-tale as the possession of a traveller from a foreign land; songs like a practiced whore who turns away from no one but the one who loves her. (57) In this passage, Barnes connects singing with movement and evasion. ­Singing is the traveller’s possession, a kind of personalized archive of emotion that she must recall, if only to reject its pull. As Adorno suggests, music expresses the “seismographic record” or movement of history “with more justice than do historical documents” by vocalizing that which is othered by speech ­(Philosophy 37). While most critics celebrate Robin’s errant nature as a subversive gesture, it is essential to see the novel’s characters, not just Robin, as embodiments of the different histories and valences of humanity whose sense of “being,” to use Alain Badiou’s terms, is “neither a known or recognized multiple, nor an ineffable singularity, but that which detains in its multiple being all the ­common traits of the collective in question…[as] the truth of the collective’s being” (Being and Event 17). In other words, only through a combination of narrative possibilities and diverse art forms can the atonal nature of history and humanity find some form of catharsis. Badiou suggests that “catharsis is the other truth” (Handbook of Inaesthetics 4). For the characters of Nightwood, any

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form of emotional reconciliation or relief lies in the field of an imagined other as an aesthetic abstraction and in a space that is simultaneously sacred and other(ed). However, this emotional diaspora that the characters persistently re-create only re-enforces their exilic position as an inevitable counterpoint to the idyll that forever (dystopically) errs in its imagined, utopian future. This future, however, is haunted by the wandering shadows of the past and their renegade quality. In Nightwood as in most of Barnes’s work, this renegade quality is associated with what Agamben, drawing on Benjamin, describes as “divine violence,” a moment when the difference between lies and truth, exile and belonging, supremacy and marginalization, life and death becomes indistinguishable, when characters are deprived of their narrative capacity and reduced to a “song, with tears and jealousy” that as Dr O’Connor says, “starts out largo, but it ends like I Hear You Calling Me, or Kiss Me Again, gone wild” (Barnes, Nightwood 96, 137). Barnes, however, refuses to give the last word to the European, albeit exiled Irishman, O’Connor, and instead stages this divine violence on the American frontier where the song quite literally turns into a bark as Robin goes down on all fours and starts barking like a dog when confronted by a love-sick Nora. Robin’s gesture of barking like a dog forces Nora to face the music—that no matter how compassionate, love and pain are frequently intertwined in a colonizing dynamic that justifies conquest in the name of desire. As they define and stifle one another, they have the power to reduce such (in)humanity to a melancholy bark. In the past, critics have attempted to align the novel’s musicality with its dramatic features. In The Art of Djuna Barnes: Duality and Damnation, Louis Kannestine emphasizes the novel’s integration of “visual, musical, theatrical, and poetic motifs” (103). Fowlie, for instance, compares the novel’s “tragic core” to a classical fugue (139, 143) while Hirschman defines Nightwood as an “orchestrated novel” (97). In his biography of Barnes, Andrew Field compares the novel to the old folk opera Bow Down, the original title of the novel and later the title of the first section, describing the characters as “stand[ing] and recit[ing] on their little narrative islands essentially the same song of despair” (183). Clearly, the musical undertones of Nightwood are essential to the narrative. In terms of its exilic theme, they help Barnes establish and mirror the non-referential aspect of displacement with which all the characters struggle and by which their mental, bodily, and sexual topographies are constantly dismantled. Barnes neutralizes, only to further enhance, this non-referentiality through the poetic quality of the text that both stages and visualizes the characters’ renegade inethics through the use of ekphrastic references to visual and ­musical arts. Felix Volkbein builds his identity on the basis of two paintings

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he ­purchases in an antique shop. Robin Vote is not only associated with an “orchestra of wood-winds [that] render a serenade which will popularize wilderness” (Barnes, Nightwood 35), but is also compared to a “painting by the Douanier Rousseau” called The Dream and “a picture forever arranged” (35; 42). Nora, on the other hand, is the ultimate image of the weeping Madonna who shall never sleep. Although more recently, critics like Grobel, Warren, and Caselli have started pondering the intertextual quality of Barnes’s work, the emphasis remains on the ways in which such intertextual references become a testament to the author’s biographical and artistic inauthenticity reflecting the liabilities of representation and gender relations at the dawn of the twentieth century. In her 2009 study, Daniela Caselli, for instance, delves into what she calls Barnes’s “[counterfeit] secrecy” through a detailed reading of Barnes’s personal letters and biography (34), arguing that Barnes produces work that is out of step with modernism (i.e., “anachronistic” and “improper” as she puts it) and in which “meaning cannot be transcended, stories need to be narrated again and again” (12). As this chapter has outlined, however, Barnes’s work is very much reflective of its time. It recognizes the blind spots of the pastoral drive of American modernism. In its reluctance to resolve the characters’ racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual anxieties, Nightwood creates a space where the pastoral idyll, like her urban counterpart, is confronted by the realities it strives to evade through its frequently colonizing minstrel spirit. These realities constitute a common thread running through Barnes’s oeuvre, which reveals itself as a determination to acknowledge America’s history as a renegade in-ethic and errant “art.” While some critics see this as Barnes’s “unintelligible” and “impenetrable modernism” (Caselli 3) that points to what Jonsson views as the “crisis of representation” (275), this chapter has argued that Barnes’s creative versatility, her ability to work across genres (from poetry, short story, novel, theatre, to journalism and visual art), relates a certain renegade quality of American modernism. This “nature” cannot be realized or fixed in the visual, verbal, or musical forms alone, but rather through their delicate synthesis by moving in and out of other media (genres and forms) whereby the apostasy of formal limitation is at least partially transcended. If impenetrability, abstract aesthetics, and what some critics continue to call excessive unintelligibility constitute Barnes’s a/theology of space, her emphasis on the renegade quality of art itself is a testament to the pastoral undertones of America’s machine-age modernity whose coat of progress cannot escape the regression to the past it serenades.

chapter 5

Métachorie as Decomposition Illustrated: The Dance of Aesthetic Synthesis in Barnes’s Journalism, Poetry, and One-Act Plays For me, dancing is only a part of the great whole, and by that I mean the thing that symbolizes life. Painting alone or sculpture alone, or the voice of the poet or the song in the throat, they are nothing unless collected into a perfect whole. True art lies in decomposed forms. Interview with valentine de saint-point, I Could Never Be Lonely without a Husband (127)

…

Art informs, deforms, and transforms a broad ensemble of forms around it, forms of objects but also forms of customs and forms of thought. Above all, it spreads something of its desire, of the new sensibility and sensuality for which it is the drawing/design. jean-luc nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing (57)

⸪ Nightwood’s nomadic aesthetic is informed by persistent movement that challenges the stability of not only geophysical, racial, and gender boundaries but also formal boundaries. In Nightwood, as in most of Barnes’s work, travel becomes a means of storytelling, and storytelling a form of travel whereby the relationships between forms—textual, geographic, or bodily—are subverted by formal excess that simultaneously emphasizes what Alain Badiou refers to as the “purging of the form” (The Century 45). Barnes’s formal v­ ersatility— her ability to move comfortably between different art forms and stylistic ­strategies—allows her to stage an aesthetic funeral for the past while welcoming the new by means of transposition and subtraction. Such “nourishing decomposition,” to use Badiou’s words, drives the very principle of anabasis that defines not only Barnes’s work, but also the early twentieth-century zeitgeist as a whole (The Century 45). If inherent in the early twentieth-century ­anabasis

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is not only a certain kind of “lostness,” but also what Badiou calls the “free invention of a wandering that will have been a return, a return that did not exist as a return-route prior to the wandering” (The Century 82), then it can be said that, in Barnes’s work, such “returns” are both entertained and thwarted, which inevitably results in their incremental repetition. Since they can never be fulfilled physically, they are suggested formally through the dance of aesthetic synthesis. This aesthetic dance as it were—be it visual, musical, bodily, or verbal—aspires towards the complete synthesis of arts, or what Valentine de Saint-Point, one of Barnes’s famous avant-garde interviewees, describes as the ability to “decompose… action into the one line that would have expressed it” (qtd. in Barnes, I Could Never 227). While little emphasis has been put on Barnes as an aesthete, most of her early work—from journalism, early poetry, and one-act plays—frequently sidelines as an intriguing commentary on the early twentieth-century America and its literary aesthetics, but also as a theoretical reflection on the artistic movements of the time. What is art? What is its function? What is its relationship to humanity? Barnes’s interest in art forms as a necessary preamble to exploring the new, but also what Badiou calls so aptly the “inhuman within the human” (The Century 167), is already present in her early journalism. Through her interviews and articles, she frequently conceptualizes art as an important means of exceeding the inhuman within humanity, or what she mockingly describes as “life” in her interview with Guido Bruno, by turning her subjects into artistic objects, thus reducing them to mere stylistic formalizations (Barnes, I Could Never 383). In “Fleurs du Mal a la Mode de New York—An Interview with Djuna Barnes by Guido Bruno,” published in December 1919 in Pearson’s Magazine, Guido Bruno, the son of a Czechoslovakian rabbi and a self-appointed “dealer of experimental literature and visual art,” teases Barnes about the “ugliness” and “morbidity” that defines her writing (Barnes, I Could Never 383). Impatiently, she responds: “What’s the use? Today we are, tomorrow dead” (386). Her ­journalism, early poetry, and one-act plays already inscribe Barnes’s aesthetic rejection of human physicality, but also its pesky inevitability and persistence. As critics like Loncraine, Caselli, and Taylor have noted, her early writing is filled with decomposed and decomposing bodies. Their textuality signals Barnes’s aesthetic dance with forms, her purging and filtering out of the (in) human that is paradoxically mobilized by the very arsenal of formal experimentation she deploys—be it drawing, music, poetry, journalism, or dramatic tableaux vivants. If, as Mary Joseph argues, physical travel both destroys and constructs new boundaries (98), then formal (aesthetic) travel both purges and sublimates the old in order to create the new, something that T.S. Eliot,

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Barnes’s dear friend and confidant, defined in his well-known essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) as a “continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” (23).

La Métachorie as Superform/s

To provide a more succinct formulation of Barnes’s nomadic aesthetic, it might be useful to turn to Barnes’s 1917 interview with Valentine de Saint-Point, a French novelist, poet, dramatist, and aesthetician, and well-known for her Métachorie, which she performed in an adapted version at the Metropolitan Opera House at nyc in April 1917 (Barnes, I Could Never 223). In the interview titled “Rectruiting for Metachorie: Mme. Valentine de Saint-Point Talks of Her Church of Music” (April 15, 1917), Barnes gets to the core of the modernist emphasis on the complete synthesis of arts by referring to Saint-Point’s conceptualization of art as a “superdance” or “that which is beyond dancing, is that which is within dancing” (qtd. in Barnes, I Could Never 227). According to Saint-Point, “dancing is only a part of the great whole” since “true art lies in decomposed forms” (227). As she says to Barnes, “[p]ainting alone or sculpture alone, or the voice of the poet or the song in the throat, they are nothing unless collected into a perfect whole” (227). She then proceeds to define métachorie as an artistic synthesis, a method whereby diverse actions are reduced to a single line. Not surprisingly, Saint-Point’s “system” evokes ­Kandinsky’s essay on “The Question of the Form” in which he aligns creativity with the ability to transcend humanity through a pure artistic synthesis whose creative force is like a “white, fertilizing ray” (qtd. in Kandinsky and Marc 147). But Saint-Point’s métachorie also resonated with the dramatic sensibility of early twentieth-century America, which was dominated by the “Delsarte System of Expression” introduced by Steele MacKaye in 1872 (Foley 80). This system was developed into a full-fledged theory of the human system emphasizing the balance of mind, body, and soul (80). An essential part of the system was its emphasis on gestures, postures, and movements that followed the tradition of Greek tableaux vivants, theatricals, and pantomimes. Modern dance became an essential part of American culture in the 1900s. Leading the way were Isadora Duncan’s solo performances that incorporated Delsartism, but strove to hone the physical form of the body from within in a manner similar to Saint-Point’s métachorie. Dance became an important embodiment of the method as it allowed for “a dramatic presentation of self,” but it also enacted the very logic of the complete synthesis of arts by “uniting dance, music, drama, and [visuality]” by means of “liberat[ing] the self” from the excessive yoke

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of physicality and by establishing instead a sense of “harmony between body, mind, and soul, and the universe as a whole” (Foley 80, 81–82). Aligned with the “system” was the masking of performers’ bodies. Duncan’s dance performances were frequently veiled or otherwise masked. Desexualized, the veiled corpus was thus transformed into an energy source that was reenacted through choreographed and highly stylized movements of the head, solar plexus, and arms, giving the viewer the sense of an abstract expansion, an expansion that simultaneously turned flesh into a highly stylized form (Foley 82). Mobilizing the traditional visual art of portraiture, such performances would revel in a kind of “formalized in-humanism” (Badiou, The Century 178), a formalized abstraction whereby the transformation of the physical elements of humanity was enacted through a delicate system of creative gesture, carefully choreographed steps, and geometric idealities.1 Saint-Point’s métachorie exhibited a similar penchant for creative gesture, but Saint-Point’s performances were meant to suggest the possibility of a ­complete synthesis of arts rather than embody the sense of totality. As she emphasizes, “Métachorie is that part of action that is gesture, that part of music that is song, that part of line that is pictorial, and that part of movement that is dance” (qtd. in Barnes, I Could Never 227). The correlation between movement and dance allows for a kind of infinite deferral of closure whereby “the dancing body” becomes “a thought-body” (Badiou, The Century 64). As SaintPoint emphasizes, “For me, there is music and poetry and painting in dance. When I think of a dance, I think of a poem; you make a little step on the floor now so—and voila, I have a line of poetry” (qtd. in Barnes, I Could Never 225). Barnes highlights this poetic visuality through her own creative use of space: a japonesque black-and-white drawing of Saint-Point’s quasi-naked, yet completely veiled body whose face is defaced by a dark mask (see Figure 2). The juxtaposition of black and white colour, and geometric shapes and fine lines, suggests the kind of abstraction of the body discussed above, a body reduced to a poetic gesture as the whole body is positioned in a moon-like shape with the arms swinging in touching the veil. The abstraction is re-enforced by a caption that states: “Only the Faces of the Dead Should be Seen” (Barnes, I Could Never 238). Barnes here draws on Saint-Point’s belief that the physical must be hidden in order to give way to the poetic and ideational. Saint-Point argued that an unveiled face interferes with artistic meaning, hence her emphasis on presenting the hidden as “the last divine gesture” (227). In essence, the visual thus takes on the form of an uncharted space. 1 For more details on Duncan’s performances, see Foley (80–83).

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FIGURE 2 “Only the Faces of the Dead Should Be Seen” from Djuna Barnes, “Recruiting for Metachorie: Mme. Valentine de Saint-Point Talks of Her Church of Music.” Series 3, Box 17 Special Collections. Djuna Barnes Papers, University of Maryland. College Park, md. 10 March 2016.

Dance as a metaphor of an open, unmapped space pervades Barnes’s articles and interviews. Her interviews with various celebrities focus on the ways in which dance is not only the “metaphor of the unfixed,” but also a metaphor of pure thought, a kind of philosophy of the universal body-text (Badiou, Handbook 61, 54). In Badiou’s terms, “Dance is the only one among the arts that is constrained to space…dance is the event before naming” (63). Similarly, for Barnes, dance is the form that embodies history before it is formulated and formalized. The dance performances she describes in her articles are evocative of the movement-obsessed America that Gertrude Stein celebrates in her article, “How Writing Is Written” (1935). For Stein, movement is endemic of the ­American century, and so is the emphasis on condensation, immediacy, and the errant character of American culture (491). Barnes’s interviews with performers like Isadora Duncan, the Vernons, or Charles Rann Kennedy and Adolph Bolm are suggestive of the renegade capacity of the American century that is to be artistic rather than consumerist. The paradox of America’s impinging consumerism, however, is not entirely lost on Barnes either. In her aesthetic sophistry, she juxtaposes the dancing culture of New York, its “dancing teas” and dance classes offered in restaurants to encourage the public consumption

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of the new “era” with the artistic ideal of a dance as decomposition illustrated: a decomposition that augurs the complete synthesis of art forms from painting, poetry, sculpture, and music to theatre. Her interview, “No Turkey or Tango in Drag or Glide Dances,” published in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle on September 5, 1913, notes how much the philosophy of dance, the Delsarte system in particular, has been integrated into America’s everyday life. Describing the city of New York in 1913 as a place where “dancing teas” and the dance fever in general spread all over popular restaurants, the article mocks the outdated turkey trot and focuses instead on the much-imitated choreographies of Vernon Castle, a famous dancer of the time, and William Pitt Rivers’ “scroll glide” (Barnes, Interviews 51). Barnes writes: “No less popular was the scroll glide. A dance that took one from side to side in perfect rhythm, a dance that never, in all its shifting steps, turned your partner’s eyes from you, in a second was charged with being a conversational glide, for her eyes were always opposite, and the Boston turn was there” (Interviews 52). Dance, in other words, was a form of poetry. Barnes’s articles are marked by a poetic rhythm and, like a dance number, her sentences glide from paragraph to paragraph. The cadence and lugubriousness of imagery marry excess with restraint. Her interviews with the Vernons in “Yes, the Vernon Castles Have a Home and They Occasionally Tango Past It” (Jan 18, 1914), Charles Rann Kennedy in “Charles Rann Kennedy Explains the ­Meaning of Tangoism” (March 29, 1914), Adolph Bolm in “A Philosopher among Russian Dancers” (January 29, 1916), and David Belasco in “David B ­ elasco Dreams” (December 31, 1916), published in I Could Never Be Lonely Without a Husband (1987), focus primarily on the philosophy of dance as a complex ­artistic system that brings together other art forms: music, theatre, visuality, sculpture, and poetry. In her interview, “Charles Rann Kennedy Explains the Meaning of Tangoism,” Barnes exposes the parallels between dance and theatre by quoting Charles Rann Kennedy, an English actor of Shakespearean tragedies, who associates tangoism with decadent America. The sense that the only way out of American consumerism is by way of art is further echoed in Barnes’s interview with David Belasco who says, “nothing lives forever, and everything changes—yet—out of it all will arise that terrible conqueror, worm. Some little hideous animal to give back all that it has taken. And again we shall climb from the caterpillar into the butterfly, and from that into something higher, and up and on until again the fall will set in” (I Could Never 189). By 1920, Barnes was a prolific and well-paid journalist, placing articles in popular periodicals like McCall’s, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Having published close to 100 articles by then, Barnes earned approximately 15 dollars per article, quite an achievement at the time, and was admired by her contemporaries and fellow journalists, such as Earnest ­Hemingway (Levine 27). As Nancy Levine notes, her journalism remains

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“­surprisingly undated” (27). In the Foreword to the collection of Barnes’s ­Interviews, Doug Messerli describes her interviews as a genre unto itself. What characterizes her journalism, Messerli writes, are “the radical metaphors, the philosophical asides, the script-like format, and numerous other rhetorical devices [that] all draw the reader away from the everyday world and place him in a fabricated space, where nearly any kind of statement or behaviour is ­possible” (6). Banking on the commercial space supplied by the periodicals, Barnes’s interviews are frequently accompanied by elaborate ink drawings that h ­ ighlight the theme of the article, but also simultaneously subtract from the written word. The reader is thus forced to abandon any expectations they might have of the interviewed celebrity and rather engage in the process of ­“reading” ­trans-medially. As Messerli emphasizes, “It is impossible in the work of D ­ juna Barnes utterly to separate the visual from the linguistic. Her pen seems as ready to sketch visual images as it is to write down words” (Poe’s Mother 5). Particularly interesting is Barnes’s journalistic process. Messerli, for example, notes how Barnes began her interviews by sketching her subjects first, beginning with the visual and “fill[ing] in with what she remembered of their discussions at a later date” (5). Barnes’s “visual memory” was beyond impressive (Messerli, Poe’s Mother 7). Illustrations accompanied most of her articles at the time, providing an important medium of amplification but also adding a certain theatricality to both the article and the periodical.2 Most significantly, the drawings and linguistic images Barnes created were not just decorative additions to the text, but were integral to it. Much of Barnes’s writing can be described as emblematic in the sense that both text and visual image are given equal weight, each comprehensible on its own terms, but together redefining and reshaping the other. messerli, Poe’s Mother 7

Such reshaping or mobilizing of the form by another form becomes crucial to Barnes’s nomadic aesthetic that dismantles and excoriates in order to create anew. This logic of decomposed forms is further exemplified in her 1915 oeuvre titled The Book of Repulsive Women: 8 Rhythms and 5 Drawings in which Barnes takes her art of subtraction and formalist abstraction to yet another level.

2 See Susan Harris Smith’s Plays in American Periodicals (1890–1918) in which she notes the preference for the tableaux, images amplifying, but also mobilizing the text, thus mimicking the cinematic effect of the moving picture (32).

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Formulated Flesh: Poetry as Illustration

Djuna Barnes wrote The Book of Repulsive Women in 1915, almost six years before she left for Paris on a journalist assignment from McCall’s. While Barnes was a dedicated journalist, novelist, and playwright, writing poetry remained constant throughout her life. In her lifetime, she published 68 poems and was famous for revising the same poem over and over again (Herring and Stutman 9). In the 2005 edition of Barnes’s collected poems, Phillip Herring and Osias Stutman (2005) refer to her obsessive rewrites: “she’d change her writing over and over until the room was ten feet high with one canto” (9). The Book of Repulsive Women evokes Valentine Saint-Point’s métachoric system of “decomposed forms” (qtd. in Barnes, I Could Never 227) through its emphasis on revision as a form of decomposition. As this chapter has mentioned previously, critics like Caselli, Goody, and Loncraine have pointed to the prevalence of decomposing, decaying bodies in The Book of Repulsive Women. Julie Taylor’s recent study, for instance, points to Barnes’s inscription and challenging of “the modernist poetics of impersonality” mainly by incorporating deeply personal, autobiographical details (11). However, as this book argues throughout, the persistent emphasis on reading Barnes’s work through the lens of her biography is not only counter-productive, but also problematic as it takes away from the impressive versatility of her craft. As in T.S. Eliot’s or Wallace Stevens’s poetry, decomposition is an essential means of “making it new,” of formal abstraction that excoriates the physicality of the human and transforms it into a “formulated flesh” (Radia, “Formulated Flesh” 1).3 The physical body, while occupying a prominent place in Barnes’s poems, must be disposed of in the process of poetic abstraction. Rebecca Loncraine correctly suggests that, in spite of the permeating body imagery, Barnes is more interested in bodily decay than its liveliness. She writes: “her poems present live bodies as decaying flesh, while corpses have a perverse vitality. Her muse is a dead woman” (xii). Not only is The Book of Repulsive Women preoccupied with decomposing bodies as a necessary preamble to poetic formulation or enfleshment, the collection also exhibits the drive for what The Blaue Reiter Almanac editors and authors, Kandinsky and Marc, referred to as “expand[ing] the former limits of artistic expression” in order to “manifest in a 3 See Pavlina Radia, “Formulated Flesh: The Inhuman Appetite of American Modernist ­Poetics” in which the term “formulated flesh” is coined (1). Drawing on the works of T.S. Eliot, ­Wallace Stevens, and Djuna Barnes, the term signifies an elimination of the poet’s subjectivity in order to bring forth the notion of poesis as “a shred of platinum” (Eliot 25)—a disciplined intensity, which Radia calls “formulated flesh” (“Formulated” n. pag.).

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material form the creative force as a light, fertilizing ray” (147). As Caselli emphasizes, apart from being a feast of forms and ideas, the collection also reacts to the increasing mass commodification of American culture: its consumerism and/as spectacle. Pervading the collection is a sense of bodily excess and urban degradation. “From Fifth Avenue Up” explores Fifth Avenue through the lens of a “belly bulging” streetwalker (Barnes, The Book of Repulsive 12, line 47). The poem is weighed down by the woman’s “sagging…bulging” body and the “over-hearts left oozing/At [her] feet” (11–12, lines 31; 29–30). The simple rhyming scheme further mobilizes the woman’s walk, a mobility that is simultaneously blocked by the human body pregnant with excess or “orgy,” as Barnes puts it (12, line 36). Although Barnes links the woman’s belly as “bulging stately/Into space” with the mass commodity culture of America (12, lines 47–48), this consumerist orgy must end with the streetwalker’s “plunging grandly out to fall/upon [her] face” (12, lines 43–44). Consequently, the black-and-white illustration that accompanies the poem further disposes of the sprawling, bulging body through the disciplined cutting of the woman’s body. As the black color slowly but resolutely invades the white space, the woman’s body is consumed by the visual form that figuratively eats the human subject. Caselli acutely points out that Barnes’s poetry “make[s] a spectacle of the…decadence in which American modernism always suspected to have its roots while recoiling from that very thought” (81). We see a similar dialectic in T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Wallace Stevens’s creative metaphysics. But while both Eliot and Stevens strip the body of its accoutrements, Barnes throws it in our face, forcing us to acknowledge it, to digest it visually. As exemplified in “From Third Avenue On,” the consumer gaze is ironically disposed of by transforming the body into a “vacant space” (Barnes, The Book of Repulsive 16, line 22). This vacancy or emptying is once again accomplished through the double subtraction of the corporeal by means of the verse and the accompanying drawing which reduces the female body to a decentred stick figure. Martyniuk, for example, notes that most of the drawings in the collection not only have “clear borders,” but their “images challenge these borders with off-center subjects and large areas of white blackness or unbroken blocks of black background” (62). The emphasis on off-centeredness and vacant spaces transforms the corporeality of the subject into a poetic dance of intensities. Such a poetic dancing is further exemplified in Barnes’s poem, “To a Cabaret Dancer.” Like Walt Whitman’s “The Song of Myself,” Barnes’s ­“Cabaret Dancer” enfleshes her own plurality by gesturing outside the limits of the poetic form towards the potentiality of the visual form of a black and white ink-drawing that feeds on her twirling, singing body. In this, the drawing

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simultaneously revels in the visualization and musicalization of the poetic, or what Wolf calls the “intermedial drive” (43). In its emphasis on the potentiality of thought as illuminating movement and/or blinding stillness, “To a Cabaret Dancer” presents a concatenation of mediated forms wherein the visualized poetic rhythm creates a space where the artistic and philosophical synthesis participates in a meta-critical reflection on the dialectic of life and death, movement and stillness, fleetingness and permanence—all of which are important staples of modernist art. Alain Badiou’s notion of poetry as a genre that “makes truth out of the multiple, conceived as a presence that has come to the limits of language” (Handbook 20) is particularly useful here. It returns us to the formal enfleshment of what is unnameable, what is hidden in language (i.e., the creative idea). In the poem and its visualization, dance gives way to yet another art form—singing. But as in Stevens’s “Of Modern Poetry,” the dancer’s song must be killed for the sake of stillness anticipating movement: “Until her songless soul admits/Time comes to kill:/You pay her price and wonder why/You need her still” (Barnes, The Book of Repulsive 22, lines 38–42). The figure of the singing cabaret dancer is flayed into a poetic text that swirls and dances. For modernist artists, the flaying of flesh is what Kandinsky and Marc called “the final goal” (190). Barnes accomplishes this deed in the poem titled, “Suicide,” in which the body is flayed twice over through references to Corpse A and Corpse B. Corpse A has a “little bruised body like/A startled moon” (Barnes, The Book of Repulsive 23, lines 4–5). The comparison of the bruised body to the startled moon is further sublimated in the second stanza when Corpse B is compared to a consumable: “She lay out listlessly like some small mug/Of beer gone flat” (24, lines 13–14). Not only is the body of Corpse B shrinking, but it is also “formulated.” The drawings that accompany the poems not only simultaneously decompose the poetic form, but also open it up. If, as Jean-Luc Nancy argues in The Pleasure in Drawing, “drawing is the opening of form” that is both “departure” and a “beginning” (1), then Barnes’s drawings can be deployed as a kind of nomafiction: a metacommentary on the renegade incompleteness or non-closure underpinning her nomadic aesthetic.4 In the same light, while Barnes quite literally does away with the physical body in the “Suicide” poem (see Figure 3), the redoubling of the corpse further points to the transformation or elevation of the physical to the realm of the formal or, as Nancy puts it, “body-organon of art, and thus of the technique (ars—techné) that is in play, whether graphic, 4 For a more detailed definition, see the Introduction (Chapter 1). This term also applies to Jane Bowles’s fiction where the characters’ movement and distinct nomadographies serve as socio-political commentaries on the 1940s expatriation to Latin America and North Africa.

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FIGURE 3 “Suicide” from Djuna Barnes, The Book of Repulsive Women Digital Collections: http://hdl. handle.net/1903.1/8267. Djuna Barnes Papers, University of Maryland. College Park, md. 10 March 2016.

vocal or c­ olored, tactile or verbal” (39). Preoccupied with what Badiou calls “formalized in-­humanism” (The Century 178), Barnes explores this exilic scission between body and soul through the cleaving of the form that is reflected in the “In G ­ eneral” and “In Particular” poems that enclose the collection’s drawings while cleaving the meaning of the “general” and “particular.” Interestingly, both poems rely on spatialization by mobilizing space through alliteration, internal/external rhyme, and incremental repetition. While the first line of “In ­General” retains an internal rhyme, “What altar cloth, what rag of worth” (Barnes, The Book of Repulsive 14, line 1), the first line of “In Particular” transforms the “altar” into a “loin-cloth” and abandons the internal rhyme by morphing the “rag of worth” into a “rag of wrong” (18, line 1). In fact, “In Particular” turns the divine, spiritual symbolism into bodily lust, once again pointing to the relationship between the formulated flesh and its corporeal, nonetheless decomposed, counterpart. Evoking the endless dance with aesthetic synthesis, Barnes’s collection rejects the dominance of the verbal corpus and embraces an altered, formulated scission that brings together what it cleaves: the musical, theatrical, poetic, and visual art forms in general. In this sense, her poetry evokes Nancy’s suggestion that: “What we call art is nothing other than the ultimate and, for this

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reason, endlessly played out resurgence of division and distinction—that the gesture by which a world forms itself is distinguished in itself” (The Pleasure 95). But Barnes’s poetry is much more than the “resurgence of division and distinction” (Nancy, The Pleasure 95), it is an attempt to create a tableaux vivant that masquerades as a “moving picture” that it aspires to, but cannot quite arrive at being.5 While critics have described Barnes’s poetry as the pinnacle art form of her oeuvre,6 Barnes published the majority of her poems (approximately 61 published poems) between 1911 and 1929. Upon her return to America in 1938, she remained a recluse, writing and rewriting the same poem over and over again, publishing merely 7 poems between the years 1938 and 1982 (Herring and Stutman 9). As Hank O’Neal notes in his biography of Barnes, she kept changing the titles and rewriting the lines. He writes: “In some instances the same poem would be written over a period of five years, where many drafts existed” (85). O’Neal notes her obsession with “death” and retaining the “same general idea and meter” but changing the words (85). While Herring and Stutman call Barnes the “mortician of modernism” (9), this chapter suggests that her persistent excoriation of the poetic form is merely a search for a method that would encompass the kind of totality advocated by the modernist avant-gardes. Be it the soulfulness of Kandinsky or the métachoric frenzy of Saint-Point, Barnes’s work points to the kind of synthesis that strives to redefine the American culture not as a mecca of consumerism, but rather as a pastoral site of serious art. Embracing the irony of such a synthesis, Barnes’s work places this “ideal” in the utopian non-space, an abstract reality that must be dramatized while its picture stories turned theatre must be both excoriated and rejected.

One-Act Plays: The Picture Stories Turned Anti-Theatre

The search for a philosophy of art pervades Barnes’s one-act plays, written mostly during the 1910s and 1920s. Although the plays continue to receive little critical attention, some critics have pointed to their uniqueness. In his introduction to Barnes’s collection of one-act plays, At the Roots of the Stars, ­Douglas Messerli praises her plays for being “some of the most curious works of American drama” (7). He notes the exquisite combination of visual settings 5 Here, it might be useful to recall Badiou’s definition of poetry as “the power of eternally fastening the disappearance of what presents itself” (Handbook 25). In other words, poetry brings to life the formulated presence that points to the physical absence it represents. 6 For example, see Caselli, Loncraine, and Kannestine.

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and an experimental style privileging “linguistic sparring” over action (9). In blurring the line between a philosophical dialogue and a dramatic monologue, the plays challenge the traditional expectation of theatre and theatre performance by returning us to the ancient Greek philosophical tradition of Plato’s Socratic dialogue, but they also provide an important insight into Barnes’s nomadic aesthetic as they shuttle between the transmedial and the philosophical. Dealing primarily with the ontological questions of life and death, soul and body, the plays are impressive tableaux of the characters’ intellectual banter and often ironic engagement with sophistication. For example, in “The Death of Life” (1916), two main characters, Ragna and Toro, contemplate the meaning of life and death. While Toro ponders death, Ragna spouts her soliloquies on the theme of love. Although both end up talking at cross purposes, their dialogue, or better, dramatic monologues, meet at the point of the argument that life is death, and death is life. As in most of Barnes’s work, the body is central and the culprit. Ragna says to Toro: “when one just lives, one dies inside, so the body becomes a little motion only wherein a thing has dropped on its knees and fallen forward” (Barnes, At the Roots 18). Fashioning herself as an artist and poet, she then goes on to add: “We’re dreaming always and fancying things ahead so that you may be living them, so we have no time to be feeling them” (18). By the end of the play, Ragna, exhausted by her own soliloquies, shoots herself to death. Similarly, plays like “Madame Collects Herself” (1918) and “Others” (1918) treat death as the commonplace of life. But the emphasis on death has nothing to do with the kind of morbidity of which Barnes has frequently been accused of focusing on. By contrast, the play comments on Barnes’s search for the “in-human” form that would surpass the body and usher in what Badiou calls “the art of theater” as “an event of thought” or “theatre-ideas” (Handbook 72). Barnes’s quest for a philosophy of art is an attempt to capture the renegade aspect of life or what Mageen in “At the Roots of the Stars” (1917) describes as “all that’s in life [that] passes us utterly” (Barnes, At the Roots 31). While critics like Warren, Caselli, or Larabee have pointed to the Platonic influences pervading Barnes’s one-act plays, it might be useful to explore the relationship between Plato’s Socratic dialogues or what Martin Puchner calls “drama of ideas” in relation to Barnes’s experimentation with dramatic form as a vehicle for challenging American consumerist culture, but also as an ideal platform for Barnes’s own aesthetic ruminations and ideas. Given that most of her one-acts were published in periodicals rather than performed on the stage, they represent an interesting art form that, on the one hand, emphasizes the transmedial quality of theatre as a “hypermedium that incorporates all art” (Chapple and Kattenbelt 20); on the other hand, they sideline as a kind of

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i­ ntramural dance between high-brow and low-brow art forms (e.g., poetry and prose, dance and painting) that coaxes the audience away from its consumerist present back to America’s frontier sensibility and its renegade spirit. In her emphasis on theatre as a “thought event” (Badiou, Handbook 72), Barnes can be viewed as America’s closet Plato, teasing the dramatic form to the point of monologic formulations. In her article on Barnes’s early plays, Joan Retallack calls Barnes’s plays ­“dialogic,” often verging on dramatic monologues. As she emphasizes, “a good deal of the ‘dialogue’ in these plays is more accurately monologue in the ­presence of another” (48). Ann Larabee takes this argument further suggesting that Barnes “went beyond any of her contemporaries in her interrogation of theatrical form, finally questioning the whole notion of display and spectacle and her audience’s implicit voyeurism” (37). Considering Barnes’s plays as ­dramatic dialogues, a discussion of Martin Puchner’s study of Plato’s Socratic dialogues will be particularly helpful here. In The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy, Puchner argues that Plato’s theory of ideas not only redefines the dramatic form, but also paves the way towards modern drama by rejecting theatricality for a philosophical “disregard of the concrete, embodied, lived experience and a desire, instead, to transcend to some realm of abstract forms of ideas, pure and simple” (13). The emphasis on ideational abstraction pervades Barnes’s one-act plays. From “The Death of Life” (1916), “Kurzy of the Sea” (1920), “At the Roots of the Stars” (1917), “Madame Collects Herself” (1918) to “Five Thousand Miles” (1923) and “Little Drops of Rain” (1922), Barnes persistently moves from the corporeal aspect of humanity to its formulated abstractions—be it the characters’ banter about the mortality of the body, their hope for an escape from “civilization” into some idyllic, pastoral world, or their musings on transcending humanity by way of what Badiou calls “an art of formalizations. An art far removed from the business of humans” (The Century 160). And yet, Barnes’s plays are deeply ensconced within and concerned with what makes us human (e.g., emotion, desire, corporeality). In this sense, her plays can be best described as “bear[ing] witness to the inhuman within the human,” their aim being “nothing short of compelling humanity to some excess with regard to itself,” to quote Badiou (The Century 160). By using dramatic dialogue that paints a particular picture and must be transcended by an argument rather than action whereby the characters’ figurative dance with ideas replaces the traditional performance, Barnes playfully transforms the corporeal into the ideational by sublimating (subconsciously, perhaps) Plato’s theory of ideas into a form incarnate. Given that American drama of the 1910s and 1920s was adamant about finding its own “way” and establishing a tradition apart from Europe, the return to

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Plato and ancient Greece in particular was a manoeuvre that made possible a much-needed estrangement from the European drama, but also allowed for America’s frontier sensibility to regenerate on different and more formal aesthetic rather than geophysical or colonial terms. What Plato and Barnes’s one-acts have in common is what Puchner calls a “disregard of the concrete, disembodied, lived experience and a desire, instead, to ascend to some realm of abstract forms or ideas, pure and simple” (13). Another important link is the privileging of the philosophical argument over action. As this section has already mentioned, in Barnes’s one-acts, characters enter into verbal sparring contests that meander in all sorts of directions, often coming to a conclusion that death is indeed the better side of life, something that Socrates tries desperately to impart to his weeping friends in Plato’s Phaedo. Like Socrates, Barnes’s characters are resolved to drink their hemlock: Ragna, for instance, shoots herself as death becomes the ultimate resolution of a life unlived. In “Madame Collects Herself” (1918), Madame Zolbo compares the soul to a “canary at song in the wilderness of body” (Barnes, At the Roots 65). In “Five Thousand Miles” (1923), the characters, Henry Allover and Mazie Notataul, board the ship Nothingmore to “fl[y] away” from civilization only to end up shipwrecked on a tropical island where the sighting of an egg-beater washed onto the shore interrupts their “idyllic” escape in the tropics (120). “Five Thousand Miles” particularly rejects the possibility of an exilic bliss. Although, like most of Barnes’s work, it inscribes a certain yearning for pastoralism, the desire for the utopian space is compromised by the invasion of the sign of civilization that both Henry Allover and Mazie Notataul are so desperate to evade. As Mazie tells Henry: “Don’t recall civilization to me. I came here, five thousand miles from everything, to forget convention and man-made law” (Barnes, At the Roots 120). Henry nods in agreement, saying that he “came here…for those identical reasons,” but while he concedes that the idea of such an escape is “wonderful,” it is after all “a little inaccessible” (120). The play revolves around their recollection of the ship Nothingmore, on which they met, and the promise of a little tryst they had connived then only to realize that they spent five years together on an island without knowing about each other as they never left their “part of the beach” (122). What soon becomes clear is that, even though they are five thousand miles away from civilization, they are still living by the same “civilized” habits they adopted from their families. So even at the moment when they are about to consummate their passion with a “fervor that makes the boar’s tusks rattle” as the stage directions suggest (122), the mere sighting of an egg-beater washed upon a beach is enough of a reminder that they “can’t get away from society” (123). After all, as the play’s full title suggests, this is a “moral homily inspired by all the current talk about the wild free

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life in the South Seas” (117). Written in 1923, the play clearly mocks the expatriate Bohemia’s exilic naiveté. A similar dreaminess underpins Barnes’s earlier play, “Kurzy of the Sea,” staged and presented by the Provincetown Players in New York, on March 26, 1920 under the direction of Helen Westley. While the play is not set in the South Seas or on a tropical island, the setting recalls the American frontier sensibility, describing the McRace home as a “hut of turf, without window and with an earth floor” (83). The play opens with a dialogue between Rory McRace’s mother, Molly, and Betsy Keep. Molly is described as a “stately dame” who loathes “free will” while the older Betsy is “keen of tongue and quick of mind” (83). The characters’ distinct personalities anticipate not only the role-switching that follows, but also the reversal-misrecognition dialectic that drives Barnes’s plays. The main theme of the play is Rory’s obsession with fairy tales and his desire for a “real unhuman woman” (87). The prattling of the two women is interrupted by the arrival of Pat McRace, well-known for his “huge liking for the women” (83), who catches a woman in his fish net. He tries to question her, but she is quiet “save for a few whispers like the sound in shells” (89), so Pat states “there’s Rory’s wife” (89). He tells the women: “I suspect she’s super-something, and so can’t talk” (89). However, as it turns out, Kurzy is a barmaid at the White Duck with no interest in marrying Rory. She departs, saying: “It’s long distance swimming you’ll be learning this summer, but it will do you little good” (94). Part comedy, part Satyr play, “Kurzy of the Sea” brings together Barnes’s wit and mockery of the material. The dreamy mermaid turned barmaid evokes Barnes’s impatience with human corporeality and its foibles. Instead of bringing the “bodies” together, Kurzy goes back to the sea, telling Rory that “it’s a boat I shall be needing” (94). Mobility and movement once again take precedence over any kind of resolution or hope for catharsis. Unless, of course, following Socrates’ argument that death is the ultimate ticket to freedom, an argument he defends rather unsuccessfully, in Phaedo, the kind of catharsis Barnes has in mind is the reversal of materiality into an abstracted in-humanity that is ironically most human of all. In addition to the “in-humanist” philosophy pervading her one-acts, Barnes’s characters frequently muddle and mock their own intellectual musings. Nonetheless, they cannot help themselves when it comes to their “theatre of ideas” and persist in their conversations at all cost. One of the comic features of ­Plato’s dramatic dialogues is what Puchner calls the characters’ “role-­switching,” where one character makes a statement and the other continues in a contrapuntal, antiphonal manner (for example, Socrates and his friends in Phaedo, or Socrates and Aristophanes in Symposium). But while Puchner argues that Plato’s role-switching relies on the “dramaturgy of reversal and r­ecognition”

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(25), Barnes’s characters construct their own meta-dramatic form that is both a critique of theatre and its endorsement, but also a kind of misrecognition of the other. As Barnes shows, this misrecognition is more of a matter of logos rather than pathos. In “At the Roots of the Stars,” Mageen boasts that “every phrase is clothed in the winding sheet of some dead thing, and through the arches of our ears walks forever the music of creation” (Barnes, At the Roots 31). Maze, on the other hand, objects to Mageen’s depiction of life saying: “Life is not like that at all; you’re dreaming, Mageen. It’s pitiless and hard” (31). In fact, both are saying the same thing except that they fail to see that their counterpoints are the two sides of the same (bathetic) coin. Such misrecognitions are a part of the comic relief Barnes sets up to counter the tragedy of life from which her characters are fleeing (as in “Five Thousand Miles”). But they also provide an insight into the changing zeitgeist of American culture. The play, “Little Drops of Rain: Wherein Is Discussed the Advantage of xix Century’s Storm over Twentieth-Century Sunshine” (1922) is perhaps most exemplary of Barnes’s anti-theatrical antics. The play mocks traditional theatre productions from the very beginning. Set on an old American estate in the garden that is “at once melancholy and charming, having some of the arboreal lèse-majesté of a wilderness and some of the hauteur of a well groomed landscape” (109),7 the play unfolds as an argument between Lady Olivia Lookover and her niece Mitzi. What starts as an argument turns into Lady Olivia’s long, protracted monologue on the demise of the American culture and the arts. Mocking her niece’s consumerist generation, Lady Olivia emotes: “We were the storm; you are the sunshine” (111). “We had furies and killed, you have tantrums and retaliations. We rode to love and possibly to death when we went down the hill in cabs… you would ride to safety and ennui” (111). There is not much poor Mitzi can say as Lady Olivia is resolved to express her thoughts whether Mitzi cares or not. Relentlessly, Olivia philosophizes further: “My life was lived without punctuation…Your life is riddled with colons and full stops” (111). While Mitzi finds ­Olivia depressing, Olivia views Mitzi as gutless. Similar to Platonic dialogues, Barnes’s plays emphasize the form as a vehicle of philosophical investigation. While Plato expected his dialogues to be read out loud (Puchner 26), Barnes had no such expectations. Apart from the plays performed by Provincetown Players, most of the one-acts appeared in popular 7 The setting is elaborately described, the focus being primarily on the decadent but decaying opulence of Olivia’s “old” garden. Here the old garden also becomes a mock-signifier of the aging lady whose decadence is a dimming in the “sunshine” of the twentieth-century generation. Cf. Jane Bowles’s use of garden imagery in Chapter 9.

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periodicals like The New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine or magazines like Vanity Fair. Accompanied by illustrations, they had more in common with the moving, dancing tableaux vivants of Isadora Duncan than traditional theatre. However, if experimental art forms allow us to move beyond “the parable of the cave,” to quote Puchner (31), then Barnes’s one-acts serve as an important building ground for the kind of “new” American theatre advocated by George Cram Cook, Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell, Marsden Hartley and many others. The 1910s and 1920s were an interesting time in the art world of America. Many American artists were reacting to their country’s rise to power, Ford’s assembly lines, and the increasing spread of commercialism. This was also a period of experimentation marked by a search for a serious, yet localized art culture that would underwrite consumerist America by going back to its roots, to “the fine old art of the pavement and the country road” as Marsden Hartley suggested in his 1921 treatise on the arts, The Adventures in the Arts (60, 160). Cheryl Black, for instance, notes the radicalist “state of mind” that pervaded the era, specifically an emphasis on a “spiritual and social regeneration” that would counter the frenzied consumerism of Ford’s America (Black 2). An important aspect of the period was the development of a “native drama” that would serve as a “unifying cultural force” (Black 2), but would be defined against the populist theatricality of Broadway by turning to smaller-size theatres encouraging experimentation. By 1927, more than 76 small theatres had sprouted in New York City (Savaran 189). Although in 1927 Barnes was still mainly in Paris, she had spent the early 1910s in New York and was living in Greenwich Village, which since 1913 had been viewed as the centre of America’s artistic and spiritual revolution.8 It was at this time that Barnes became well-known in the village for being a reporter, illustrator, and writer, where she shared a house at 86 Greenwich Avenue with Ida Rauh, Berenice Abbott, Charles Ells, James Light, and Susan Jenkins (Black 30). Like most of the villagers, the group aspired to transform American culture into a new art world. Barnes also became involved with the Provincetown Players at this time, an experimental theatre group founded in 1915 by a group of players led by George Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell, in Provincetown. When the group moved from the tiny shack on Lucas wharf to New York in 1916, they had an established philosophy of what the “new” American theatre should be—spiritually restless and anti-theatrical. The new tradition drew on the ancient Greek theatre, relying specifically on Dionysian elements, 8 For more details, see Phillip Herring’s biography, Djuna Barnes: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes.

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but also ­incorporated native American drama (Kenton 4). Underpinning the Provincetown Players was a philosophy of free experimentation, “to found a native stage for native playwrights, to maintain in the heart of New York a little laboratory for dramatic experiments” (Kenton 25). Evoking but also challenging the Delsarte human system popular in 1910s and 1920s America, George Cram Cook, alias “Jig” Cook, advocated a return to Greece. Cook’s famous slogan “Back to Greece” was meant to establish a new dramatic tradition in America. None of the group’s members were professional playwrights (Kenton 14), but their lack of theatre experience was viewed as an advantage, as a new-found philosophy of the “new” anti-theatricalism that countered the mass spectacles of vaudeville and burlesque.9 The Players’ mandate, formulated by “Jig” Cook and Neith Boyce, stated: One man cannot produce drama. True drama is born only of one feeling animating all the members of a clan—a feeling shared by all and expressed by the few for all. If there is nothing to take the place of the common religious purpose and passion of the primitive group out of which the Dionysian dance was born, no new vital drama can arise in any people. kenton 14

In line with the anti-theatrical and spiritual sensibility of the Provincetown “laboratory” was the emphasis on one-act plays and simple stage productions that emphasized “mood” rather than plot. Louise Bryant’s play, The Game, for instance, was advertised as a play “synthesiz[ing] decoration, costume, speech, and action into one mood” (Kenton 40). Eugene O’Neill’s Bound East for Cardiff, Djuna Barnes’s Kurzy of the Sea, and John Reed’s Freedom were all one-acts as well (Kenton 40). In her article for Theatre Guild Magazine, published in January 1929, “The Days of Jig Cook: Recollections of Ancient Theatre History But 10 Years Old,” Barnes described writing one-act plays as a morbid exercise: “It was as good as suicide to write a one-act play” (Interviews 183). While Barnes was an important part of the group, most of her one-act plays were published 9 Among the members were, for example, Louise Bryant, John Reed, Marsden Hartley, Susan Glaspell, Ida Rauh, Mary Heaton Vorse, Joe O’Brien, Edwin and Nancy Schoonmaker, Myra Carr, Robert Edmond Jones, William and Margaret Zorach, Charles Demuth, Djuna Barnes, Eugene O’Neill, and Neith Boyce. For more details see, Edna Kenton, The Provincetown Players and the Playwrights’ Theatre 1915–1922 (Jefferson: McFarland and Co., 2004). For other trivia, also see Jeffery Kennedy, The History of the Provincetown at http://www.provincetownplayhouse.com/history.html.

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in magazines and newspapers. In other words, they reflected the kind of blurring of the line between the high-brow and low-brow art culture that was advocated by the Players, but they also stood independently on their own as unique, experimental performances that were meant to be read, not necessarily ­performed in public. In the 1910s and 1920s, American newspapers and magazines frequently included one-act plays that were viewed as “stories in dramatic form amplified by illustrations and narrative stage directions” (Smith 18). As Smith notes, Scribner’s Magazine, Harper’s Monthly, Vanity Fair, or New York Telegraph Sunday Magazine published plays as dramatic tableaux rather than texts (Smith 39). The popularity of including one-act plays in popular periodicals also promoted the kind of trans-medial form of “reading” rather than traditional theatre ­performance and yet simultaneously relied on performance of a different ­(visual) kind. More importantly, the publication of the one-acts in periodicals like The New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine and magazines like Vanity Fair returned American theatre back to its “bastard,” frontier roots (Smith 16; Quinn 159). As Smith emphasizes, the roots of American theatre can be traced back to oral tradition, vaudeville, and minstrel shows, but also to the editorial practices of The Dial. Drawing on the early twentieth-century theatre scholars like Arthur Hobson Quinn, Smith points to the link between the rise of modern American theatre and its journalist roots. Unlike their ­European counterparts, most American playwrights of the period worked with other art forms (28). But as Quinn argued in 1920s, the trans-medial quality of A ­ merican theatre not only allowed for reconnecting with America’s frontier sensibility, but it also challenged the traditional expectations of theatre and theatre ­productions (28). Although little critical attention continues to be paid to Barnes’s one-acts, they provide an intriguing insight into the American art culture of the times. They also reveal Barnes’s unique contribution to the “anti-theatrical” trend, specifically its emphasis on the “creative destruction of the subject and the human actor” pervading the 1910s and 1920s American theatre (Ackerman and Puchner 8). As this section has already mentioned, apart from Three from the Earth, Kurzy of the Sea, and An Irish Triangle that were staged by the Provincetown Players, most of Barnes’s one-acts were published in newspapers and magazines, and were usually accompanied by an illustration. While critics have generally dismissed them for Barnes’s juvenilia, such criticism is unjust.10 As the close reading of some of Barnes’s one-acts suggests, her plays are an integral part of her nomadic aesthetic: they mobilize diverse forms in service 10

For example, see Retallack, Warren, and Kannestine.

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of the drama called life. Driven by a particular idea or image rather than focusing on action, her one-act plays take the form of picture stories turned theatre. These picture stories ekphrastically gesture towards an immaterial aesthetic that pervades both her journalism and poetry. In this respect, the plays provide a valuable insight into Barnes’s artistic vision, but also into the American art world of the time. Their Platonic sensibility is particularly unique in the sense that they transform the characters’ mundane banter into philosophical monologues where Barnes, similar to Plato, not only “subjects drama to prose discourse” (Puchner 29), but also experiments with form, excoriating the corporeal for a loftier ideal. The “dream” of transcendence is best exemplified by Maggie, the main character in Barnes’s 1917 play, “Maggie of the Saints.” When Maggie’s aging mother, Mary, perturbed by her daughter’s strange ideas, asks: “Are you speaking blasphemy or poetry?” (Barnes, At the Roots 46), Maggie responds: “It’s the greatest poetry I’m telling you, and the most wondrous thing in the world of labor” (46). Accompanying the play, published in New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine on October 28, 1917, is the image of Maggie’s mother, Mary (see Figure 4). The illustration is a typical Barnes drawing, a black-and-white portrait of a languid woman whose body seems to be on the verge of decay. Her hair is sparse and balding. She is very taunt and corpse-like looking. In the background, dotted circles signify the past Mary has forgotten. She is described as “a passive bubble in the draught that lay in the goblet of life” (Barnes, At the Roots 41). If we consider the illustration as the “midpoint between exteriority and interiority” (Nancy, Multiple Arts 220), it can be said that Barnes’s visual language takes on the performative role of the dramatic form it excoriates. If, as Nancy says, “[t]he object of the portrait is, in the strictest sense, the absolute subject: the subject detached from everything that does not belong to it, withdrawn from all exteriority” (220), then Barnes here executes her own form of métachoric super-dance. It is both an aesthetic synthesis and decomposition whereby ideas become forms, whereby forms in their “tingling, tangling tango” are stripped of their materiality and transmuted into an aesthetic storm that shatters the “walls between the arts,” as Kandinsky and Marc advocated (37). At the same time, Barnes’s work manages to retain the kind of renegade quality of America’s frontier sensibility where “life and art are one and the same thing,” the kind of creative adventure Marsden Hartley hoped for in Adventures in the Arts (253).

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“Maggie of the Saints” from Djuna Barnes, “New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine, October 28, 1917.” Digital Collections: http://hdl.handle.net/1903.1/14691. Djuna Barnes Papers, University of Maryland. College Park, md. 10 March 2016.

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“There’s Nothing like Destruction for an Aim”: The Antiphon’s Theatre of Ideas or State Politics? … a misreading of The Antiphon is not impossible. djuna barnes, The Antiphon (5)

⸪ By the time that Djuna Barnes’s three-act play, The Antiphon, finally emerged from the author’s unforgiving pen in 1958, it had been subjected to more than twenty years of rigorous rewriting and honing. As Lynda Curry notes in her study of Barnes’s numerous drafts, Barnes had been working on the idea for the play since 1937. With numerous interruptions, the play underwent at least five major drafts before it was published by Faber and Faber (Curry 287). A socio-cultural commentary on the end of the roaring ‘20s and the return of a renegade artist, The Antiphon is part family drama and part reflection on the state of American politics in the 1930s and 1950s. Written in blank verse, the play’s poetic style and wealth of inter-textual references to literary works and historical events not only attest to Barnes’s aesthetic savvy, but also contribute to what Barnes described as its challenging “difficulty.” Dismissed for its abstract poeticizing or read purely as an autobiographical piece, the play generated what she called a “strange reception” (qtd. in Broe, Silence 269).1 By locating the play’s abstract poetics in its socio-political context, this chapter, however, proposes a reading that deploys its so-called difficulty as a passionate attempt to critique and engage with historical events of the first half of the twentieth century. This chapter argues that, in its blending of the political and abstract, The Antiphon evokes what Alain Badiou refers to in his Rhapsody for the Theatre as a “theatre of ideas” that combines an artistic “heresy in action” with a “figurative reknotting of politics” (13). In spite of the play’s loaded socio-historical subtext, critics continue to read The Antiphon as a piece of obscure abstraction that sidelines as Barnes’s, albeit 1 As Barnes wrote in one of her letters to Wolfgang Hildesheimer, she was concerned that she “would have to write another play to explain [what the meaning was]” (qtd. in Broe, Silence 285). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004314436_008

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“coded,” autobiography.2 In her recent re-reading of the play’s individual drafts, Judith Taylor, for example, describes the play as a “testimony” to Barnes’s traumatic childhood, a kind of “rewriting of the family chronicle found in Ryder” (Taylor, Djuna 36; “Revising” 125). Daniela Caselli similarly comments on the play’s expert (en)coding of Barnes’s rather dysfunctional family autobiography (Caselli 224, 19). Through this lens, most contemporary criticism continues to follow the line of interpretation established by earlier critics (Kannestine, ­Curry, DeSalvo, Herring) who have deployed The Antiphon as Barnes’s final ­attempt at “a revenge tragedy in a double sense” whereby Barnes’s abusive childhood is finally avenged (Altman 280). And yet, as this chapter emphasizes, the tragic ethos underpinning the play lies far beyond the realm of the autobiographical. Rather, it extends to a philosophico-political encounter with the first half of the twentieth century to which it responds.3 The play takes place in 1939 during World War ii and is set in the Burley Hall estate in Beewick, England. Burley Hall is a half-way point between Europe and America, a meeting point where the state of “war” is represented by the jarring confrontations of individual family members and their dark states of mind, but also by the larger socio-political conflicts raging outside. This aspect is further enhanced by the exilic undertones that underpin the play, but also by the Hobbs family’s internal conflicts that are further reflected in the dilapidated interior of the estate. In many ways, the play unfolds as a typical family drama where individual family members wage wars with one another. Trying to put an end to the warfare, Jack Blow, the alienated son and the play’s mastermind, summons the Hobbs family members—his mother, Augusta, his sister, Miranda, and his two brothers, Elisha and Dudley—to Burley Hall for a brief tête-à-tête, hoping to bring them to their senses. His ideal vision however is soon thwarted by his mother, Augusta, who makes the family encounter entirely about herself, or more specifically about the conflict she has with her proxy—her daughter, Miranda, an artist and dramatist returning from Europe. What ensues is the wrath of the (family) state and the destruction brought upon the returning and deeply misunderstood exile-artist who is scapegoated by her family for her expatriate past and exilic politics. As Augusta and Miranda engage in a war of words that frequently 2 See Caselli, Warren, or Taylor. 3 In her recent article on The Antiphon, Alex Goody calls for reading the play as a “[serious] theatrical text” (339). Goody draws on the drafts of the play to explore the play’s engagement “with the traditions of Renaissance and modern drama and with an acute sense of the tensions between literary and popular entertainment” (339). Focusing on the published text rather than its drafts, this chapter reads the play as a response to the socio-political complexities, as well as philosophical tendencies, underpinning the first half of the twentieth century.

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returns to the trauma imposed on the family by Titus, Augusta’s husband and Miranda’s father, the brothers Elisha and Dudley observe the unfolding drama with glee. Jack Blow and Miranda’s uncle, Jonathan, are both trying to ­mediate the conflict between Miranda and her family, but are unsuccessful in their ­endeavour. In the heat of the argument about their difficult life under Titus, Augusta and Miranda kill each other with a door bell. As Jack Blow says early in the play, “there is nothing like destruction for an aim” (Barnes, The Antiphon 10). Viewed in this context, it can be argued that the play’s ultimate aim is to explore such ethics of destruction as a search for a method that would simultaneously rupture and transcend the very limitations of art forms—be they dramatic, visual, or poetic. Alain Badiou locates this search more specifically in the twentieth-­century zeitgeist of avant-garde movements and their desire to part with the old and embrace the new, but also in its politics of war—be it in its Nazi, communist, or other totalitarian forms. In his study of the twentieth century titled simply The Century, Badiou suggests that one of the most challenging aims of the first half of twentieth-century art movements was to find some kind of a “magic formula” that would create the new out of the destruction of the old—­modernism’s famous mantra, “to make it new.” Badiou writes, “In this respect, the art of the century, just like its politics or its scientific formalisms, is starkly anti-humanist” (The Century 161). In many ways, Barnes’s The Antiphon speaks to the anti-humanist ethos of the first half of the twentieth century by providing an intriguing insight into the beginning and end of a creativity-filled era, an era of avant-garde movements and literary exiles who by 1939 (when the play is set) were forced to return to a country from which they have been estranged (Cowley 229). As Cowley notes, “the country had changed,” but so had the returning artists, finding themselves “real exiles from society itself” (223). In an essay written most likely upon her return to New York in 1939, titled “Farewell Paris,” Barnes echoes Cowley’s observation by saying: “One is in a city that should be a little less nervous than Paris or a London, and yet so many are breaking down, taking to health cures, science, Christian or otherwise” (qtd. in Herring and Stutman 269). Set in 1939 and published in 1958, Barnes’s The Antiphon spans almost twenty years of Euro-American history. While the play opens as a kind of farewell to the American expatriate Bohemia in Europe, it unfolds as an intriguing commentary on American politics of the 1930s and 1950s. In 1939 Barnes had been forced out of Europe to return to America, a return that she was not eager to make (Herring 63). In their biographies of Barnes, both Phillip Herring and ­Andrew Field note Barnes’s resistance to come back to her motherland’s fold. Her 1930s essays, “Vantage Point,” “A Way of Life,” and “Farewell Paris,” all three of which were unpublished until Phillip Herring and Osias Stutman’s

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­ ublication of Barnes’s Collected Poems with Notes toward Memoirs (2005), p ­further speak to Barnes’s sense of dismay with American life (239–269). She preferred England to the neurasthenic atmosphere pervading 1930s America, and, had it not been for the war, she would not have left Europe. In other words, her “exile’s return” was marked by mixed emotions: it was not a joyful homecoming for reasons that ranged from personal and cultural to socio-political.4

Tragic (Con)texts: The Antiphon and American History

Before exploring The Antiphon in more detail, it might be useful to map the historical context of Barnes’s 1930s-1950s America. After more than a decade away, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1930s America must have been a shock to the modernist aesthete-tragedienne. The New Deal of 1933 hardly fixed the rising unemployment and inflation of America’s recession, and the Neutrality Act of 1939 only re-affirmed America’s non-involvement policy (Norton et al. 734). The increasingly conservative policy against immigration, sealed by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1924, resulted in political embarrassments like the u.s. refusal to accept 938 German-Austrian Jewish refugees that were attempting to escape Hitler’s Germany, despite an urgent plea by the captain of the German ocean-liner, the ms St. Louis.5 America’s nativist policy of ­“containment” continued well into the 1950s with the Truman Doctrine and McCarthy’s anti-communist propaganda. The horrors of World War ii were replaced by the fear of “the communist menace,” a fear that had already began in the 1920s with the foundation of the ussr (Norton et al. 826). Similar conservatism pervaded the mainstream art culture of 1930s-50s America. During and after the war, the art scene was pulverized by rising consumerist conservatism and its emphasis on promoting the ideology of a “happy nuclear family” (Caputi 9). As William Demastes notes, theatre in particular suffered a blow from the mass appeal of cinema industry. Unable to compete with Hollywood, many playwrights like Eugene O’Neill, famous for his experimental drama, were forced to return to realist drama which “the American 4 As Herring and Stutman’s recent publication of Djuna Barnes: Collected Poems with Notes toward Memoirs reveals, Barnes was conflicted about her return to America. Like most of her contemporaries, she was disturbed by the consumerist and conservative sensibility of America, a sensibility that was a far cry from the Bohemian sensibility of her expatriate circle in Paris, Vienna, London, and Tangier. 5 See Sarah Ogilvie and Scott Miller, Refuge Denied: The St. Louis Passengers and the Holocaust (Wisconsin: U of Wisconsin P, 2010). Also see Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts, The Voyage of the Damned: A Shocking True Story of Hope, Betrayal, and Nazi Terror (New York: Skyhorse, 2013).

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audiences [had] been more willing to accept” (Demastes ix). Moreover, the popularity of Lee Strasberg’s “method acting” re-enforced the appeal of realism by calling for “naturalism on the stage” (Counsell 56). An avant-garde artist and experimentalist like Barnes must have certainly been put off by the kind of “iconography of neurosis” that dominated Broadway (Counsell 56). Barnes’s The Antiphon inscribes this neurotic iconography through the dysfunction of the Hobbs family and its tragic state, which also becomes a metaphor for the political neurosis of 1930s and 1950s America. Whether projecting the 1950s culture of the Beat renegades onto the 1920s literary expatriates— both cultures of exile, both experimental and radicalist—or emphasizing the parallels between the aestheticization of politics and destruction as evident in the Nazi politics of Hitler or Stalin’s communist demagogy, The Antiphon returns to the idea of theatre as a means of “illumination” and ultimately as a vehicle for artistic transformation (Badiou, Handbook 72). As Badiou emphasizes, “theatre can only show an ‘other state’ of affairs than the one of which it is a form” (Rhapsody 59): For the theatre text always subordinates its incompletion to the open gap of conflict. A theatre text begins when two “characters” do not agree. Theatre inscribes discord. Now, there are only two major discords: that of politics and that of the sexes, whose scene is love. Rhapsody 51

The Antiphon follows this discord. Its investment however is not only in politics and the sexes as Badiou suggests, but is also focused on the ways in which theatre, as the ultimate “hypermedium that incorporates all arts and media” (Chapple and Kattenbelt 29), can comment on a whole set of aesthetic and political states as ideological and/or emotional performances that mobilize the characters’ action. In this respect, the play represents an aesthetic gem that transforms the concrete (be it autobiographical or historical events) into an “art of formalizations,” “an art far removed from the business of humans” that Badiou refers to as a “nourishing decomposition” (The Century 160; 45).

The Hall of Burley and the “Hour of the Uncreate”: From Family to State Politics

The first act of The Antiphon prepares the ground for this exquisite transformation from the concrete to the abstract by marrying dysfunctional family (and state) politics to the aim of destruction with which Jack Blow summons the Hobbs family to the Hall of Burley. However, Jack’s aim is not necessarily an

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endorsement of violence or some evil re-enactment of the Hobbs’ dysfunction; rather, his goal appears to be to turn the “hour of the uncreate” and “the season of the sorrowful lamenting” into something medicinal as he suggests at the end of Act 3 (Barnes, The Antiphon Act 3, 127). In other words, the un-creating or de-composing is to be a form of unmaking of the family past, a kind of double entendre whereby destruction in its re-articulated form becomes art. A meeting point between Europe and America, the Hall of Burley therefore serves as an ideal, liminal space where such a transformation can take place. Having become a sort of transitory refuge for travellers on their way to board the ship to America, Burley Hall is a site of both familiarity and estrangement, mobility and stasis, home and exile. Accordingly, the cluttered and broken surroundings masquerade as a war front where the battle of the Hobbs family past will be waged (Act 1, 9). Act 1 establishes the Hall as an embodiment of the “cracked” world where the complex interrelationship between family and state is encountered and played out (9). Even though Jonathan Burley, Augusta’s brother, officiates the encounter, it is Jack Blow, the coachman, who quite literally drives or blows the family war towards the “hour of the uncreate” (Act 3, 127). While Jack hopes to use the time as an enactment of justice rather than revenge, Miranda’s melancholy memory persistently blocks his lofty aim. Instead, she associates home with “a rip in nature” that is a motherless and “cloistered waste” (Act 1, 7). Of particular note here is the blurring of her mother’s home with the idea of home in general—in other words, the concept of mother(land) and the possibility of a return to it or lack thereof is crucial to the play as a whole. But so is Miranda’s recollection of the home’s “barbarian” sovereign, Titus Higby Hobbs of Salem, Miranda’s father to whom Augusta and “her country state” fell prey (Act 1, 127). From the very beginning, the character of Titus Higby Hobbs haunts the play. But unlike Wendell Ryder who “sows his seed” throughout Ryder, Titus never “appears” physically on the stage as he is already dead. Yet, the heritage of his barbarian rule is persistently resuscitated and invoked through the rest of the family’s unreconciled state(s) of mind. In the play, Hobbs occupies the place of a despotic sovereign who skirts the law, but also ironically dictates and represents it. Like Wendell Ryder, he is the embodiment of nomos described by Agamben as a “state of exception” where law and violence become indistinct (Homo Sacer 31). Drawing on Pindar’s fragments on Nomos Basileus, Agamben defines this space not only as “the most violent [of all]” but also as “violen[t] to the most just” (33). Indeed, throughout the play, Titus is associated with both (unjust) law and (raw) nature. His name alone is symbolically loaded as c­ ritics have pointed out. While his first name recalls William Shakespeare’s violent play Titus Andronicus, his middle name evokes Thomas Hobbes and his ­Leviathan

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philosophy of subjugating the human “nature” to the political authority of the sovereign. Last but not least, his association with Salem evokes the birthplace of America’s 1692 witch trials and is evocative of the kind of inquisition and injustice that drive the play forward. All of these associations are significant to the play’s aim to destroy and un-create the past—both public and private.6 But so are the evocative connections to the ancient Greek tragedy, specifically its symbolic engagement with state politics through what Simon Goldhill refers to as “dynamics of distance,” whose aim was to “uncove[r] divisions, expos[e] tensions, in the politics of gender as well as in the spectacles of power” through a dramatic process of othering (151). Myths in particular became the means of distancing. In Aeschylus’ Seven against the Thebes or The Persians, such distancing or a “detour through the other,” as Goldhill puts it, becomes a crucial strategy to tap into the inner crises of the individual characters who cannot see their foibles or culpability, thus pointing to “the cracks in [the] edifice of self-knowledge and self-assertion” (151). In The Antiphon, Barnes uses a similar strategy to expose both individual and collective dysfunction and tensions underpinning the Hobbs’ family and, by extension, the American state as a whole. While much critical attention continues to be given to the relevance of ­Titus’ symbolic significance to Barnes’s family life, it is important to consider the socio-cultural connotations of Titus as a character who represents state dysfunction in general and a sovereign rule gone awry. In this light, Titus can be also viewed as an important signifier of America’s struggle with the 1930s and 1950s politics of containment—be it Roosevelt’s initial policy of neutrality extended towards Hitler’s warmongering, Truman’s 1950s attempt to “contain the communist menace,” or McCarthy’s witch-hunt directed against artists and other so-called “unpatriotic activities,” but also the post-war, nationalist frenzy and return to conservative values that pandered to the domestic ideal of a “happy nuclear family” (Norton et al. 826; Caputi 9). Such symbolic encoding of American politics allows Barnes to critique the anesthetization of politics underpinning the Nazi and communist ideologies, specifically their emphasis on building a state consisting of new men who will transcend the limits of humanity, to paraphrase Badiou (The Century 36).7 But it also serves as a way 6 Many critics have noted the symbolic significance of Titus’ name. For example, see Taylor, Caselli, and Warren. Judith Taylor in particular draws attention to the Hobbes philosophy and the Salem witch trial connection. For more see, Judith Taylor, Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism, Chapter 2. 7 This theme, as Badiou notes in The Century, underpins the twentieth-century penchant for the new. “This theme of a total and final war to end all wars underlies all those moments, which punctuate the century…” (36).

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to challenge the conservative bend of 1930s and 1950s politics that advocated a reconnection to the past (Caputi 2). The 1950s embrace of the “happy suburban wife,” who nurtures her family like her own little Eden, in particular surfaces in Augusta’s insistence on makebelieve as a way out of the tragic past into an idyllic future. “Happy talk,” as Caputi calls it, was an intrinsic part of the 1950s return to rigid gender roles and domesticity, cultivated by a political environment that was frequently in conflict with the idyllic pastoralism it preached. As Caputi suggests, “[i]t ‘demanded masks,’ allowing that duplicitous, dishonest gestures be tolerated if the resultant image was sufficiently pleasing” (148). Similarly, Augusta revels in dissembling and masking reality in her desperate attempt to avoid taking responsibility for her culpability in Titus’ oppressive reign. Echoing the state of 1950s America, Augusta’s behaviour drives Act 2 of The Antiphon. Accordingly, the act as a whole relies on a unique juxtaposition of distance through masking that is both physical (for example, both Dudley and Elisha don masks for a while to “play” with Augusta) and verbal. The verbal masking surfaces particularly in Augusta’s insistence on escaping reality and its tragic haunts by enforcing a kind of sterilized happiness through “[f]eatherheaded, fairy-tale[s]” (Barnes, The Antiphon, Act 2, 75). Like a crafty p ­ olitician, Augusta transforms fairy tales into myths that allow her to avoid the past, but also self-knowledge. In fact, any attempt at coaxing Augusta to face reality, specifically her complicity in her husband’s sovereign rule and violence, is blocked by her ability to “banquet in a dream” (Act 2, 75; 85). In this way, Barnes ­delineates the fine line between myth and reality. However, in deploying the Hobbs family as a dysfunctional state, Barnes is also able to interrogate the ways in which the politics of the state and f­amily (or state as family) are not only interrelated, but also implicated in perpetuating oppressive scripts and ideologies. This is further reflected in Act 3, where ­Miranda describes Titus as “Self-appointed Holy Ghost and Father./ Prophet, Saviour, out of Salem—brag of Heaven;/Wived in righteous plenty—­ Solomon./…That crusading infant…” (114). While critics continue to fixate on the many parallels between Titus and Barnes’s father Wald, who was a freethinking polygamist and despot (Herring 58),8 Titus’s despotic sovereignty can be also interpreted as Barnes’s reflection on the destructive aspects of power, especially when combined with passion and justified in the name of free will and/or nature. Here, a brief reminder of Agamben’s definition of the sovereign can be particularly helpful. As Agamben emphasizes, the irony of ­sovereign power is that not only does the sovereign occupy a liminal space, 8 See also DeSalvo, Altman, Caselli, and Taylor.

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being s­ imultaneously inside and outside (as a human subject and a ruler), but also as “having the legal power to suspend the validity of law [something of which Titus Hobbs is accused on numerous occasions in the play] that legally places him outside the law” (Homo Sacer 15). As mentioned earlier, Agamben aligns this “outside” with nomos that is both “the state of nature and the state of exception” (37). This state or nomos constitutes an important rhetorical device driving the play’s aesthetics. As noted by critics, one of the most interesting aspects of the play is its reliance on antiphon, a musical recantation or, in classical rhetoric, a response (oed).9 For example, Judith Taylor in Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism argues that “antiphony names, among other things, a strategy that enables Barnes to dramatise the testimony of sexual trauma without reifying victimhood or reproducing a simply moralistic narrative” (37). She then goes on to suggest that it allows for a “stylized, theatrical, affectively complex performance” (37). And while the antiphon constitutes the structural bones of the play, it is theatrical stylization that it challenges and subverts. However, further examination of the etymology of the term reveals that the word itself originates in classical Greece, and was coined by an Attic orator, Antiphon (ca. 480–411), whose controversial legal speeches, titled simply Truth, ­challenged the separation of the law from nature. One of his arguments, for instance, pertained to the hypocrisy of law as being hostile to rather than an extension of (human) nature. In his terms, “a person’s behavior that is just by the rules of the legal system has the consequence that it injures someone who has done no harm” (Gagarin 76). Such a process is clearly at play in Barnes’s The Antiphon where Miranda becomes “punished” for both her exilic ways and for her father’s indiscretions by being killed with a bell by her own mother (or in other words, by the motherland). Another important aspect of Antiphon’s oratory is his emphasis on a court speech being a theatrical, but not necessarily truthful exercise. In his terms, “a court speech has a clear purpose: to present the strongest possible case to the jurors” (Gagarin 54). By the “strongest,” Antiphon however does not mean the most “truthful” or just. By contrast, he believes that the law frequently punishes the most just (Gagarin 76).10 Miranda, accused by her brothers of being 9

10

This argument has already been raised in Pavlina Radia’s 2004 dissertation titled, “­Nomadic Modernisms, Modernist Nomadisms: Disfiguring Exile in Selected Works of Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys, Jane Bowles, and Eva Hoffman,” and in her article, “Renegade Whos Aesthetics: The Recipe for an Uncooked Story,” Double Dialogues 12 (Winter 2010). For more details, see Michael Gagarin’s insightful study, Antiphon: The Athenian Oratory, Law, and Justice in the Age of Sophists (Austin: The U of Texas P, 2002).

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an “expatriate” who is “the same as traitor” (Barnes, The Antiphon Act 1, 63) and by her mother as a “revengeful…magpie” (Act 3, 104; 114), is the outcast exiled by and from her family, as well as her motherland. Similar to Antiphon, Barnes refuses theatricalization even as she unavoidably re-inscribes it. While Augusta re-enforces it, Miranda sabotages stylized theatricality or any kind of stylized performance at every turn. When her brothers, Elisha and Dudley, want to stage their own “trial” to tease their sister, she leaves the stage. When Augusta begs her to “play” in Act 3, saying “Let us play./The epilogue is over” (101), Miranda calls her a “bloody Cinderella” and refuses to participate in her mother’s make-believe (102). Instead, she engages Augusta in an exchange that favours argument over action or make-believe, as if attempting to transcend Augusta’s “dreamy” nature, as well as her oppressive sense of victimhood by means of verbal play. The verbal play that permeates The Antiphon, but intensifies in Act 3, challenges the very materiality of theatre. This gesture evokes the symbolist rejection of theatricality for the sake of philosophical contemplation and ideas. What comes to mind is, for example, Mallarmé’s emphasis on theatre being “first and foremost a faculty of the mind” (McGuinness 150). As Patrick ­McGuinness argues in his essay on Mallarmé and Maeterlinck’s via negativa, the symbolists reject the materiality of theatre only to return to it via the ­“negative road” whereby, as Maeterlinck believed, theatre becomes an aberration, “a painting, making a statue from flesh” (152). To put it differently, the anti-theatrical gesture allows Barnes to reveal that “theatricality lurks everywhere” and is “embedded in the quotidian” (McGuinness 150). In The Antiphon, this counterpoint is best exemplified in Augusta’s persistent dramatization of her own suffering rather than engaging with her daughter’s estrangement. In fact, rather than admitting her fault or her complicity in the Hobbs’ brutal reign, Augusta instead chooses to kill her daughter with a “brass curfew bell” (Barnes, The Antiphon Act 1, 7; Act 3, 126). Refusing to respect her mother’s “curfew,” Miranda must be silenced. Silencing or excoriating speech and performance in general is not only part of the play’s family/state politics, but also part of Barnes’s aesthetic courtship of the very theatricality she rejects. While critics like Caselli, Warren, and Taylor, for example, view the play as overtly theatrical and dismiss its theatrical tendencies, Barnes makes the two inseparable, thus further exposing the complex nature-law dialectic that underpins the Hobbs family politics, but also state politics as a whole. This aesthetic liminality is foregrounded in Act 2 through Barnes’s use of the puppet theatre that Jack Blow employs in the pursuit of mediating the conflict between Augusta and Miranda. A perfect counterpoint to realist theatre, the puppet theatre is Jack Blow’s creation. It consists of little toy puppets made in the likeness of the Hobbs

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family. Jack’s introduction of the puppets aims to create a distance between the past and the mother-daughter war that Augusta and Miranda “wage in style.” Using the puppet theatre, or the “doll-house” alias “beast-box” as he calls it (Barnes, The Antiphon Act 2, 94), Jack’s attempt is to heal his family’s past through its catharctic re-enactment, but also through its minimization. By emphasizing how small the puppets look in the great scheme of things, he hopes to show Augusta and Miranda how all-consuming it is to be living in the past. He says: “I give you Hobb’s Ark, beast-box, doll’s house—/That little alchemy unhems a man./Madame, your contagion” (Act 2, 91). But his intention to cure the family “contagion” of sorrow and suffering backfires. Neither Miranda nor Augusta is interested in being cured. Instead, each is adamant to defend her own turf in the name of (and for the sake of) justice that cannot be achieved because the happily-ever after that both Miranda and Augusta pine for, albeit in their own, different ways, is simply not an option.

From Politics to Aesthetics: From Aesthetics to Ideas

Underpinning the very notion of the puppet theatre is the transcendence of the corporeal. As Gordon Craig argues in his essay on “über-marionette,” the puppet theatre is an attempt to arrive at a different kind of “human(ity)” (37). As Penny Francis writes, the puppet is a kind of embodiment of transcendence that reflects the modernist thesis that “a theatre show is an artificial product of the human” which points to the very “process of creation” (127). In Badiou’s terms, the very process of creating the new cannot do away with destruction or decomposition, or, to quote Barnes, un-creation. The puppet dematerializes theatre, but also transforms materiality into a loftier ideal: a theatre-idea. As Martin Puchner explains, such transformation is evocative of Plato’s theory of forms or, as he calls it, “drama of ideas,” where the corporeal is rejected and abstraction favoured through an emphasis on dialogue and depersonalizing role-switching (24). Role-switching, Puchner explains, shifts attention from “action” to “argument” (25). While the aesthetic value of the puppet scene has been much debated by critics, what is clear is that its transformative power and poetic quality mediates between the characters’ yearning for justice and their resistance to it. The puppet theatre that Jack builds is a form of “alchemy that unhems a man” (Barnes, The Antiphon Act 2, 91). It is imbued with visuality and poetry, and, like a tableau vivant, it is a dancing picture that mobilizes the family inertia by offering a possibility of transformation and, ultimately, transcendence. In many ways, what is most static in the play is also the most dynamic, thus providing an insight into the complexity of movement and its alternatives. As

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American puppeteer Eric Bass suggests, the world of the puppets “is a poem, not a short story. They are by their very nature images come to life” (qtd. in Francis 13). Barnes’s use of blank verse further enhances the play’s poetic thrust as it foregrounds Augusta’s need to remove herself from the challenges of real life. Instead, it allows her to revel in the magic of poetic make-believe where the powers and cruelties of tyrants like Titus are downplayed and diminished. For example, when the Titus puppet pops out of the doll’s house, Augusta reacts with glee: his miniature size makes him a mere “tick,” a “syllable all buttoned up in cypress” (Barnes, The Antiphon Act 2, 92). She imagines herself all powerful and daring. She says: “This size I could have jumped him/And been happily unacquainted with you all” (Act 2, 92). While Augusta wishes to see the doll-house as a happy afterthought, Miranda once again challenges this pretence that the “beast-box” is an idyllic family portrait. But Augusta is relentless: she insists on her innocence. Instead, she says to Miranda: “I don’t care what you’ve done,/I do forgive me” (Act 2, 94). However, as soon as she says it, her idyll is further interrupted by the “stray travellers” who “have climbed up the back way into the gallery” (Act 2, 95). Representing both the era of war refugees and modern tourists, the stray travellers sideline as a modern chorus that shines light on the ruthless invasion of the public into the private world of the Hobbs family. While in Greek tragedy, the chorus was a highly stylized production, including circular dancing, song or chanting, and poetic “storytelling” of what transpired off-stage ­(Goldhill 52), Barnes’s adaptation of the chorus relies on the figure of the traveller as a force suggesting movement on stage, thus bringing outside in. Similarly, the aesthetic devices of antiphonal exchange, Dudley’s and Elisha’s penchant for dance, and the rapid flow of the contrapuntal dialogue turned monologue, generate a sense of the “moving” world outside. In The Antiphon as in most ancient tragedies, the chorus fulfills an aesthetic role, but also serves as an important vehicle for political commentary. As ­Goldhill emphasizes, the chorus can be viewed as a “hinge between scenes, and guarantee that tragedy is never merely a sad story but always has commentary, reflection, and distance built into its unfolding” (53). Not only does the travelling chorus provide a much-needed repose from Augusta’s stagey performance and whining, it also marks a departure from the “ruined address” that once was home (Barnes, The Antiphon Act 1, 9). The summoning of the Hobbs family accomplishes nothing close to the kind of homecoming that was glorified in the 1930s, nor does it live up to the ideal of the happy nuclear family of the 1950s. What it does, however, is affirm that home—her mother and motherland—is Miranda’s exile, her exile her new home. As Miranda says at the end of Act 2: “What else, if I am she, and she Miranda?” (97). The blurring of the outside and

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inside, family and state, mother and daughter, reaches its climax in Act 3 where “their familiarity” finally becomes “their estrangement” (5). Most of Act 3 relies on the kind of role-switching that estranges, but also excoriates materiality to give way to purer, loftier ideas. Not surprisingly, Act 3 is, in a sense, the most violent of all, as Augusta refuses to acknowledge her complicity in her husband’s cruel domestic rule and Miranda’s abuse, or, as Miranda puts it, “his raping-hook” (102). But she also takes on the role of the victimized daughter; in other words, usurping Miranda’s place twice over. As each speaks in a counterpoint, the focus shifts away from their corporeality to the very idea of cruelty and victimhood. As they banter back and forth, their exchange formalizes their discord. While Augusta bemoans “hav[ing] a daughter for Inquisitor” (Act 3, 103), Miranda indicts her mother for being “the bloodiest villain of us all” (Act 3, 107). Cruelty becomes central in Act 3, but it also speaks to the ways in which theatre itself is and can be cruel in its stylized simplification of life and death. Augusta’s need to play and her penchant for the theatrical exposes how different the mother-daughter aims really are. Like a good 1950s housewife, Augusta dissembles and masks the oppressive violence lurking beneath the veneer of the “happy state,” coaxing Miranda to join in on the game: Let’s jump the Day of Wrath. Let us pretend. The play is over and the boys are put to bed. Let’s play at being Miranda and Augusta. Say we’re at some hunting box with lords— Say duck sniping—on a lake, or snaring Woodcock in the hills—shooting and kissing— … (Act 3, 104) As in the tv commercials of the 1950s, whose function was to foster the oppressive conservative agenda of the times (Caputi 148),11 Augusta prances and coaxes, hoping that Miranda will “buy” her splendid goods. But Miranda does not budge. She has no intention of playing; instead, she wishes to speak, which immobilizes Augusta’s verbal dance. The only “jig” that she is willing to dance is to extricate the idea of victimization out of Augusta’s head. Miranda, like a 11

As Caputi emphasizes in A Kinder, Gentler America: Melancholia and the Mythical 1950s, ­ ruman’s containment policy and McCarthy’s anti-communist propaganda were mediT ated by a “cultural narrative of happy talk” that presented an “image of cohesion” (148). The cohesive image of domestic bliss served as a rhetorical and ideological distraction from the otherwise gloomy and oppressive political environment of 1950s America.

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true aesthete, attempts to arrive at truth through philosophical contemplation of injustice. But Augusta’s refusal to engage in any serious conversation suggests that “the only veritable cruelty is that of the Idea,” to put it in Badiou’s words (The Century 117). Indeed, as she says to Miranda, “the price of passion’s seizure” is a “horrid holocaust” (Barnes, The Antiphon Act 3, 113). Each believes that the idea of justice should be on her side. But it is ­Miranda who finally steps up to accuse Augusta of her complicit cruelty, saying: “You who would un-breath my dying breath” (Act 3, 122). As she confronts her mother, they approach the steps and slowly mount. While Augusta wishes to escape, Miranda blocks her exit. Charging forward, Augusta brings the curfew bell down on Miranda, and, as they fall across the gryphon, they bring down “the curtains” as Barnes notes in the stage directions (Act 3, 126). Not only does Barnes bring the bell down on the mother and the daughter, but also on the play and theatre at large. If theatre is, as Badiou suggest, “the archetypal art of simplification, of stylized force” (The Century 114), Barnes rejects both artistic simplification and theatrical stylization by this act. In the Platonic manner, the idea of justice ascends. In its excoriation of the suffering bodies, however, the play suggests that ideas, in their immortal abstraction, might be all there is—the cruellest justice of all.

Estranged Conclusions

The Antiphon was Barnes’s final major work. From then on, she continued ­writing poetry of epic dimensions, but struggled to finish, often revising and rewriting the same poem several times over. As Hank O’Neal writes in his memoirs of Barnes, some poems would have several titles, others’ titles would have been switched. He notes the numerous drafts that were piled up on her desk, scattered around the floor of her small apartment at Patchin Place (O’Neal 75). However, given the aesthetic riches of The Antiphon, perhaps it is not surprising that it was her final major work, and perhaps the most accomplished of all. In its totality, the play brings together her formal versatility, her keen eye for visual detail, but also her mind’s exquisite ability to challenge humanity by exposing it to the force of artistic creativity. In her emphasis on the immortality of the idea, Barnes brings to life Marsden Hartley’s idea that “it is necessary …to poeticize ideas in order to comprehend them” because it is art that makes the world “visible at last” (7, 58). In The Antiphon, Barnes manages to transform personal history into a philosophical reflection on the process of telling stories—personal, historical, political, or literary—as they shape the lives of individuals but also the fate of the collective and the state. In other

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words, while Barnes’s work can hardly be called political, its trans-medial quality provides interesting insights into larger historical and societal movements and trends. Her exploration of the inhumanness of humanity excoriates the material and, by consuming the corporeal, breathes life into a different kind of flesh whose abstract form houses, to paraphrase Whitman, “multitudes.” In this respect, Barnes might be not be so much of a “mortician of modernism” as Herring and Stutman, and many other critics, have called her (9), but rather the modern alchemist who “unhems a man” (Barnes, The Antiphon Act 2, 91). As Barnes warns in the cautionary note with which the play is prefaced, “a misunderstanding of The Antiphon is not impossible” (5). When put in the context of the first half of the twentieth century, it is plausible to suggest that misunderstandings of various kinds underpinned the era but also had devastating political and cultural consequences. In The Century, Badiou suggests that “the twentieth century [was] not a century of promise. Within it, one accept[ed] in advance that a promise may not be kept, that a programme may not be actualized in anyway because movement alone [was] the source of greatness” (92). Barnes reveals however that while movement was essential to its zeitgeist, its “greatness” might have been (if not partially) misunderstood and its challenges overshadowed, covered over by the promise of the idyllic, a promise of return that may have been and could never be. To give Barnes the last word, the lost generation moved in “lost familiarity” only to find their estrangement suspended “in hiatus” (Barnes, The Antiphon Act 2, 122; Act 1, 12), a kind of exilic diaspora of their own making.

Part 2 Nomadic Topographies of Jane Bowles

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FIGURE 5

“NYC Ferry” (2012) by Pavlina Radia

Introduction to Part 2 The kind of restlessness embedded in Djuna Barnes’s work also pervades the writing of Jane Bowles, a second-generation American modernist whose experimental novel, Two Serious Ladies (1943), has been described by Alan ­Sillitoe as “a landmark of twentieth-century literature” (qtd. in Dillon, Original Sin 2). Like Barnes, Bowles was famous for her endless rewriting and quirky characters whose strangeness and elusiveness contributed to what Tennessee Williams, in reference to her 1951 play, In The Summer House, described as “the oddest and funniest and one of the most touching” qualities of her writing (qtd. in Dillon, Original Sin 227). Unlike Barnes who was born on a farm and struggled with poverty for most of her life, Jane Bowles (then Auer) came from a privileged background. She was born in 1917 in New York City to a Jewish family of high standing. She was educated in French private schools and raised to take for granted the luxuries of her upper-middle class upbringing. In 1927, the Auers moved to Woodmere, Long Island, “a green haven less than an hour’s ride by train from New York City” (Dillon, Original Sin 15). Unlike Djuna Barnes, Bowles enjoyed a relatively idyllic childhood, surrounded by her mother, her mother’s sisters and their families, and her father who had a kind, gentle spirit. In the summers, the family would rent a house in Far Rockaway, an idyllic place that cultivated Jane’s flourishing imagination (Dillon, Original Sin 15). At the age of thirteen, Jane Bowles’s family idyll was, however, radically ­shattered by her father’s sudden death and Bowles’s increasing dependence on her mother Claire, whose conventionalism and affection she simultaneously admired and rejected. Two years later, Jane Bowles underwent numerous ­surgeries for a tubercular knee that left her with a permanent limp and an increasingly constant need to displace the enormous physical pain and her growing sense of isolation. As Millicent Dillon, her biographer, notes, “[h]er only escape was an escape of her own devising, by whatever wiles of the spirit and imagination she could call upon … [and for which] she would pay with terror” (26, emphasis added).1 Like Barnes, Bowles adopted a nomadic lifestyle, which was primarily d­ riven by her “imaginative wildness” and partly driven by necessity (Dillon, Original Sin 26). In 1936, she spent most of her time in Greenwich Village, inspired by 1 For a further account of Jane Bowles’s life, see Millicent Dillon’s biography, Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles (Berkeley: The U of California P, 1981). For Jane Bowles’s letters, see Jane Bowles, Out in the World: Selected Letters of Jane Bowles 1935–1970, ed. Millicent Dillon (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1985).

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its artistic community and decadent lifestyle. She became a member of the Askew Salon, frequented by artistic geniuses like Virgil Thomson, Charles ­Demuth, Charles Henri Ford, e.e. cummings, and Maurice Grosser, to name a few. As Dillon notes, Jane Bowles soon became the life of the party. “Through her wit and charm, her sophisticated and yet childlike quality, she drew other people to her” (35). In fact, her social aptitude and ability to throw caution to the wind became the ultimate leitmotifs of her life’s intricate journey. A ­ fter meeting her future husband in 1937, Paul Bowles, a composer and writer, Jane Bowles ­embarked on a life that was marked by a crossing of various frontiers— racial, cultural, intellectual, and sexual, but also by a persistent desire to return. Unlike Paul who enjoyed living outside America, Jane felt ambivalent about a voluntary self-exile. She frequently joined Paul on his travels, but did so reluctantly, often opting out for the familiarity of the art world in New York wherefrom she made her little “voyages out” into the world.2 Bowles published her first novel, Two Serious Ladies, in 1943, six years after Barnes’s Nightwood (1937). Spanning the early 1940s and 1950s, Bowles’s work engages with both modernist and postmodern agendas. Embedding ­dramatic poetics into her characters’ nomadic politics, Bowles’s work speaks to 1940s America and its artistic concerns to “sustai[n] the movement of literary ­modernism during the Cold War era” while simultaneously exploring “certain ideological themes and political trends” that were characteristic of postmodernism (Bender 135). Referred to by critics as a second-generation American modernist (Friedman and Fuchs 21), Bowles and her work provide an interesting bridge between the end of a highly aesthetic era of the 1920s and 1930s, and the rise of a new, expatriate avant-garde era of 1940s and 1950s America. If Barnes’s work marks the period of America’s Bohemian expatriation in ­Europe, Bowles’s writing encompasses the Truman era of wwii bombings, Cold War politics, and anti-communist propaganda that propelled many ­left-wing artists into exile. While Jane Bowles’s nomadic lifestyle had more to do with her personality than her and her husband’s communist ideology or left-wing sympathies,3 far from a creative stimulus, her nomadic lifestyle 2 For making these “trips,” Jane relied on her group of friends (Harry Dunham, John La Touche, Marian Chase, and Teddy Griffis) (Sawyer-Lauçanno 208). For more, see Christopher SawyerLauçanno, An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles (New York: Grove, 1999). 3 As Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno notes, Jane and Paul were not dedicated communists. When they joined the party in 1939, it was primarily for “opportunist” reasons (206). Virgil Thomson suggested to Paul Bowles that, if he and Jane wanted to be a part of New York’s art world, they needed to sympathize with the Stalinist ideology that dominated nyc’s theatre world in particular (Sawyer-Lauçanno 206).

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would often precipitate her into periods of “imaginative wildness” and unproductive paralysis that marked a continuous stifling of her artistic genius (­Dillon, Original Sin 26). As a result of her persistent writing blocks, Bowles’s literary efforts yielded only one full-length novel, Two Serious Ladies (1943), numerous short stories that had been intended, but never developed, as novels, and two, not very successful plays, A Quarreling Pair (1945), and In the Summer House (1945–1947). From the modest account that she has left behind, but particularly from her personal letters, it becomes clear that, like Barnes, Bowles engaged in persistent de-composing and re-composing of her writing, where she revised ­endlessly and left behind numerous drafts of work that to date remain unpublished. As Dillon notes, “[n]otebook after notebook of uncompleted fragments testify to her trying to find her way, starting, breaking off and beginning again” (“Jane Bowles” 140). This does not, however, mean that her work should be aligned with what Lidia Curti refers to as Bowles’s “aesthetic failure” to compete with “artistically perfect male visions” (134). By contrast, Bowles seemed to have been aware of her talent, but her anxieties often interfered with her ability to stay focused and bring a creative idea to its completion.4 Although Bowles cannot be called a prolific writer, her work provides an intriguing insight into the dark realities of exile and its diasporic topographies through characters whose self-displacement does not pave the way towards the much-desired salvation, but towards suffering and self-annihilation, neither of which Bowles viewed as liberating or emancipatory, but rather ambivalent and, at times, restricting and territorializing. Unlike the reclusive Djuna Barnes, Jane Bowles was the life of the party. But, as critics have noted, her need to surround herself with others was a way to compensate for her inner sense of restlessness that was reflected in the way she lived her life, but also in the way she relied on writing to make sense of her desire to be on the outside while simultaneously recreating a sense of an imaginary diaspora, where she, like Mrs Copperfield and Miss Goering (the protagonists of Two Serious L­ adies), could ponder the familiarity of the unfamiliar. As Sawyer-Lauçanno notes, “The people to whom she was drawn were often chaotic, amoral, as bent 4 In this, the chapter echoes other critics who emphasize the value of her modest account. For example, see Robert E. Lougy, “The World and Art of Jane Bowles (1917–1973),” cea 49 (1986– 1987): 157–173; 160; Millicent Dillon, “Jane Bowles: Experiment as Character,” in Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction, ed. Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs (Princeton: Princeton up, 1989) 140–147; and Allen Hibbard’s study of Jane Bowles’s drafts of her second, unpublished novel in “‘Out in the World’: Reconstructing Jane Bowles’s Unfinished Novel,” lcut 25.2 (1994): 121–169. See also Maier 84.

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on self-destruction as she was. Consequently, they were incapable of seeing how she was frequently a victim, albeit willingly, of her own impulses” (212). Not surprisingly, her first and only published novel, her short stories, and her plays not only inscribe the ambivalence of her nomadic subjectivity, but also comment on the diasporic ethos of 1940s American expatriate artists to whom Europe was foreclosed by the war, propelling the Bohemian art world elsewhere, mainly to Central America and Northern Africa. Moreover, while Barnes’s work is preoccupied with aesthetics, Bowles’s work delves into the very politics of nomadism, especially as viewed from a (post) colonial perspective of a western traveller. Problematizing the ways in which nomadic lifestyle brings to the forefront America’s colonial heritage, Bowles’s work speaks to the issues of race, gender, and sexuality, exposing the complex power asymmetries produced by multicultural relations. Her work thus exemplifies what Bender refers to as “historical versions of [American] modernism” that relied on the embedding of aesthetics and politics, but were also “closer to current sensibilities than many postmodernists allow” (147). In other words, Bowles’s work provides an incisive commentary on American (post)modernity and its expatriate movements, their artistic beliefs and diasporic journeys. Last but not least, like Barnes, Bowles is preoccupied with the American frontier as a symbol of pastoral utopia turned awry. While Barnes’s writing is shaped by the experimental 1920s, Bowles’s work is the product of 1940s and 1950s America, ravaged by consumerist greed and Cold War politics. In Bowles’s work, the nomad figure exposes the ways in which post-colonialism is bound up in and by neo-colonial politics. Bowles’s characters are forced to confront their privileged, western positions even as they wrestle with their own insecurities and power asymmetries. Their nomadic topographies provide insight into the colonial dynamics underpinning the nomadic traveller, eager to be “out in the world,” as the ultimate embodiment of American consumerism. To examine and contextualize the intricate (post)colonial dynamic of Bowles’s nomadic politics, the following chapters draw on the feminist and postcolonial work of Ella Shohat, Sara Ahmed, and Rosi Braidotti, to name a few. Rosi Braidotti’s Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory will serve as an important spring board for ­examining Bowles’s sceptical, and often critical, view of emancipatory ­nomadism. More specifically, Braidotti’s theorization of the nomadic subject as a transgressive figure that subverts socio-cultural boundaries, Sara Ahmed’s study of alterity, including Trinh T. Minh-ha’s and Ella Shohat’s critique of postcoloniality, will assist as important theoretical signposts that shed light on Bowles’s rather sceptical view of nomadism and its inherently ambiguous politics.

chapter 7

Tawdry Nomadographies and Transcultural Frontiers: Two Serious Ladies and the Politics of Nomadism It is this spatial thinking that then enables us to highlight the ways ­modernity and modernization themselves unfold through a process of spatial transformations. phillip wegner, “Here or Nowhere: Utopia, Modernity, and Totality” (119)

…

There comes a moment when there is no possibility of escape. jane bowles, “Curls and a Quiet Country Face” (304)

⸪ Jane Bowles’s novel, Two Serious Ladies (1943), is an interesting exploration of the early years of her restless shuttling between Northern and Central ­America. But far more than an autobiographical reflection on her own travels, the novel provides insights into the complex historical, geographic, and political topographies defining the relations between the United States and Central America in 1930s and 1940s. Framing the novel are the much celebrated yet contentious journeys of two American women of an upper-middle class background whose desire to extricate themselves from their conventional lifestyle propels their desire for a nomadic idyll. Miss Goering sells her family house in order to live on an island while embarking on nightly excursions to the mainland. Mrs Copperfield, on the other hand, opts for another frontier, Panama, where she hopes to find what she desires most: happiness. Read primarily as a celebration of women’s empowerment, the novel continues to be lauded for its positive deployment of the characters’ journeys as an “ideological project of social change for women” (Lakritz 227), or similarly, as an attempt to find a “new space beyond accepted norms” (Tinkler 67). While the focus remains on the characters’ resistance and individual idiosyncrasies, the socio-cultural context of their nomadic, yet not necessarily liberating geopolitics, remains

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largely unexamined. This chapter argues that Bowles’s novel sheds light on the utopian mythographies and often complicated nomadographies of American modernity. Written in the 1940s, a period of many political upheavals in and outside of the u.s., Two Serious Ladies comments on the spirit of social and national utopianism that emerged as an antidote to the crisis of American modernity in the 1940s u.s.—the discourses of waning modernism and the increasing ­commercialism that even the spreading war could not have prevented, a spirit that sublimated in the u.s., as well as south of its border, in a frenzied, nomadic pursuit of pastoral idylls.1 Like Barnes’s Nigtwood, Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies is a novel that responds to the historical events and socio-political unrest shaping twentieth-century America by examining (trans)national politics through the lens of intimate, personal dynamics. Divided into three parts, each section of the novel represents a different aspect of the 1940s nostalgia for the myth of the great frontier, of “an undefiled, green republic, a quiet land of forests, villages and farms dedicated to the pursuit of happiness” (Marx 6). The first section describes its domestic resonances through Miss Goering’s pioneer version while the second section takes us south of the American border to Panama where Mrs Copperfield confronts its various cultural conversions. The third, final section brings these stories together to contemplate the mythographies generated by the ladies’ migrant ethic. Through the novel’s three frontiers, Bowles probes the ways in which the two serious ladies’ nomadism mobilizes their quests, but often interferes with their dream visions, forcing them instead to come face to face with a series of bodily and cultural collisions. Bowles not only evokes, but also revises the transcultural latency of modernist geopolitics underpinning her characters’ complex nomadographies. When examining Bowles’s complex nomadographies, Rosi Braidotti’s notion of nomadism as a “feminist figuration for the kind of subject who has relinquished all idea, desire, or nostalgia for fixity” serves as a helpful counterpoint (23). To highlight her views briefly, Braidotti’s theory of feminist embodiment advocates the nomadic ethic as a “desire to go on trespassing, transgressing,” a desire that allows for bonding across cultural, class, racial, and sexual differences, but also posits as a kind of utopos, or utopian nonplace where new identities and homes are borne through women’s confrontation with their class, racial, age, lifestyle, and sexual differences (35, 32). 1 For more historical details, see the studies by Pells and Marx in which they describe the 1940s as dominated by the desire to rediscover America by searching for alternatives to the frontier dream in and outside of the u.s.

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­ otwithstanding, while modernism ushers “the decline of the universal” that N “marks the o­ pportunity for the definition of the nomadic standpoint [that] is based on differences while not being merely relativistic,” as Braidotti suggests (98), nomadism as an emancipatory project represents perhaps one of the most exhilarating yet frustrating dreams of modernism. As Simon Gikandi notes, the pernicious challenge haunting modernism is the “deep ambivalence at the heart of what appears to be [its] revision of alterity” (Gikandi 4). In other words, while ­difference drives the nomadic ethic, it also presents its ultimate site of conflict. In Bowles’s novel, the ambivalence produces an interesting utopian dialectic whose modernist latency propels, yet simultaneously remains anxious about the intellectual, artistic, and cultural revisions it advocates. In one sense, the two serious ladies’ nomadic ethic spatializes their geographic locations, as well as their social and sexual relations; in the other, it points to the divergent nature of their emancipatory paths that are not only socially determined, but also personally constructed as a “temporary reprieve from modern society” (Lougy, “Some Fun” 125). This need for a reprieve stems primarily from the two serious ladies’ class privilege that creates the ethical, but also narrative ground for their displacement, triggering their anxiety about being locked into a position of social mimesis that they experience as a form of alienating immobility. Not surprisingly, they opt for a mobilizing, itinerary tactic to reconnect with their frontier dream. Christina Goering is described as a daughter of “an American industrialist of German parentage” and “a New York lady of a very distinguished family” who, isolated by her environment, has difficulty relating to others (Bowles, Two S­ erious 3). While Mrs Copperfield’s wealthy background allows her to indulge “certain moments of gaiety” (64), it indirectly keeps her bound to her husband’s desire for exotic travel. They challenge their socially prescribed locations through the displacement of their bodily topographies that become extended metaphors for the waning idyll of the American Dream and its c­ onversions (here the stress is on being conned, that is, these are duped versions), which are doubled and enhanced through narrative transitions that persistently rehash and revise the characters’ idyllic visions. While the opening paragraph of the novel promises an almost idyllic view of Christina Goering’s childhood, growing up surrounded by a “distinguished family” (Bowles, Two Serious 3), by the second paragraph, it is clear that the idyll is nothing but an illusion: Christina often feels out of place and is much “disliked by other children” (3). To compensate for her difference, she develops “an active inner life” that protects her from the outside world, yet inevitably locks her into an imaginary state that inhibits “her observation of whatever [goes] on around her” (3), thus giving her a “look of certain fanatics who think

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of themselves as leaders without once having gained the respect of a single human being” (3): Christina was troubled horribly by ideas which never would have occurred to her companions, and at the same time took for granted a position in society which any other child would have found unbearable. Every now and then a schoolmate would take a pity on her and try to spend some time with her, but far from being grateful for this, Christina would instead try her best to convert her new friend to the cult of whatever she believed in at the time. (3) Lonely and estranged by her environment, Christina finds comfort in the world of ideas, but shuns the company of others she so desperately seeks. Instead, she religiously strives to reform those who “take a pity on her” as a way to “work out [her] own idea of salvation…in some more tawdry place” (17). However, such working out, in Christina’s case, is mobilized mainly by her desire to foster an alternative yet solipsistic rather than collective space. Analogically, her nomadic project unfolds as a performance of social exclusion whereby Christina reproduces, if not reaffirms boundaries between herself and others. Christina’s attempt to catch the attention of her sister’s friend, Mary, is exemplary of the utopian subtext of her nomadic politics. For instance, when she coaxes Mary to participate in an imagined “I forgive you for all your sins” game (5), Mary finds herself tied up in a burlap sack as Christina symbolically transforms her friend’s physical body into an ideal and idealized “nowhere.” When performing this ritual of ablution, she is not interested in Mary, but in reducing her friend to a burlap-sacked offering whereby her physical body is not so much objectified as it is elevated to a higher realm: a divinely anonymous topography, a utopian non-place. When Mary finally moans “I’m freezing to death” and thus dares to draw attention to the materiality of the body she is supposed to renounce (7), Christina gets upset and abruptly ends the muddy ordeal. Interestingly, by reclaiming her corporeality, Mary unconsciously confirms Christina’s exclusivist positionality, a positionality that paradoxically allows Christina to re-establish her otherness as an imaginary frontier and to finish what she set out to accomplish—the renunciation and elevation of Mary as a corpus dei—by suddenly announcing that “the game is over” (7). As she leaves Mary to her own devices and runs away to play by herself, she negates her body twice: first through the act of play and then by simply abandoning her all too corporeal companion. Such a religious renunciation of the physical body evokes one of the prerogatives of modernist aesthetics that subjects the body to what Gikandi calls a decorporealizing, “ritualized management of

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difference” in order to ascertain its aesthetic function (33). As Gikandi notes, this ritual often takes the place of religion as the artist assumes the role of the divine consciousness stripping the body of its physicality by elevating it to a reformed, metaphorical (or utopian) existence (33). In Christina’s case, the ritual sublimates as a moral issue that is played out, not surprisingly, on the female body that is stripped of its difference and soothes but also inevitably triggers the nostalgia for the natural (yet aestheticized) idyll, a kind of utopia of clean mobility. Such mythographies find their welcome resonance in the 1940s wave of American utopianism whose reformist agenda ironically regurgitates some of modernism’s anxieties about the physicality of the (female) body and the way it interferes with the dream of an idyllic sort of mobility. By aligning nomadism with the female body as a site of difference, Bowles however sets out to problematize rather than merely re-inscribe the modernist alignment of female corporeality with a marginalized but also inevitably idealized fluid location, a kind of utopia that serves as “the ultimate basis for spatial exclusion and inclusion” (Pritchard and Morgan 240). In this respect, ­Christina’s game hardly represents an “ontological leap forward” or the kind of “self-legitimation whereby the ‘she-self’ [that] blends her ontological ­desire to be, with the conscious willful becoming of a collective political movement” that Braidotti aligns with an embodied nomadic subject (Braidotti 200). By contrast, Christina’s play at divine creativity threatens to subsume the ­collective into her revised positionality by eliminating rather than fostering the ­feminist community with Mary. This “tremendous scheme” as she calls it (Bowles, Two Serious 29), precipitates Christina’s adult nomadism, her persistent need to keep moving, claiming and renouncing both places and people, self and the body, whereby she transforms her “inner life” into an idealized locality, an imagined topography or utopos that she paradoxically lives out not only through her own body, but also through its surrogate extensions.2 In accordance with her “tremendous scheme,” Christina as an adult Miss ­Goering turns her family estate into an open house whose collective body ­politic initially accommodates new alliances, including Miss Gamelon and a want-to-be artist, Arnold, both of whom prefer figurative travel, but are ­reluctant to “make a definite break” with society (18). After a while, ­propelled mainly by her “active inner life” rather than a clear feminist agenda (3), 2 The etymology of the term utopos is enlightening here. According to the Oxford English D ­ ictionary, the origin of the word utopia can be traced to the Greek ou- (meaning “no”) and topos (meaning “place”), “no place,” but also to an “ideal locality” or an “impossibly ideal scheme, esp. for social improvement” (oed). It is interesting to note that, in Bowles’s novel, Miss Goering uses a similar terminology, referring to her nomadic ethic as a “tremendous scheme” (Bowles 30).

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­ hristina suddenly decides to “live in some more tawdry place and particularly C in some place where [she] was not born” (26). In spite of Arnold’s and Miss Gamelon’s remonstrations, she sells her family estate and moves to a smaller, dilapidated house on an island from where she starts “tak[ing] little trips to the tip of the island” (111). The move however fails to open up a space for the kind of nomadic reality Miss Goering promises her companions. Miss Goering’s “tremendous scheme” evokes Barnes’s Nightwood, specifically, the ambivalent domesticity that Nora establishes in order to recreate the nomadic frontier for Robin whose search for enclosures in open spaces contributes to her sense of alienating immobility and social exclusion. Similarly, Miss Goering’s nomadic ethic is hardly conducive to, nor does it always serve as, an acute means of fostering relationships. For instance, in her pursuit of salvation via displacement, Miss Goering yet again abandons, if not completely forgets about and thus erases from sight, her fellow companions, Miss Gamelon, Arnold, and Arnold’s father whom she transports to her nomadic delight in the woods. Initially, they too are quite willing to participate in Christina’s tremendous scheme because it relies on the enactment of the nomadic dream that, as Arnold says, “gives [them] a certain feeling of freedom” (Bowles, Two Serious 106). To put it differently, it creates that much-needed sense of being elsewhere, of occupying “nothing”—the utopia as a non-place, the ultimate metaphor for the American frontier. Ironically, it is Miss Goering’s nomadic politics that not only take her out of the circle of “coalitions” and “interconnections” emphasized by Braidotti (33), but that also interfere with her companions’ well-being and freedom. The sense of freedom, or more specifically, the luxury of personal space that Arnold comes to associate with Miss Goering’s house on an island soon degrades into a binding confinement that turns her companions into “inmates” (Bowles, Two Serious 144). As Clark reveals, this is an important premise of modernist utopias where desire saturates as a form of “equalization, a reduction of everything and everyone into raw material” and hence inevitably turns upon the self by instigating a “removal of all alternative ties” (21). In Bowles’s novel, this raw materiality is a site of latent sexuality projected onto the female body, the ultimate signpost on “the road to Utopia,” as Shohat reminds us (27).3 Analogous to her dilapidating family estate, Miss Goering’s body becomes a frontier site upon which her search for salvation is ironically played out. She embarks on creating estranged relations with men who, much to her surprise, 3 Cf. Chapter 4. In Barnes’s Nightwood, this “raw materiality” is manifested in Robin’s barking like a dog, a gesture that voices her ambivalent submission to, but also refusal of Nora’s socalled pastoral idyll.

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take her for a prostitute. Moreover, confusing emancipatory nomadism with physical and sexual excess, she cannot quite see that she has turned her own body into a strange site and thus confined herself to a fluid yet dangerous locality. Oblivious to the way in which her nomadic escapades affirm gender boundaries and conventions, she is absolutely shocked when her male liaisons reduce her to a sexed body, she exclaims: “Heavens! … I certainly never thought I looked like a prostitute” (Bowles, Two Serious 166–67). When Frank retorts: “You look like a prostitute, and that’s what you are. I don’t mean a real smalltime prostitute. I mean a medium one,” she gasps: “I don’t believe you” (167). She does not believe him because she sees her promiscuity as a nomadic, albeit tawdry, prerogative to what she imagines to be the frontier idyll, the American Dream, that she seeks—that idyllic place of mobility, wild fields, and green gardens. However, by offering her body freely to others, Christina’s emancipatory nomadism sublimates the Dream as a sacred commodity rather than the undefiled embodiment of the sacred she is so desperate to achieve. By highlighting the potentially commodifying and decorporealizing facets of Miss Goering’s nomadic project, Bowles points to the complex trajectories of displacement and, to put it in Ramachandran’s words, “what it means to ‘live in’ a body as the body loses its existential power and is reduced to a spatial locus, a territory that may be inhabited by different tenants” (169). The novel’s section on Miss Goering exposes this production of female spatiality as indicative of the socio-historical contradictions in modernism’s emancipatory, nomadic impulse. These contradictions are further mobilized in the section on Mrs Copperfield, the second part of the novel, in which the nomadic plot takes on a transcultural dimension, as the Copperfields undertake the equivocal journey to the shores of North America’s shadow frontier, Panama. The detailed description of the surroundings, the migrant population, and mainly its tawdry commercialism brings us from Miss Goering’s salvation dream to another frontier: the great Panamanian isthmus where migrants of various origins (West Indian, North American, Mexican, Spanish, Irish, etc.) hope to find their own version of a blissful nomad life. In the 1940s u.s., voyages to South America became a new form of i­ dyllic indoctrination. Anxious about u.s. politics, many intellectuals sought an ­escape from the impending chaos of consumerist capitalism and mass ­commercialism in South America that they saw as a rural, more idyllic and “pristine” version of the American frontier (Pells 100). As Pells suggests, pursuing “preindustrial arcadias” (101), they hoped to find “some mystical experience unavailable in the u.s.” and an opportunity to “launch a serious critique of existing conditions in the u.s.” (101). These expectations echoed the transcultural latency of the often exoticized and eroticized visions of South America pervading ­modernist

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narratives in which characters set out on emancipatory quests, eager to make themselves new, as it were, through an encounter with culturally different, racialized others.4 While Bowles links the kind of pastoral idyll many were ­hoping to find in South America with the transcultural geopolitics of modernity, the Mrs Copperfield section paints a more complicated scenario by uncovering the two Americas’ intricately webbed mythographies, shaping some of the Panamanian (con)versions of the American Dream. As early as the end of the nineteenth century, Panama became strategic not only for America’s economy and international defense, but also for many workers from the Caribbean islands and other South American countries, who associated what Frederick calls the “Panama Dream” with its North American equivalent (46). The u.s. financial support of the isthmus turned Panama into a transcultural yet Americanized vision, generating a whole mythography of success that fostered the rhetoric of an emancipated migrant who made it in the isthmus. While the majority of the migrant population was male, women often pursued their own forms of entrepreneurial exchange, relying on the market value of their bodies, be it as domestic workers or sex workers (­ Frederick 40, 200). Thus, Panama became an interesting transcultural site where not only u.s., but also South American nostalgias for the rural arcadia were being played out.5 The second frontier of Bowles’s novel probes into the nuanced versions of Panama’s own transcultural dream by exposing the culturally intertwined relations between Americans and Panamanian residents. While emphasizing Panama’s migrant topographies, Bowles historicizes the transcultural ethos of the nomadic impulse as imbricated in the cultural crossovers that challenge monolithic visions of American modernity. In this way, Bowles also pluralizes rather than polarizes the American and Panamanian migrants’ gendered and racial differences, highlighting the diverse yet related spectrums of the ­nomadic dreams they generate, but also revealing the ways in which Panamanian mythographies refract and resonate with the waning idyll of the great ­American frontier. 4 For an interesting discussion of such encounters, see Richards. 5 For a detailed account of Panama after the construction of the Canal Zone, see Matt Cassado’s article, “Overview of Panama’s Tourism in the Aftermath of the Turnover of the Canal Zone,” Journal of Travel Research 40.1 (2001): 88–93. Here, Cassado points to the economic interdependency between the u.s. and Panama. See also the collection of essays edited by David Rock, Latin America in the 1940s: War and Postwar Transitions (Berkeley: U of ­California P, 1994) and Stephen Frenkel’s poignant account of the Panama Canal Zone as “a ­hyper-American suburb” (85).

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As Frederick emphasizes, Panama grew to mythic proportions first and foremost as a site of masculine indoctrination and cultural education on both sides of the frontier (Frederick 41). Bowles mirrors this indoctrination through Mr Copperfield whose interest in Panama stems from a similar desire: he, too, wishes to learn “a lot about the countries in Central America” (Bowles, Two Serious 94). Once he is done perusing Panama, he is ready to leave it behind for another country in Central America; he feels that he has learned enough and therefore sees no “point in staying here much longer” (94). His fascination with the cultural landscape however reduces Central America to a museum artifact rather than a site of masculine prowess. As Benz suggests, it functions as a “tableau vivant for him to observe, to study, and to define according to his culturally specific criteria” (42). Such an obsessive study of Central American difference reflects Mr ­Copperfield’s desire for a compulsive displacement, a displacement that ­relies on what could be called a Safari nomadism whereby the other is persistently framed and immobilized into what Gikandi calls a “museum moment” (33). For example, Mr Copperfield embarks on a proverbial jungle trip, but all he sees is the cleansed version of the jungle since, in spite of his interest in learning, he goes only “where there were paths” (Bowles, Two Serious 56). As a culturally polished, museum artifact, the jungle is merely a metaphorical extension of the Canal Zone’s sanitized areas such Colon, Cristobal, or Panama City where the landscape was carefully manicured to generate a pleasant cultural effect (­ Frenkel 93). The cultural sanitization is reminiscent of the modernist tendency to aestheticize difference by doing away with its materiality.6 However, no matter where Mr Copperfield goes, he realizes that the boundaries he establishes are not only far from static, but rather protean. When Mr Copperfield decides to see the jungle, he is persistently confronted by the ­multicultural hybridity that binds rather than separates North and South Americas. After all, in order to get to the “jungle,” he has to take a bus called, ironically, ­Shirley Temple—a name reminiscent of the Hollywood screen, not the rainforest. ­Inside the bus, the blend of the Panamanian and American Dreams gives way to a kind of Disnified Latinidad as the holy virgin innocently peeks through her veil at the picture of the sexually ambivalent Mickey Mouse (Bowles, Two Serious 57). Throughout the second part of the novel, this transcultural and sexual ambivalence resonates with Mrs Copperfield’s desperate search for happiness 6 As Gikandi notes in “Africa and the Epiphany of Modernism,” modernist interest in the other as an aesthetic object required an anesthetization of and distancing from the body as a repressed (tolerated) presence (42). See also Wilk.

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that is personified in her fascination with public (rather than holy) women. Propelled by her desire, she strolls through the streets of Colon, hoping to find what she calls “le bonheur”7 (64). Unlike Mr Copperfield, who balks at the ­physicality of Colon, Mrs Copperfield finds the attention of the women who solicit customers standing outside the door somewhat refreshing. Like Baudelaire’s melancholy “passante,”8 she walks carelessly, yet with an exuberant persistence. Completely abandoned to her pursuit of le bonheur (64), she feels terrified yet free. When an older woman pulls her inside the house, she is delighted by the “smell of the theatrical gauze [that] remind[s] her of her first part in a school play” and “smile[s] up at the Negress, looking as tender and as gentle as she [is] able” (39). Mrs Copperfield’s reluctance to shy away from the environment establishes an interesting transnational dynamic that pushes cultural, but also social and sexual boundaries. However, rather than inscribing colonial relations, the dynamic is perhaps best expressed in Pordzik’s definition of the trans-­ colonial as a “region in which representations are always relational, local, and ­historically contingent, concerned not so much with reproducing a given existential truth or position than with the multiplication of meaning and possibility through multiple symbolic interaction and boundary crossing” (164). In the Mrs C ­ opperfield section of the novel, these crossings, once again, remap the ­woman’s body whose mobility is associated with excess, hence the contentious connection between the sex workers and Mrs Copperfield’s public streetwalking. Like Barnes’s Nightwood, Bowles’s novel thus engages with modernity’s contentious relationship to female sexuality and its feminization of otherness.9 By alluding to the modernist alignment of the moving female body with that of a prostitute, an allusion that remains the source of anxiety throughout the novel, Bowles brings to surface some of the transcultural nomadographies 7 In English, le bonheur means “happiness,” but also “good fortune” (Larousse French-English Dictionary). As discussed in the following pages, Bowles’s novel plays on the ambiguity. 8 See Boym’s discussion of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal, particularly his location of happiness in a passing moment represented by the image of a “passante,” an anonymous female strolling down the street, at once an innocent passer-by and a prostitute, a moment that, for Baudelaire, is the embodiment of modern transience: the lust for an elsewhere (20–22). 9 Here, Bowles echoes Barnes’s concerns with the feminization of displacement and mobility. In her work, Nightwood in particular, Barnes aligns modernity with the “figural power of the stagings of otherness (of the divine, the feminine, or death)” (Buci-Glucksmann 133). In her study, Deborah Parsons, for example, draws attention to the ways in which Nightwood inflects the streetwalker/flâneur as a figure of transgression and estrangement that is both subversive and destructive (180). For more see, Deborah Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford up, 2000).

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that, by way of cross-cultural encounters, shift or challenge (if only temporarily) socially and culturally determined paradigms. The shift further sublimates in Mrs Copperfield’s interaction with the Panamanian woman who, after a few minutes, charges Mrs Copperfield for their brief chat as she eyes another customer. Though Mrs Copperfield would be perfectly happy chatting and playing “Te-ta-ta-tee-ta-ta” (Bowles, Two Serious 40), the prostitute finds her indulgence troublesome and silly. Noticing another, more prospective customer, the prostitute pushes her out of the door, saying: “Time is gold, honey. …But maybe you’re too young to realize that,” which she yells at her “without so much as nodding good-bye” (40). The embarrassing exchange revokes what Shohat calls the “topographical reductionism” that is associated with representations of Third World countries as “underdeveloped” and “child-like” (31). In spite of the colonial latency in the two women’s interaction, the Panamanian prostitute enacts the cultural supremacy that underpins the Panamanian version of the American Dream by playing the game of social mimicry that mocks the white, upper-middle class woman’s behaviour. However, as Dillon emphasizes, Bowles’s narrative thrives on revisions, “repetitions, variations on a theme of themes like a musical composition” (Original Sin 102). In this context, the passage also revises Mrs Copperfield’s nomadism as potentially encouraging of what Braidotti calls “the social integration with difference,” whereby transnational encounters can take on the form of bridging, negotiating, and learning (33). Simultaneously, Bowles cautions that such alliances are often enabled by the socio-political contexts that strive to stifle them in the first place: for instance, Mrs Copperfield’s encounter is neutralized by the prostitute’s entrepreneurial savvy that mediates their so-called feminist network. As the following paragraphs show, through the tenuous context of such physical and cultural encounters, Bowles connects the estranged yet related topographies of the Panamanian idyll and the corrupted American Dream, but also constructs her own historical meta-commentary or what this book calls nomafiction, a fiction that exposes the aspects of history that escape narrative and cultural conventions. The section on Mrs Copperfield is dominated by Panama’s migrant ­voices, a move that celebrates, but does not romanticize or repress alterity (a ­tendency characteristic of modernist narratives).10 Not only do the voices of the ­Panamanian sex workers frame the Copperfield section, but they also frequently challenge Mrs Copperfield to revise her nomadic vision. In this, the Mrs Copperfield section anticipates the critical allegations that “while the n ­ ovel 10

As Susan S. Friedman points out, in modernist texts, difference is deployed as the r­ epressed “heart of colonial darkness” (“Paranoia” 248).

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offers a critique of overt racism, it also eroticizes social and economic power dominances in a colonized country” by occupying a “singularly ­modernist [white] space” (Allen 31). Challenging such criticism, this section of the novel emphasizes Panamanian women’s sense of ownership, c­ ommercial savvy, and voice while simultaneously highlighting their desire for upward m ­ obility as motivated by not only socio-economic conditions but also c­ ulturally inflected dreams and desires. As Frederick suggests (and Bowles’s novel implies), migrant workers had “their own agendas, ones that contested their officially denigrated bodies and labour” (43). Like many American expatriates, they, too, were searching for an ideal “elsewhere”: the promise of adventure and cultural exposure. Their families and communities contributed to the myth by wanting to see migrant workers as the embodiment of Panama Dream. In turn, migrant workers were under pressure to “live up to its mythic proportions by wearing costumes identified with Panama, affecting an American accent and behaviour” (Frederick 42). Through such cultural mimicry, they not only performed their success, but also inevitably embodied the disjunctive geographies of the metropolitan space that simultaneously represented a site of emancipation and a place of perpetual enslavement (disjunctions pervading both the u.s. and the Panamanian versions of the dream). Similarly, many of the Panamanian sex workers Mrs Copperfield encounters are migrants who are seduced by the commercialized Pan-Americanism. Pacifica, for instance, openly admits that she likes “to be with Americans when [she] can” (Bowles, Two Serious 42). Although she misses her family and her family house, she says to Mrs Copperfield: “[b]ut I still want too many things, you know” (44). While Mrs Copperfield listens intently to Pacifica, she does not quite grasp the constraints of her situation or her motivation. Pacifica, however, suffers from a similar oversight. When she reproaches Mrs Copperfield for not being delighted to be married to such a “rich husband” (44), she does not realize, or perhaps refuses to consider, that it is not Mr Copperfield but Mrs Copperfield who is in charge of sponsoring the adventures of her marital enterprise. Each makes concessions to stay in business, so to speak, but assumes that the other is somehow closer to the idyll she desires. Literally stepping into Pacifica’s presumed idyll, Mrs Copperfield decides to settle in the Hotel de Las Palmas. She likes its “bright green” colors and is taken by its diversity (64). A metaphor for the conned versions of Pan-American dreams, the hotel, like Panama, is an isthmus where some of the immobilizing agendas that drive the emancipatory logic of nomadism on either side of the frontier, are exposed. The hotel is hardly an “in-between zon[e] where all [sexual, cultural, and racial] ties are suspended” (Braidotti 19), but rather a t­ awdry

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embodiment of historical and cultural collisions (Spanish, English, French, and American). Such collisions are persistently enacted through the diverse opinions of the hotel occupants whose voices and bodies, Pacifica’s in particular, not only dominate most of the section, but also compare and challenge a whole series of assumptions. Furthermore, the link between nomadism and desire parodies the 1940s emancipation of Panama as a “safe and manicured landscape of formal gardens and yards” where “neighbourhoods of Colon and Panama City ran the gamut from modern shopping districts with multi-story hotels and night clubs” (Frenkel 93, 94). The Hotel de Las Palmas is an inseparable part of the commercialized gamut of happiness supplied by the nomadic influx of the “girls [who] come away from their homes so young” as Mrs Quill, the proprietor of the hotel, so blatantly reveals (Bowles, Two Serious 71). There is nothing manicured about it: the messiness of human relations is embodied in its transculturalism that is marked by differences and distinct cultural histories of the hotel’s residents: from Pacifica’s Spanish origin to the anonymous “girls,” to sailors whose “boats never stop coming” (52). Toby, a con artist who is desperate to get some money out of Mrs Quill describes the place as having “no atmosphere, no bright lights, no dancin’. It ain’t pretty or big enough. People go to the other places and then they come to your place late” (76). To make his point, he takes Mrs Quill to the plush Hotel Washington that serves as a counterpoint to what Mrs Quill believes to be her “balmy” Las Palmas (50). As the narrative shifts between individual spaces and perspectives, this section of the novel gives voice to the hotel residents, con artists, and tourists alike, and thus exposes the city of Colon as a space where realities provide new conversions of the American Dream, conversions that are mirrored in the complicated relationship between Pacifica and Mrs Copperfield. While Mrs Copperfield idolizes Pacifica as the embodiment of Panamanian emancipation, Pacifica emphasizes that her liminal position is less of a vision of le bonheur and more of a liability. Unlike, Mrs Copperfield, who is wealthy yet feels imprisoned, unhappy, and desperate to be free (free of her wealth specifically), Pacifica is addicted to the vision of money; as she admits herself: “I still want too many things, you know” (44). In this respect, Pacifica can merely “laugh” at the torch of liberty she holds over her body cum shopping mall where customers come and go, “happy to have her” even though her body is paradoxically her business (44). Yet Mrs Copperfield believes in her newly-established transnational friendship with Pacifica, just as Pacifica treasures Mrs Copperfield as the American Dream that she pines for. While each woman tokenizes the other, the novel refrains from judgment. Rather, it shows that their polarities participate in the production of the kind of interracial and

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i­ntrarelational “displacement of temporal logic for a politics of space” that nonetheless exposes the “predicaments that prescribe the limits of liberty… through intimations of gender, race, class, and nation” (Hitchcock 51, 59). This displacement is manifested in Mrs Copperfield’s recurrent dream in which she sees a figure of the “mannequin about eight feet high…fashioned out of flesh, but without life,” which she holds tightly as they roll down the hill “locked in each others’ arms” (Bowles, Two Serious 88). Her dream exemplifies the yearning for a collective identity, for being one with otherness (e.g., see Benz, Tinkler, or Lakritz). But the giant mannequin is also the ultimate figure of modernity, the commodifying and overwhelmingly sexist mythos that marks the history of the Pan-American Dream, a dream refracted by the bowdlerized but cruel realities of the Hotel de Las Palmas. Like Mrs Copperfield’s mannequin, the animated social body of the hotel uncovers the conversions (duped versions) of the dream where “the Americas offer another marginal, ec-centric space… where the radical otherness of colonial life is internalized as a lived reality” (Schedler xiv). Bowles’s emphasis on the Americas’ frontier dreams, particularly on the ways in which their socio-historical topographies intertwine, poses a challenge to the critical views that read the Copperfield section as merely re-inscribing colonial Panama-American relations.11 To view Bowles’s narrative as a regurgitation of the colonizer-colonized paradigm means to underestimate the shifting, disjunctive rural-metropolitan, private-public geographies propelling not only North America’s, but rather the two Americas’ nomadic mythographies. Consequently, politicizing such disjunctions is the utopian desire driving the characters’ nomadic ethics, a desire, as recent studies of utopia reveal, that not only “thinks spatially” but also “provide[s] the basis for a new thinking of time and history” (Wegner 119). That a new vision of the dream is necessary for Bowles becomes evident in the third section and final frontier of the novel where Miss Goering’s and Mrs Copperfield’s viewpoints bring about not two, but three distinct and discordant visions when their stories converge and they meet in a restaurant. ­Echoing the opening section of the novel, Miss Goering arrives first, hoping to have a good time with Ben, but when he ignores her she becomes bored and decides to call up Mrs Copperfield who, delighted to hear from her friend, ­arrives within seconds. When Mrs Copperfield agrees to meet Miss Goering, Pacifica (who is living with Mrs Copperfield in New York but who is initially out at the time with her new boyfriend) also arrives at the restaurant in the middle of the two women’s conversation. Bringing all three women together, 11

For example, see Curti, Allen, or Knopf.

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the final section of the novel transforms the initial binary of the rural and metropolitan, divine and physical “Arcadias” into a space of conflicting dreams. That this conflict might be necessary for an awakening from the destructive potential of their dreams and for the mobilization of an ethical intervention is exemplified in the three ladies’ barrage of critical confrontation. While Mrs Copperfield notes that Miss Goering is “stodgy” and “less comforting” (Bowles, Two Serious 178), Miss Goering is “disgusted with Mrs Copperfield” who “tak[es] drink after drink without turning her little head” (176), as she waits for Pacifica to arrive with her new boyfriend, who “eats ravenously of every dish she puts in front him” (177). When begrudgingly taking charge of the “now terribly gay” Mrs Copperfield, Pacifica confronts Miss Goering, saying: “What a baby your friend is!” (180). Indirectly, the comment also extends to the dishevelled Miss Goering whose search for redemption forces her to keep “­ piling sin upon sin as fast as Mrs Copperfield” (181). When Pacifica and Mrs Copperfield depart, the novel closes with Miss Goering contemplating the meaning of her own idyllic dream as she walks down “the long staircase that seemed short to her, like a dream that is remembered long after it has been dreamed” (180). The nostalgia inscribed in Miss Goering’s vision of a staircase further highlights the cultural and racial latencies informing the frontier separating the two Americas. By coupling the waning dream with Miss Goering’s own self-­contemplation, Bowles ties together the novel’s preoccupation with nomadic utopias, idyllic non-places, and socio-political visions: the notions of America, North and South, as intertwined in dreams and mythographies that might have not been remembered. The insistence on mapping but also diversifying the many ­nuances and revisions of her characters’ nomadic, yet not necessarily emancipatory, visions that characterizes the novel thus provides a unique social ­commentary on the two Americas’ historiographic nomafiction. Critical studies of Bowles’s work, however, continue to interpret her representations of travel and of the characters’ resulting self-destruction as a ­subversive, even revolutionary gesture. Andrew Lakritz in his 1991 essay, for example, aligns Bowles’s representation of travel with “an ideological project of social change for women” (227). In a similar manner, most of the 1997 ­critical contributions to the collection of essays edited by Jeannie Skerl associate Bowles’s physical and literary travels in one way or another with an aesthetic and psychological gain.12 Describing Bowles as “an author whose unwavering objective was to efface herself so that true writing can happen” (86), George Toles in his 1998 article, “The Toy Madness of Jane Bowles,” views her characters’ suffering and destruction as a necessary prerequisite towards positive 12

See essays by Benz 37–48; Schloss 102–118; and Lougy 119–133.

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transformation. In his words, “The dream of being wiped clean to the point of erasure includes the hope of being carried to some new hiding place in language, where thinking about oneself can begin anew on a completely different basis” (Toles 94). For Lidia Curti, such new beginnings cannot happen without “the undoing and loss of self” brought on by persistent travel and encounter with “subaltern wom[e]n” (152). In her study, Curti deploys Bowles’s “journey[s] in and through sexual identity” as “metaphor for the crossing of an indistinct zone between masculine and feminine” (134). Challenging the work of Paul Bowles, her husband, and William Burroughs, her friend, in which she is portrayed as “the female traveller” and reduced to “an icon presaging ruin and death” (134), Curti approaches Jane Bowles the writer, as “the ghost of a woman haunting the modernist imagination” (139). In a manner similar to Toles, Curti interprets the author’s “slow and painfully conscious journey” to mental “perdition” and writerly “silence” as if this journey were leading towards a new, more culturally-open identity ­(Curti 142, 147). Likewise, in his recent study, Michael K. Walonen praises rather than troubles Bowles’s compulsive moving from place to place, “opt[ing] to live in hotels rather than sites of a more permanent and domestic character” (18). Yet, unlike Barnes, who upon her return to the United States became a famous recluse, Bowles was famous for surrounding herself with people who mirrored the kind of destructive chaos that informed, but also interfered with, her literary work. In one of her letters to Paul Bowles, written in July/August 1948, she complains of her inability to “exist independently” (Bowles, Out in the World 86). She writes: “I wonder if I would bother with all this if you didn’t exist” (86). In another letter, written in November 1948, she further admits to being ambivalent about travel: “If you are going off alone with Gore and Tennessee for the winter, then I must decide whether I would rather be here… or in New York” (120). The letter evokes the conflicting agendas that informed her life and art. And yet, during the late 1930s and early 1940s, Bowles spent most of her time travelling between Central and North America. She continued to travel back and forth between France, Spain, and North America even after settling in Tangier in January 1948. But her relationship to Tangier was vexed at best. ­Although she was adamant about learning Arabic and participating in the social life of Tangier, she felt “continually hurled out of the Arab world” (Bowles, Out in the World 93).13 Nonetheless, her unfinished work, letters, and tragic 13

Bowles voices this concern in her letter from August 1948. In this letter, she confides to Paul about her sense of being out of place. She mentions the different social structure of Arab society, conceding that she finds herself in an “inferior position vis-à-vis the Arabs”

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death in a sanatorium in Málaga reveal that the lifestyle of nomadic transience is not necessarily a productive means of achieving success in life or in work.14 While Curti describes Bowles’s “[mixed] relationship to travelling” as “a moral imperative” (133, 145), Jane Bowles’s personal as well as fictional accounts provide enough evidence that she was neither thrilled with nor supportive of the nomadic antics that many of her male counterparts had cherished.15 By contrast, a close reading of Bowles’s letters and work reveals her persistent refusal to downplay the consequences of exilic displacement by glamorizing travel and its potentially destructive facets as attractive or liberating.

The Other Serious Ladies and Their Transgressive Conversions: The Deleted Guatemalan Section

Through the characters of Miss Goering and Mrs Copperfield, whose identities are left in shambles through their nomadic travels, Bowles problematizes the Western patronization of the foreign other that is so prominent in contemporary theories of exile and displacement by demythologizing travel as a convenient means of transformation and gender subversion. Instead, her work ushers us into what the traveller in Bowles’s story titled “A Guatemalan Idyll” calls “the other world…inhabited by assassins and orphans” (Bowles, Portable 523). This “transcolonial” world, to use Pordzik’s words (164), does not foster self-liberation of either the Western or non-Western subject; rather, it exposes the shifting and disjunctive relations that underpin the frontier sensibility pervading Bowles’s work. Bowles’s characters are often reluctant to position themselves anywhere in particular while simultaneously yearning for some idyllic diaspora where ambivalence and idiosyncrasies cease to be frightening and destructive. Wishing to step out into the world, they embark on journeys that turn their displacement into a religious pursuit of exile, a pursuit that evokes the nomadic impulse of the Jewish golah.16 In her biography of Bowles, ­Dillon (93). For more, see Bowles’s letters in Out in the World: Selected Letters of Jane Bowles, 1935–1970, ed. Millicent Dillon (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1985). 14 For a detailed account of Bowles’s travels, refer to Dillon’s biography. Note that, in this account, Dillon describes Bowles’s travels as a way to “evad[e]” writing (Original Sin 275). 15 As Dillon emphasizes, “she was terrified of almost any new landscape” (Original Sin 87). For more, see also Bowles, Out in the World. 16 The golah refers to “Jews living outside Israel” who “did not join those returning home, preferring to remain in exile” (Yehoshua 417). Yehoshua describes this choice as “a neurotic solution” (427). In his terms, “In the golah one can preach, cajole, educate, or persuade, but in a totally Jewish ambience there comes a moment of truth, and at that moment

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emphasizes that although Bowles did not particularly embrace her Jewish background and felt ambivalent towards the question of God, she was “beset by a sense of sin and driven by a need for salvation” (Original Sin 120). Thus her work evokes a peculiar sense of religious mysticism wherein the characters’ quest for salvation becomes destructive as in Miss Goering’s peculiar set of principles that drive her closer and closer to debauchery rather than the salvation she seeks. Like Paul Klee’s painting of the Luciferean angel called “Angelus Novus,” an angel who is the embodiment of frightening, if not deadly beauty, they frequently become avatars of disaster. Or, as Walter Benjamin describes Klee’s painting in his essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” they are the “allegory of humanity”: the embodiment of progress that also signals disaster.17 Expanding on Benjamin’s essay, Christine Buci-Glucksmann notes that the allegorical figure of the violent angel pervades modern thought as the uncanny aspect of human character (43). Drawing on Lacan, Buci-Glucksmann aligns the angel (l’être ange) with the uncanny (l’étrange) and suggests that because modernity no longer believes in the divine presence, “the angelic, by virtue of its être-ange-té [a pun on foreignness] …summons up the precariousness of the human” (60).18 By exiling the angel into the fold of foreignness, modernity enforces its own divine transformation, as Buci-Glucksmann maintains, wherein “the angel of protection becomes an angel of destruction” (58). In Bowles’s work, such transgressive transformations, or deformations, compensate for the ways in which exile has become a kind of a/theology of modernity, but also somewhat of a cliché of America’s diasporic ethos. Bowles’s scepticism about the effect of such noble deformations particularly stands out in a deleted Guatemalan section of the novel, which was published in 1944 in short-story form under the title, “A Guatemalan Idyll.” The narrative describes the lives of Guatemalan women through the radically distinct point of view of an American traveller who, having accomplished his work mission, decides to prolong his stay “because he had always heard that a vacation in a

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the choice must be either religious or secular. Life in the golah postpones the moment of truth” (425). For more, see A.B. Yehoshua, “Exile as a Neurotic Solution,” Contemporary Jewish Theology: A Reader, eds. Elliot N. Dorff and Louis E. Newman (New York: Oxford up, 1999) 417–433. As Benjamin writes, Klee’s painting represents the “angel of history” whose wings are caught in the storm of progress: “this storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward” (264). For more, see Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations. For Lacan’s use of the term, see his account of jouissance in Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge 1972–1973, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998) 1–13, specifically, p. 6.

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foreign country was a desirable thing” (Bowles, Portable 505). During his stay at the pension Espinoza, he has a brief affair with Señora Ramirez, who wishes to “be somewhere else…somewhere where the life is beautiful” (514). Like the published novel Two Serious Ladies, the deleted “Guatemalan” section inscribes Bowles’s emphasis on the trans-colonial rather than colonial versus postcolonial relations, thus complicating the cultural, gender, and racial trajectories of the characters’ nomadographies and also questioning the intellectual and emotional value of rudimentary displacement. Tired of her husband’s infidelities and absences, Señora Ramirez spends most of her days at the pension Espinoza with her two children. Confined to the pension by her husband, she dreams of escaping her monotonous lifestyle by going to a different country. Her desire for travel makes the American traveller particularly attractive to her. Although the traveller finds Señora Ramirez “crazy and disgusting” (505), he goes to bed with her, though he blames his transgression on the tropics and on the otherness of the world in which he finds himself. In his mind, he admits that the night with Señora Ramirez evokes “the other world, the world that he had always imagined as a little boy to be inhabited by assassins and orphans” (523). Projecting his fears and condescension onto Señora Ramirez, the traveller copes with his displacement by dismissing her as a “crazy and a little disgusting” foreign other (505). Bowles’s critique of consumer nomadism and the racism that underpins it, however, does not come to rest with the traveller’s demonizing of the foreign female. Aligning Señora Ramirez’s admiration of the American traveller as lodged in the myth of America as a country of unlimited possibilities, Bowles exposes the foreigner’s own mythology as immersed in a dream of a land “where the life is beautiful” (514). Just as the traveller demonizes Señora Ramirez, she romanticizes the traveller and thus reduces him to a mere representation of her desire to escape from her life in Guatemala. Infatuated with his superior foreignness, she perceives his world as an ideal site of romance and beauty. “I would love to travel…and I think it would be very nice to have the life of an actress, without children. You know it is my nature to love men and kissing” (515). As this passage suggests, she associates travelling with an escape into the world of romance, into the world where she can perform the role of a swooning actress, adored by her loving hero. The idealized dream world of Señora Ramirez contrasts with the American traveller’s condescending view of foreign women. In this deleted section, Bowles reveals two radically different perspectives of how otherness contributes to, or dismantles, the fascination with another’s lifestyle. The traveller associates displacement with danger and debauchery whereas Señora Ramirez romanticizes travel as an illusory escape from the

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monotony of everyday life, from nationality, and ultimately from herself. Projecting her idealized expectations onto the foreigner, Señora Ramirez parodies the supremacy of the western gaze, but also subjects it to a trans-colonial mimicry where the frontier separating the colonizer from the colonized is ­mobilized and thus rendered fluid, yet not necessarily less xenophobic. Bowles thus exposes the nuanced plurality of what Sara Ahmed calls “the economy of xenophobia” whereby the body of a stranger is “constructed through a process of incorporation and expulsion,” a process that adheres to an unstable dynamic where the body’s liminality depends on the level of its assimilability into the familiar (Ahmed, Strange Encounters 54). Through the perspective of the American male and the Guatemalan woman, Bowles explores the transgressive nature of desire through two radically different cultural and gender viewpoints. Whereas for the American traveller, desire is a demonic transgression that “would have to remain a secret” (Bowles, Portable 523, 524), Señora Ramirez aligns desire with the pastoral ideal of cultural nomadism, with an idealized vision of a foreign country. But just as the novel does not favour romantic views of displacement, the deleted section’s ending shirks the possibility of fulfillment when the American traveller’s departure bursts Señora Ramirez’s idyllic bubble. Not only does he refuse to marry her, but he finds her desire and western aspirations disgusting. By annihilating her dream of romance and/as upward mobility, the western traveller leaves Señora Ramirez where he found her: in her “dream-state” place where travel and love spring eternal. The failure of Señora Ramirez’s romantic escape in this story evokes Miss Goering’s and Mrs Copperfield’s ambitious, yet disastrous journeys. Like Barnes’s Nightwood, the tragic notes upon which Bowles’s “Guatemalan Idyll” and her novel close only further speak to Bowles’s acute eye for the familiar of exile: the yearning for idyllic non-place where the possibility of salvation remains thwarted by the nomadic ethic that is as liberating as it is constraining in its many conversions. By refusing to entertain the possibility of conflating such trans-colonial politics of otherness with what Buci-Glucksmann calls an “amorous paradox” through an erotic conquest that both captivates and immobilizes (133), Bowles transforms ambivalence into a contentious, albeit political, aesthetic.

chapter 8

Short Stories and the Vendetta of Nomadic Politics You did not feel I had the courage to carry out my scheme. I still expect to work it out. But not yet. I am more than ever convinced that my salvation lies in solitude, and coming back to the garage before I have even reached Massachusetts would be a major defeat for me…. jane bowles, “Going to Massachusetts” (437)

…

I—the—Seer am bound to mis-see so as to unlearn the privilege of seeing. trinh t. minh-ha, “Other Than Myself/My Other Self” (24)

⸪ In her stories, Bowles, like Barnes, returns again and again to the themes of ­self-imposed exile and alienation through female characters who seek ­happiness and fulfillment in faraway places. While echoing Barnes’s concern with the characters’ sense of exile and displacement, Bowles’s characters evoke the diverse, yet problematic trans-colonial ecologies of America’s international relations in the late 1940s and 1950s. Unlike Barnes who, by that time, r­ esided in New York, Bowles was part of a new expatriate generation. Marked by the wwii and Cold War politics, this generation was “at odds and even disgusted with their places of origin” (Walonen 10). Contrary to the 1920s American avant-garde that employed exile as a means of reconnecting with the homeland, the 1940s expatriate Bohemia searched for an “alternative to an America of mass conformity, xenophobia, and grim, self-willed optimism” (Walonen 10). In her travels to South America, North Africa, and Europe, Bowles struggled with her ambivalence about living abroad and returning to America. This ambivalence pertained to her discomfort, but also acknowledgment, of being a western traveller who is “liked for [her] money” (Bowles, Out in the World 131). While most of the 1940s expatriates like Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, or Alfred Chester, saw their life in exile as a diasporic terra exotica where they “benefited economically” and were thus “deeply implicated in the

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[colonial] system” they critiqued in their own homeland (Walonen 11), Jane Bowles remained unconvinced. Instead, she was sceptical of the western expatriates’ “tremendous scheme” of getting away from America only to exercise their privilege by surveying non-western cultures as exotic mementos enhancing the “artfulness” of their art. In her short stories, Bowles explores this privilege through her characters’ intimate, yet often toxic relations. These relations not only comment on the transcultural encounters of the 1940s and 1950s expatriate Bohemia, but they also shed light on the pastoral undertones of their quest for an alternative America, an idyllic diaspora where they would retain their privilege while mastering estrangement in the form of what Sara Ahmed calls “passing for strangers”—in other words, by usurping or taking over the stranger’s identity (Strange Encounters 131). In this iteration, exile takes on the role of a (post) colonial cliché whereby the strangers are affirmed in their (in)authenticity through “affective politics” of love, hate, intimacy, and fear (Ahmed, The C ­ ultural 63). But it also provides an interesting insight into the gendered and racial complexities underpinning the transcultural landscapes of the 1940s and 1950s. As in Barnes’s expatriate era, in 1940s and 1950s America, gender continues to be conflated with racial and ethnic anxieties. Bowles’s stories attest to this socio-cultural conflict by tracing the lives of odd couples whose foibles and idiosyncrasies reflect their search for an affective diaspora. Bored with the family dynamics of their homes, they abandon their safe abodes to embark on spiritual journeys, hoping to find salvation by way of adventure. In their attempt to escape their unhappy, monotonous lives, and destructive bonds with others, the characters chase after a dream world, the inaccessibility of which often brings them to a point of no return: suicide, death, madness, or further confinement. And yet, in their pursuit of this imaginary and imagined space beyond the limits of cultural, gender, class, and racial expectations, they inevitably expose the various challenges and power asymmetries generated by, and as a result of, the nomadic politics they advocate or strive to embrace. One of the endearing qualities of Bowles’s stories is their characters’ gutsy willingness to take risks, to challenge the familiar by questioning normative categories of race, gender, and sexuality. As Bozoe, one of the characters, emphasizes in “Plain Pleasures,” it does not matter whether her decision to go to Massachusetts is right or wrong, what matters is that she must go there and “be alone” in order to “carry out [her] scheme” (Bowles, My Sister’s 457). Nonetheless, as outlined in the previous chapter, in spite of their queering of normative boundaries and discourses, like the majority of Barnes’s protagonists, Bowles’s characters’ nomadic “schemes” are not always proto-feminist or unproblematic. Echoing the gender ambivalence of Barnes’s stories, Bowles’s

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characters struggle with normativity. On the one hand, they strive to challenge socially-prescribed boundaries and norms; on the other hand, they are conflicted about such transgressions. Power asymmetries often complicate, if not drive their relationships. In this, they provide an intriguing commentary on the gender and racial anxieties of 1940s and 1950s America. Consequently, Bowles’s characters embrace nomadism as an erring and errant ethic that relies predominantly on what Trinh T. Minh-ha, in her essay, “Other than Myself/My Other Self,” refers to as “deliberate mis-seeing” (24–25). According to Trinh, such politics of mis-seeing allows for a repositioning and resituating of borders and boundaries, but also forces the nomadic subject to “see things differently from what they are, differently from how one has seen them, and differently from what one is” (23). In other words, the courage to make mistakes, to court imperfection, and to embrace the politics of “deliberate mis-seeing” is crucial to “bring[ing] about a different form of seeing” (24). As Trinh emphasizes, “[i]mperfection … leads to new realms of exploration, and travelling as a practice of bold omission and minute depiction allows one to (become) shamelessly hybridize(d) as one shuttles back and forth between critical blindness and critical insight” (24). It creates a space where “I-the-Seer am bound to mis-see so as to unlearn the privilege of seeing” (24). The process of un-learning a particular way of seeing is what Bowles’s characters fear, but at the same time feel compelled to endeavour. Frequently, their ways of seeing are attached to challenging the prescribed ideologies of femininity, sexuality, marriage, and cultural belonging. In this respect, their nomadic encounters can be viewed as a reaction to the 1940s return to the politics of containment and domesticity, encouraging women to return home and embrace the nuclear, heteronormative family as the acme of the American Dream (Caputi 9).1 But they also inevitably contemplate what Betty Friedan called in her famed oeuvre, The Feminine Mystique, the “problem with no name”—“a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States” (15). This dissatisfaction or conflict pertained to normative femininity and motherhood, on the one hand, and the yearning for independence, on the other. The conflict between the two pervades Bowles’s stories. Dillon, for instance, mentions the “push and the pull” of her characters’ nomadic politics (Original Sin 104), while James Kraft in his 1968 review speaks of her works’ 1 As a member of the Askew salon and later of the expatriate group in Taxco and Tangier, Bowles was interested in free-thinking ideals and, like many of the Askew salon members, espoused the view that the New York intellectual was primarily a “literary-political commentator” (see Bender 133).

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“suggestive tension” (273). However, this tension inevitably propels Bowles’s characters into positions that both challenge and re-inscribe normative gender and ­cultural roles. Although Bowles’s female characters refute any hope for a domestic bliss, they perpetually recreate it. Bowles thus turns nomadism into a politicized aesthetic. Her characters’ search for a domestic idyll parallels the pastoral quest of Barnes’s exilic characters. However, like Barnes, Bowles examines the ways in which family and personal dynamics do not just speak to the characters’ idiosyncratic manifestations, but rather mirror, if not re-­inscribe, larger socio-political events and state politics. For Bowles, the personal is mobilized by the public only to be severed by a frontier—be it state, race, history, or sexuality—that immobilizes the quest for a diasporic community. As Robert Lougy writes, “her characters exist within an isolation that cannot be broken down, always wandering in search of that which eludes them”—be it home or exile (“Some Fun” 120). They search for an imaginary space that lies outside the normative ideologies of gender, race, class, and culture. But they also challenge the conventional interpretations of travel or being on the “road” by troubling the female Westerner’s quest for other, emancipatory spaces. As Deborah Paes de Barros emphasizes, for centuries, the trope of the road has been associated with masculine, colonizing quests. In her words, “the road of travel n ­ arratives [was] frequently the road of the colonizer rather than the colonized” (4). ­Drawing on Braidotti’s notions of nomadic subjectivity, Paes de Barros argues that twentieth-century women writers often rewrite their own “colonized” ­position by “altering the geography of the road” and by substituting the masculine quest for a more inclusive, communal bonding (6). Refusing to celebrate such communal desires, Bowles’s writing however goes further in challenging the different kinds of bonds and bondage that are produced by both western and non-western women who try to re-create a sense of community abroad. Bowles’s nomads, both male and female, frequently attempt to bond with others, but also warn against the idea of enforced communal bondage at all cost. In this, they extend Barnes’s critique of the American frontier idyll even further. Her stories like “Camp Cataract,” “Plain Pleasures,” “Looking for Lane,” or “Going to Massachusetts” caution against the kind of communal “­dreamtime,” to use Braidotti’s words, that recalibrates normative ideologies of marriage, gender, class, and race, only to perpetuate them. As Bozoe says in her letter to Janet in “Going to Massachusetts”: “First I have to go to Massachusetts and be alone” (Bowles, My Sister’s 457). While she acknowledges that she “can find no rest” (458), she also realizes that negotiating between social expectations and her own desires might be the ultimate “dilemma on earth” (458). In Bowles’s stories, nomadic encounters are a lonely and lonesome enterprise, which is frequently pursued in spite of others but also, most often, at the

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cost of both self and the other. They are “plain pleasures” that “come without crowds or fancy food” as Alva Perry says in the story “Plain Pleasures” (301). While the characters’ search for some transgressive utopia often interferes with, and at times, invades the space of the foreign other, Bowles challenges the binary opposition by suggesting that the western and non-western positionality is subject to various, asymmetrical shifts. These shifts shed light on the ways in which the characters’ pursuit of diasporic spaces is marked by ­different power structures and trans-colonial rather than strictly colonial or postcolonial relations.

“Finding No Rest”: Escaping (In)Humanity

Bowles published most of her stories in the 1940s and 1950s. Like Barnes, she continued to rewrite her stories endlessly, adding new perspectives or “retelling in slightly different words” (Dillon, Original Sin 145), thus inevitably challenging her own artistic boundaries and limits. As noted in the previous c­ hapters, borders and frontiers of various kind pervade Bowles’s fiction, and in her stories, Bowles dramatizes these cultural collisions as the inevitable dilemma of nomadic subjectivity. Christopher Schedler suggests that “[t]he relationship between border and modernism in the Americas” is not only pertinent to “their differing responses to the predicament of modernity,” but is also entrenched in its colonial history (xiv). Through her mapping of 1940s and 1950s America, Bowles stages these conflicts as a reflection of Truman’s containment politics, be it the rise of anti-communist propaganda or the conservative turn towards nativism. In what follows, this chapter argues that Bowles’s stories dramatize these intricate conflicts through the various power asymmetries generated by nomadic politics and through contrapuntal characters whose conflicting opinions shed light on the so-called nomadic “experiment” with which artists like Virgil Thompson, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Bowles, and many others of Bowles’s generation were so enamoured. Bowles therefore not only alters the masculine trajectory of the nomadic quest, but she also blurs the line between the colonizer and the colonized, the masculine and the feminine, revealing what Macpherson refers to as “the socially constructed nature of any prescribed pathway and they demand that readers re-vision patterns of departure, exile, and return” (207).2 2 For more, see Heidi S. Macpherson, “Women’s Travel Writing and the Politics of Location: Somewhere In-Between” in Kristi Siegel, ed. Gender, Genre, and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing (New York: Lang, 2004) 193–208.

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Stylistically, Bowles revises these patterns by transforming her stories into dramatic skits that evoke the precision of Barnes’s one-act plays. Shifting from the dramatic monologue to antiphonal exchanges, Bowles’s short stories epitomize the Platonic tendency to spiral out of ordinary life into a more abstract, idea(lized) space where aesthetics and politics meet, where the very idea of escape serves as a figurative diasporic space that remains, and must remain, elusive. Furthermore, Bowles’s stories invoke the power asymmetries that result from nomadic politics going global, exposing not only the trans-colonial complexities but also pointing to the dystopian vendettas precipitated by the American Dream. In other words, Bowles’s stories expose the dreams of figurative nomadism as intricately bound up with the escape from different forms of humanity—be it an ideology or what the characters frequently refer to as a “scheme.” Bowles’s 1946 story, “Plain Pleasures,” explores this complex relationship ­between the pursuit of happiness and (in)humanity through a dramatic encounter between two loners: Alva Perry, a “dignified and reserved woman of Scotch and Spanish descent,” and John Drake, “an equally reserved person,” who works as a trucker for lumber companies (Bowles, My Sister’s 299). Alva Perry and John Drake are neighbours, but, both being reserved, they hardly speak to each other until one day John helps Alva carry a bag of potatoes. ­Reciprocating his kind gesture, Alva feels obligated to share a few of her baked potatoes with him. As they start eating, she says: “Do you like plain ordinary pleasures? … Plain pleasures like the ones that come without crowds or fancy food. Plain pleasures like this potato bake…” (301). She then goes on to talk about her pleasure-loving sister Dorothy only to emphasize that “It’s always better to stay alongside your life” (302). John Drake is disturbed but also taken by her monologue, adding to her ­position his own reflection on moving around too much. He says: “if a man leaves home he must leave for some very good reason…. Otherwise, I think he ought to stay in his own home town, so that nobody can say about him, ‘what does he think he can do here that we can’t?’” (303). Thinking that they are of the same mind, he invites her on a date. Alva goes to great lengths to ­prepare for the evening, but when John is late, she is annoyed and starts drinking ­heavily. After a few glasses, she gets up and walks to the back of the r­ estaurant, falling asleep in one of the rooms upstairs, thinking: “This is perfection. I have kept the pathway all my life. So that I could go back” (300). As she falls asleep, the proprietor comes in. Whether he takes advantage of her is left open to ­interpretation. When she awakens, however, she feels strengthened in her anonymity. Her ability to remain detached and independent ironically allows her to experience the kind of tenderness towards John Drake that she associates

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with her “potato bake” (301). In other words, only by rejecting the possibility of human bond is she able to experience “plain ordinary pleasures” that are “closer to the heart of God” (301). Here, Bowles evokes Plato’s idea of God as pure form, or what Puchner in The Drama of Ideas refers to as “a disregard of the concrete, embodied, lived experience and a desire, instead, to ascend to some realm of abstract forms or ideas, pure and simple” (13). The story’s ending further enhances the dreamy quality of Alva’s awakening as she walks out of the room feeling tender towards the memory of John Drake rather than his physical being. In “Camp Cataract,” a story written in 1948 and published in 1949, Bowles constructs a similar dream world only to expose and critique what lies at the heart of its foundation: a delicate marriage of blindness and insight that evokes but also problematizes the kind of “deliberate mis-seeing” advocated by Trinh T. Minh-ha (24). A story about two sisters, Harriet and Sadie, who are at odds with each other, “Camp Cataract” is one of Bowles’s most critically acclaimed stories. In one of her letters to Paul Bowles, Jane described the story as “the best thing [she’s] ever done” (qtd. in Dillon, Out in the World 167). However, as Dillon documents in her biography of Jane Bowles, Paul Bowles found the story “mysterious” and difficult to understand (Dillon, Original Sin 168). And yet, the storyline of “Camp Cataract” is quite simple and so typically “Jane” (168). Like many of Bowles’s works, “Camp Cataract” centres on two sisters: Harriet, the nomadic type who suddenly leaves the city for a resort nestled around a waterfall, and Sadie, the domestic type who loves her sister dearly and finds her escape from the city selfish and irresponsible, but also heartbreaking.3 While Harriet also has a sister Evelyn who is married, she merely figures as a foil for the repressed desires that underpin the conflict between Harriet and Sadie. While Sadie has deep affection for Harriet, Harriet ignores her. So, when Sadie finally goes to “Camp Cataract” in the hope of retrieving her nomadic sister, she is also desperate to reveal her love for Harriet, something that she knows will meet with Harriet’s disapproval, but she goes nonetheless. Not surprisingly, her arrival merely angers Harriet who dismisses Sadie’s passion as sentimentality. Heart-broken, Sadie ends her life by plunging into the falls. Echoing the plotline of Bowles’s other stories, “Camp Cataract” is about two women whose lifestyles and politics couldn’t be more different. Harriet believes that her nomadic lifestyle will bring her back to her real “roots” while Sadie “fear[s] nomads” and is a “great lover of security” (Bowles, My Sister’s 361, 360). Sadie insists that “[y]ou don’t grow rich in spirit by widening your circle 3 Similar dualities pervade Barnes’s stories. See, for example, “A Sprinkle of Comedy” or “The Earth.” For more details, see Chapter 2.

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but by tending your own” (360). Harriet, on the other hand, doesn’t “give a tinker’s damn about feeling part of a community” (362). Her journey to “Camp Cataract” is a “complicated” quest for self-discovery. Or, as she puts it, “Camp Cataract is habit, Camp Cataract is life, Camp Cataract is not escape” (363). Like a true pioneer, she wishes to live on the frontier, merging with her surroundings rather than being defined by them. Like many Bowles’s characters, she believes that her nomadic scheme is justified and justifiable. Trying to convince herself and others, she emphasizes: Escape is unladylike, habit isn’t. As I remove myself gradually from within my family circle and establish myself more solidly into Camp Cataract, then from here at some later date I can start making my sallies into the outside world almost unnoticed. (363) Harriet’s plan is to remove herself slowly from the city life and her family, to find her “tree house” where she can be away from her family without quite suffering the consequences of exile and displacement. However, as Sadie points out, Harriet’s escape from “the norm” is relatively easy since it is predicated on her position of privilege. After all, she has a loving family and the money to ­afford such dreamy ventures. The plot line is based on Harriet contradicting her family, her loving sister, but also mainly herself. While she knows of her sister’s deep affection for her, she does not share her passion or sexual desire. Instead, she finds Sadie’s ­domesticity repulsive and oppressive even though she frequently relies on her kindness. Harriet is the embodiment of the western nomad who, in her quest for self-definition, pursues her consumerist agenda at all cost, even if it threatens to annihilate others. For example, it is no news to Harriet that the family has to foot the bill for her escapades. Ironically, she is very happy that the ­resort caters only to what she calls the “respectable clientele,” providing them precisely with what Harriet purports to loathe, a “bohemian dash for freedom” (363, 362). In other words, Camp Cataract is a place that re-enforces indulgent habits of the American upper-middle class by promising to satiate their ­hunger for adventure and a bit of noble savagery. A resort housing relatively affluent Americans, Camp Cataract represents what Carol Schloss refers to as “an outpost of the possible,” offering the ­American woman a much-needed escape away from the confining comforts of her industrialized Western home (Schloss 105). Secluded from the hustle and bustle of everyday life, the camp also becomes a holy ground for many ­American tourists who are weary of the fast pace of the highly industrialized American lifestyle. Supplying its residents with an escape from everyday life,

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Camp Cataract figures as the adventurous dream site upon which a tourist projects his or her most primitive desires, including pre-planned trips to Pocahontas Falls, where they can “fancy [themselves] a red skin all the way [there] and back” (Bowles, My Sister’s 386). Bowles juxtaposes this dream with the urban life of the city where women like Sadie “coo[k] and clean all day long,” embracing domesticity as if it were a form of religion (362). Through the different politics and life philosophies that the two sisters espouse, Bowles interrogates the myth of noble nomadism as an American fantasy of adventurous escapism whose colonial heritage inevitably re-casts the nomad as a symbol of unrestrained desire and transgression, but also as an embodiment of selfish individualism and exploitation that paradoxically re-enforces rather than subverts heteronormativity. Every year, Harriet leaves home to spend five weeks at Camp Cataract upon her doctor’s advice that a combination of fresh air and new environment might help eliminate her “fits” (364). Brought on mainly by her secret desire for escape from the boredom and drudgery of her family life with her sisters, Sadie and Evelyn, and Evelyn’s husband, Harriet’s fits are clearly not a result of some mental malfunctioning, but rather represent her need to get away from ­everything and her family in particular. While Braidotti views women’s ­figurative nomadism as “a point of exit from phallogocentricism” towards “an epistemological community” of women (Braidotti 33, 179), Bowles aligns ­Harriet’s trip to the camp as an attempt to escape such sisterhood, which she finds stifling and oppressive. In this sense, Bowles’s female characters run not from patriarchy but from their dependency on the pre-oedipal world of childhood that is associated with maternal or sisterly rather than patriarchal space. As in Barnes’s work, this space is a complicated affective colony where the characters’ ­nomadic politics connote the colonizing bondage of their interpersonal relations. Ironically, like Harriet, they merely replicate what they are trying to escape. Like Barnes’s play, The Antiphon, Bowles’s narrative strives to disrupt the maternal space by exposing its territorial oneness through female duos that represent the female identity as torn between the desire for the pre-oedipal space of wholeness and the need to separate from the diffusive process of identifying with the mother and her surrogates. Such territorial relationships mirror America’s (post)colonial history and its frontier mythographies wherein the metaphor of the oppressive mother stands for the old world’s dominance over the New. The abjection of the (monstrous) mother figure constitutes an important aspect of America’s frontier myth. From the early writings by Thomas Paine to James Fenimore Cooper’s historical romances or Washington Irving’s famed “Rip Van Winkle” who escapes to the woods to avoid his wife’s “petticoat government,”

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representations of abjected mothers pervade early American literature. As Shirley Samuels emphasizes, mothers are frequently eliminated as regressive and backward forces hindering the characters’ freedom. But their elimination also signals America’s desire for its own national identity (Samuels 7). The worlds of “domestic and national housekeeping” are thus conjoined in the familial metaphor of the body politic (8). Bowles’s stories, “Camp Cataract” in particular, exemplify this conjunction. As an attempt to abandon the female space, “Camp Cataract,” but also Two Serious Ladies and other stories, align themselves with an oppressive site of female fusion, an act that replicates the conflict between the mother-daughter symbiosis and separation. In Reproduction of Mothering, Nancy Chodorow ­describes this relationship as a site of confusion where the female subject’s battle for subjectivity is fought out as an imaginary duel between the desire for “dual unity” with the mother and the “fear of [such] fusion” (61, 79).4 Bowles depicts this conflict through Harriet’s desire to separate from her sisters, ­especially from Sadie whose dependence on Harriet exposes the opposite pole of the ­dyadic conflict, the desire for fusion. While Braidotti’s conceptualization of feminist nomadism as “half prophecy” and “half utopia” returns us to the dyadic space of in-betweenness wherein the conflict of feminine fusion and separateness is celebrated as a liberating absolution from patriarchy (Braidotti 189), Bowles’s “Camp Cataract” deploys the female utopia as a site of oppressive territoriality where merging with the other is also an act of appropriation and cultural erasure. Bowles exposes the possessive and destructive aspects of such a female dream world through ­Harriet’s identification with nomads and Sadie’s desire for a dyadic fusion with Harriet, but also through Harriet’s attempt to merge with her surroundings as opposed to human beings. Both sisters thus represent a different aspect of the same. But, first, it might be useful to explore how Harriet’s campy nomadism reflects, if not plays into Sadie’s sisterly utopia. Despite her desire to extricate herself from her confining family, Harriet refuses to “make an unseemly dash for freedom” (Bowles, My Sister’s 362) because she does not approve of “an ­unmarried woman setting out on her own” or any other such abrupt transgressions (363). Instead, she annually resides at Camp Cataract which serves as a figurative training ground for her further displacement. Protected by the illusory paradise of Camp Cataract and its “respectable clientele” (363), Harriet feels free to engage in exhilarating pilgrimages into the camp’s surroundings that allow her to dream about her potential exile from her family. From within 4 Cf. Allen’s discussion of Two Serious Ladies (19–36).

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the camp’s protective grounds, she sets out to explore the wilderness and goes on little canoe trips to Pocahontas Falls during which she “can fancy [herself] a red-skin all the way to the Falls and back” (386). As a fantasy site where any quest is possible, Camp Cataract enables Harriet to transform into Braidotti’s “figurative nomad” (35), but it also allows her to escape, albeit temporarily, her whiteness and “pass” for a native. However, such “passing,” as Ahmed cautions, is implicated in assuming the role of a (racialized) other whose identity is “reduced to a fetish, by rendering it an object that can be known, seen and approximated” (Strange Encounters 130). In her study of early American history and its representations of romance and/as violence, Samuels draws attention to the ways in which early American literature gendered national identity as feminine. Furthermore, America was frequently deployed as an “Indian woman” fighting “her Caucasian mother Britain…as a woman threatening or threatened with violence” (Samuels 9). In Samuel’s terms: “By figuring a national conflict through the bodies of these women, a double substitution is enacted where not only a woman’s body, but a body of a native American, twice disenfranchised…, manages the stressful business of national violence” (9). Extending the metaphor of romance as violence through the disenfranchisement of women and people of colour to twentieth-century America, Bowles indicts nomadism for being a means of “legitimat[ing] the national fantasy of multiculturalism” (Ahmed, Strange Encounters 132). Consequently, what this fantasy legitimates is “an ability (or a technique) to become without becoming,” as Ahmed puts it (132). Bowles’s “Camp Cataract” interrogates such forms of becoming. By juxtaposing H ­ arriet’s “native” mimicry with Sadie’s domestic desires, Bowles revises the frontier conflict as a site of racial (and racist) anxieties where the fantasy of becoming free is aligned with a figurative “reconstitution of the other through the h ­ egemonic self” that solidifies it (Ahmed, Strange Encounters 132). Harriet’s pioneering endeavour to forge her own path towards freedom by preparing her ultimate exile from her family within the safety of Camp Cataract exemplifies this legitimation of passing as a means of authenticating multiculturalism by assimilating difference within its body politic. While it certainly contrasts with the sedentary monotony of her home life, her pioneer sensibility uncannily replicates the confinement of her sisters’ home she is so desperate to escape. Like the sisterhood that characterizes Harriet’s life at home with her sisters, especially Sadie who “cooks and cleans all day” and “takes her life as seriously as she would a religion” (Bowles, My Sister’s 362), Camp Cataract evokes a cozy atmosphere where “[t]he steadies get into birdsof-a-feather-flock-together arrangements” (377). But it also, almost religiously, re-enforces the habit of finding freedom within the safely, not to mention

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artificially and racially, defined parameters. It is in this sense that the camp also represents a cataract that clouds Harriet’s vision with the illusion of escape. The surrounding wilderness is, after all, “groomed” and provides a safe playground upon which “the steadies” like herself can project their pioneer desire for new ­territories and freedom from social constraints (377). In juxtaposition with Harriet’s annual retreat to Camp Cataract is her sister Sadie’s lifetime escape into the folds of domesticity. In the story, Sadie represents another dimension of “national housekeeping” (Samuels 9). Looking after her family, she takes on the role of a “woman who will hold the republic together” (Samuels 9). On the surface, Sadie appears to be the exact opposite of Harriet’s free-spirited character; she insists on acting out the role of her parents by assuming responsibility for her sister Evelyn, Evelyn’s husband, and her unstable sister, Harriet. But just as Harriet’s trips to the wilderness involve pretence and make-believe, Sadie’s domesticity is a pretend game to keep her family together, and especially to remain close to her sister, Harriet, to whom she has been attached since early childhood. Duping her family with her domestic fervor, Sadie however knows deep down inside that “beyond wearing an apron and simulating the airs of other housewives, … [she] yearned to live in the grown-up world that her parents had established for them when they were children, but in spite of the fact that she wanted to live in that world with Harriet, and because of Harriet, she didn’t understand it properly” (Bowles, My Sister’s 368). Sadie thus uses cleaning and cooking to cover up her need for a complete merger or a dyadic relationship into which she can escape. This covering up or masking of the racial and gendered conflicts as a frontier separating the characters from their ability to exercise their sense of agency as free human beings ultimately exposes the various valences of exclusion—be they based on gendered or racial(ized). Despite their radically different activities, the sisters, blinded by desire and social conditioning, are propelled to follow distinct paths through which they both attempt to grasp, albeit in different ways, the dream-like quality of their childhood.5 While Sadie plays house, Harriet makes her escapes to Camp ­Cataract. Comparing Camp Cataract to a child’s tree house, Harriet describes it as a place where you escape “when you are a child and plan to run away from home once you’re safely hidden behind the leaves” (362). Protected by the physical distance that her stay at Camp Cataract affords her, she prepares to turn the camp into a pretend habitation from which she will strike out into the world one day: 5 See also Lougy, “World and Art” 165.

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First I will come here for several years… I don’t know yet how many, but long enough to imitate roots…I mean to imitate the natural family roots of childhood…long enough so that I myself will feel…. As I remove myself gradually from within my family circle and establish myself more and more solidly into Camp Cataract, then from here at some later date I can start making my sallies into the outside world most unnoticed. None of it will seem to the onlooker like an ugly impetuous escape. bowles, My Sister’s 362–363

As the passage shows, Harriet believes that as long as she has a detailed itinerary and a carefully constructed projection of herself, she is safe from the potential dangers inherent in displacements that are made on impulse. When her sister Sadie suddenly shows up at Camp Cataract, however, Bowles shows that Harriet’s plan to be a “nomad” is not completely impulseresistant. Preceding Sadie’s sudden arrival is her letter to Harriet, in which she warns her sister against straying too far from the family. Reminding Harriet of her home, she complacently suggests that “[k]nowing that you have an apartment and a loving family must make Camp Cataract quite a different place than it would be if it were all the home and loving you had” (360). Sadie fears abandonment and is willing to do anything to prevent her sister from being swayed by wanderlust. “I am not old-fashioned,” she says, “but I don’t want any of us to turn into nomads” (360). It is her belief that “[y]ou don’t grow rich in spirit by widening your circle but by tending your own” (360). Sadie’s letter to Harriet encodes two radically distinct yet intricately related readings. On the one hand, it exposes Harriet’s pretend nomadism for what it is: an escapist make-believe of a white American woman of relatively high standing who performs her little escapades within the safety of the camp grounds at her sisters’ expense. In other words, having a place to return to, Harriet is safe to engage in her tree house nomadism, go “nomad” during her canoe trips, and have her annual Camp Cataract fits. The letter also exposes Sadie’s own double-standard. Although Sadie writes to warn her sister against turning into a nomad, her letter reveals her repressed desire to be one with Harriet, and implicit in such merging with her sister is to become a nomad like her sister. And yet, throughout her letter, Sadie indicates her fear of nomads. She says: “I fear nomads. I am afraid of them and afraid for them too” (360). In need of justification, she blames her fear of Harriet’s potential nomadic defection on her bad nerves; the phrase “my nerves make me think such things” is repeated twice in her letter (360), which suggests that Sadie secretly admires Harriet’s ability to escape, mainly because Harriet’s displacement mirrors her dream of a world where she and her sister could happily co-exist. Her denial

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thus placates her true desire. Moreover, although Harriet admires nomads and Sadie fears them, both sisters share a romantic vision of a world away from the constraints of civilization. Through the sisters’ desire for a mythical place away from home, Bowles’s story inevitably re-engages with the American frontier myth of restless pioneers searching for an escape from social and political constraints in the wilderness of new, virginal landscapes. Pastoralism and escapism constitute an inevitable part of the American transcendentalist tradition, represented by the works of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Harriet’s “tree house” nomadism in particular echoes Thoreau’s idealized vision of American wilderness, the picaresque aspect of the American Dream, that is, the dream of a restless pioneer justifying his temporary exile from civilization by putting emphasis on the positive aspects of pioneering. Thoreau’s Walden is exemplary of such idealization of the frontier as it highlights “the happiest phases of pioneering” while “the worst phases of pioneering, grinding toil, chronic ­nomadism, sordid lust for acquisition, [are] deliberately banished from his [narrative]” (Hazard 166). As other critics have noted, in the American literary tradition, the myth of the restless pioneer subduing the surrounding wilderness often overlaps with the myth of the American settler tending his little ­garden. As Reginald Dyck contends, in the American literary tradition the frontier myth engenders a conflict between the restless pursuit of new, unused landscapes and the desire to settle (55). Bowles’s literary predecessors like Fennimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau, but also her contemporaries like Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Zora Hurston, and Flannery O’Connor, to name the most obvious, engaged with and in many ways perpetuated the frontier myth through their fiction.6 Although their work shows their empathy for the suffering their characters had to endure while pursuing their dream, they often justify suffering, violence, and madness as a means towards regeneration, freedom, and independence. In his reading of Cather’s My Ántonia, Dyck, for instance, observes that although Cather’s pastoral vision strives for a realistic depiction of the violence and suffering that defines the Shimerda family’s plight, she, like many other American writers, “use[s] various strategies to make violence safe” (58). In “Camp Cataract,” Bowles exposes the violence and hypocrisy that has shaped the American pioneer tradition as she deploys Harriet’s tree-house 6 See Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), Cather’s O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918), Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and O’Connor’s Wise Blood (1949).

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nomadism and Sadie’s tragic end not as a way to freedom or as a form of “reaching out and absolution,” to put it in Dillon’s words (Original Sin 177), but as a way to self-destruction. Depicting their distinct journeys as being caught in different versions of the American frontier myth, Bowles also probes their fascination with and their fear of the nomad other. Through the figure of the dress-up Indian, Bowles exposes the sisters’ different yet equally disturbing dream worlds, and through their individual falls Bowles dismantles the American idealization of pastoral nomadism. When Sadie arrives in Camp Cataract without any prior warning, she is embarking on a journey towards her romanticized version of idyllic pastoralism, a dream world where she and her sister will live forever after. Harriet’s cold welcome, however, absolutely annihilates her dream world. “I feel like I was sitting at my own funeral,” she says to herself when Harriet and her friends scold her for invading her sister’s private world (Bowles, My Sister’s 384). By putting Sadie on trial, Harriet obviously destroys her sister’s dream of primordial wholeness and dismantles the very foundation upon which Sadie’s sense of self is built. Abandoned by her sister, Sadie realizes that “this agony she was suffering was itself a dreaded voyage into the world—the very voyage she had always feared Harriet would make” (396). Sadie’s inner voyage takes place in an imaginary clearing where she tells her sister that she wishes to escape with her “out into the world…just the two of us” (396). In her mind, the clearing episode forces her to encounter the “animal [that was] devouring her” from within (396). In reality, Sadie is waiting to meet her sister by a souvenir booth near the falls. From the spot where she stands, she observes the tourists walking up and down the bridge across the falls, giving money to an “Indian chief in full war regalia…seated at the bridge entrance on a kitchen chair” (391). But she soon discovers that the Indian in his fancy costume is “an Irishman employed by the management” (391). Dressing the part however, he pretends to be the nomad other who ushers tourists into the gates of nomadic wilderness and whenever possible divides his time between the bridge and the souvenir booth. The vision of Camp Cataract is to simulate the idea of wilderness through the figure of the make-believe Indian who symbolizes what Gerald Vizenor in his study of Western stereotyping of Native American Indians, Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence, refers to as “an indian presence” (25). In Vizenor’s terms, “The indian is a simulation, of course, that imitates both many misfortunes and faults, the misfortunes of either noble or demonic savagism, and the faults of civilization, a contradiction of the exotic and mundane” (33). As a simulacrum of a Native Indian, the pretend Indian in Bowles’s story not only mocks what Vizenor depicts as the modernist fascination with the savage as a “simulation of the other” in the form of “an aesthetic

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absence” (47, 86), but also reveals the cruelty that has shaped the American Dream (86). When Sadie notices the simulated Indian’s blue eyes, she feels “ashamed for the Indian this time…She stared intently at his Irish blue eyes, so oddly light in his brick-coloured face. What was it? She was tormented by the sight of an incongruity she couldn’t name” (Bowles, My Sister’s 398). Sadie’s shame stems from her realization that the Western fascination with the savage other is a form of appropriation. In her mind, she imagines forcing the pretend Indian behind the falls so that nobody can see him. She tells him: “We must hurry…I didn’t mean to see you…I’m sorry…I’ve been trying not to look at you for years…for years and years” (395). Mocking the American literary tradition of a displaced hero whose quests for otherness often results in wrangling with an unruly savage whom the hero subdues and later befriends,7 here Bowles uses the image of the pretend Indian to evoke America’s historical unconscious. Through her encounter with the native Indian who is not a true Indian, Sadie is forced to penetrate into the dark interior of her own repressed desires and thus encounter America’s extensive history of racial ostracism. Mirroring the American appropriation of the nomadic “Indians,” Sadie’s act of figuratively “tucking” the pretend Indian behind the falls thus exposes the cultural essentialism of the West that subsumes the nomadic others into its cultural fold and reduces them to “a fugitive object, the uncut cord of colonial dominance” (Vizenor 33). When viewed in this context, the pretend I­ndian serves as a mirror image of Sadie’s domesticated persona, but also exposes the patronizing pose of Harriet’s admiration of nomads. In this sense, ­Harriet’s need to identify with the nomad equals Sadie’s desire to possess Harriet. Through Harriet’s tree house escape and Sadie’s dream world, Bowles shows us the two different fantasies that define the Western and American fascination with idyllic nomadism: the need to merge with the other and the desire to separate, that is, to be distinct from the other. The merging of opposite desires is further reflected in the narrative that shifts from Harriet’s discourse on the defence of her noble nomadism to Sadie’s inner monologue through which the tragic consequences of displacement are disclosed. Moreover, each sister’s individual perspectives are presented as secrets (Bowles, My Sister’s 368, 381), and this gives the narrative a sense of a suspended, dream-like quality, through which Bowles carries out her critique of noble nomadism. Through the sisters’ perverse attempt to masquerade as (an)other as in the case of Harriet’s nomad identification or to become one 7 For an account of the American frontier myth, see Reginald Dyck’s essay in Eric Heyne, ed. Desert, Garden, Margin, Range: Literature on the American Frontier (New York: Twayne, 1992) 55–69.

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with the other as represented by Sadie’s desire for fusion, Bowles exposes the tragic consequences of the cultural appropriation of the nomad that lays at the heart of the American frontier myth and its “national romance of victimry” (Vizenor 86). But it also uncovers the violence driving not only America’s, but also modernity’s “amorous paradox” to otherness.8 In other stories, Bowles constantly rehearses the conflict between the desire for a separate identity and the need to merge with the other (foreign) self in an attempt that resists “the structuring of desire” (Paes de Barros 8), but simultaneously resituates the characters’ positionality. In “Looking for Lane,” for instance, the two positionalities are deployed through another sisterly duo, Dora and Lane Sitwell. Like Sadie from the “Camp Cataract” story, Dora defines herself through her sister. She appropriates the airs of domesticity to sustain her sense of self. Lane, on the other hand, is an emotional nomad who feels no attachments to her sister, or to the house where she lives. Aware of “the falsity of her position in the world” (Bowles, Portable 413), Lane often “pass[es] into darkness” from which she is often rescued by her sister, Dora (413). The log house where Dora and Lane live is located in an anonymous town x—, a town surrounded by “a swampy valley divided in the middle by a dark green river” and “a swift little waterfall” (411). As in “Camp Cataract,” where ­Sadie’s domestic, static lifestyle and Harriet’s need for displacement are ­deployed through the different environments they occupy, the setting of “Looking for Lane” enhances the contrast between Dora’s domesticity and Lane’s dark spells. Like Sadie, Dora positions herself as her sister’s domestic centre; she herself becomes the sturdy log house that protects her constantly decentred sister from her nomad escapes into “darkness” (413). And yet, Dora, too, harbours a secret fondness for Lane’s pathological nomadism. As a child, fearful of her sister’s unexpected bouts of rage but at the same time attracted to Lane’s free spirit, Dora invents a game called “Looking for Lane”: “It was the usual hide-and-seek game that children play but it gave Dora a much keener pleasure than any ordinary game” (413). In other words, “Looking for Lane” becomes a disguised search for the self through which Dora identifies with her nomad sister to the point of usurping her sister’s identity through a simulation of becoming-Lane. The point of the game is to delay the final outcome—Dora’s confrontation with her lack of self—by allowing Dora to fantasize “that she would find Lane’s body dismembered on the railroad tracks” instead (415). But as in “Camp Cataract,” in “Looking for Lane,” such sisterly merging not only dismantles the subject, but also consumes it, further evoking the kind of consumerism that underpins their nomadic subjectivity—where 8 See Buci-Glucksmann 133. See also Chapter 7.

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the nomadic subject consumes the other in the quest of looking for her other “self” by passing for the other. The plot line echoes Barnes’s 1917 story, “The Earth,” where two sisters, Una and Lena, engage in an analogous hide-andseek game whereby Lena outsmarts her aggressive sister by embracing her “nature.” Like Barnes, Bowles suggests that mere code-switching—nomadism versus domesticity, nature versus culture, or inclusion versus exclusion—do not ­necessarily subvert hegemonic positions, but frequently re-enforce them. A similar theme underpins Bowles’s 1960s story, “Going to Massachusetts” (1966), which was intended to be part of a larger work, a novel of the same title; however, Bowles’s own ambivalence towards publishing unfinished pieces (or pieces that she deemed “unfit” for publishing) prevented her from developing the piece into a full-fledged novel. As Paul Bowles says in his preface to her c­ ollected works, published posthumously under the title Everything Is Nice (1989), “[a]mbivalence was her natural element; to be obliged to make a ­decision filled her with anguish. The possibilities for a sudden volte-face had to be kept open” (12). Such ambivalence pervades the story “Going to Massachusetts.” The interesting female three-some, Janet, Bozoe, and Sis McEvoy, rely on the possibility of a “sudden volte-face” in order to protect themselves from “people” (Bowles, My Sister’s 452). Janet defines herself through her garage work. Hard work is “like God to [her]” (453). In other words, her work is sacred because it provides her with an escape from humanity. As she says, she couldn’t care less about people: “I never dabbled in people. They were never my specialty” (454). Similarly, Sis McEvoy can’t stand “long-standing relationships” because “[t]hey disagree with [her]” (455). As she puts it, “I get the blues I don’t want anyone staying in my life for a long time. It gives me the creeps” (455). Bozoe, on the other hand, is desperate to “carry out [her] scheme” of “­going to Massachusetts” alone (457). Similar to Janet, Bozoe deploys her nomadic scheme as an escape from humanity rather than an attempt to seek communal bonding with other women. If hard work is like God to Janet, the need to go away and be alone equals salvation for Bozoe. But while the characters in this story speak of “God,” their idea of the divine has nothing to do with spirituality. Rather it has to do with a kind of vendetta on society and its social expectations that curtail free will but also confuse the characters, forcing them to question their life’s trajectories. Seeking a complete isolation from humankind through travel and a commitment to work understood through the framework of art and religion are gestures associated with modernist anti-humanist agenda. Impersonality is the engine of the characters’ nomadic politics, so is the need to part with the subject’s corporeality, hence, the invocation of the divine as the ultimate realm of abstraction and transcendence. Bozoe echoes this sensibility in her letter to Janet where she justifies her need to go to Massachusetts, but also explains why she abandons

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her plans half way through her journey: “I have never admired being human, I must say” (45). She rejects humanity on the grounds of its (in)human n ­ ature. Here, Bowles not only exemplifies the modernist emphasis on art being the ultimate “extinction of the [artist’s] personality” (42), as T.S. Eliot writes in his “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” but she also echoes the Cold War politics of 1950s and 1960s America. The 1960s patriotism directly competed with the rising civil rights movements in and outside America, creating an atmosphere of angst and nuclear threat. As Eric Hobsbawm emphasizes, it was a time of political ambivalence from “the gesture politics” of J.F. Kennedy to ­Nikita Khrushchev’s “taste for bluff” to the Cuban revolution in Latin America and the demoralizing war in Vietnam (1965–75) made for a “divided nation” at best (Hobsbawm 243). Paranoia, hysteria, and ambivalence became important side-effects of the Cold War sensibility (Hobsbawm 245). Ambivalence and indecision drive the psychology of Bowles’s characters and yet they are bent on escaping somehow, somewhere. And restlessness is the price they pay for this “dilemma on earth” as Bozoe suggests (Bowles, My Sister’s 458). In fact, there is no other solution but accepting the dilemmas that restlessness provokes. In her letter, Bozoe tries to explain this point to Janet: “Naturally, the psychiatrists would at once declare that I was laboring under a compulsion” (458). But she objects. The aim of her scheme is to transcend human foibles, not to succumb to them. She warns Janet of “sink[ing] into the mire of contentment and happy ambitious enterprise” (458). This enterprise consists of pursuing normative happiness, Bozoe warns her, be it through relationships or “social or financial security” (458). It is better, Bozoe implies, to “find no rest” than to take comfort in “the mire of contentment” (458). She implores Janet: “I can find no rest, and I don’t think you should either” (458). While suffering is an inevitable punishment for the nomad who travels idly and without a purpose, taking the more difficult and unconventional path seems to be the only possible “scheme.” If the characters are to thwart conventionalism, they must be willing to go outside their comfort zone by embracing the very dilemmas of nomadism and its (in)humanist vendetta on conformity and normative contentment, but also to acknowledge its racial and gendered topographies and their affective politics. Not surprisingly, their schemes frequently, if not tragically, lead them back to the very conventions from which they were so desperate to escape in the first place.

Jane Bowles’s “Middle” East and Boutique Multiculturalism

The identification with the nomad is further re-drawn and problematized in Bowles’s Tangier stories, “The Iron Table” (1950) and “Everything Is Nice”

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(originally published in Mademoiselle as a non-fiction essay titled East Side: North Africa in 1951). Both stories grapple with the power asymmetries produced by nomadic politics. But they also expose the challenges of female bonding on the frontier by exploring (post)colonial hybridity as mired in a diasporic consciousness that Regina Lee aligns with what she calls “boutique multiculturalism,” a consciousness that plays up the otherness or exoticism of the diaspora by “re-enacting for the dominant community their ethnicity” (55). However, Bowles problematizes western fetishization of the other by exposing the ways in which both western and non-western cultures participate in the performance of their so-called otherness. But she also shows how this performance redefines their positionality, as well as recalibrates the centre-margin binary by which they are frequently defined. In her Tangier stories, she not only debunks the expatriate mythographies of pastoral nomadism, but she also exposes the asymmetrical dynamics of (post) colonial hybridity as caught up in situational mistranslations and misreadings. But as Bowles emphasizes, there are no easy solutions, no easy ways out. While the cross-cultural encounter can help recalibrate power asymmetries, it remains caught up in misreadings that are both cultural and situational. Edward Said speaks to this ambiguity in his work on western media coverage of Arab cultures and Islam. In Covering Islam, he describes the western fetishization of the Middle East as an attempt to come to terms with that with “which the West is radically at odds” through celebratory discourses of cultural bonding and transnational networks (Said 164). In his words, “it is precisely this conscious willed effort of overcoming distances and cultural barriers that makes knowledge of other societies and cultures possible—and at the same time limits that knowledge” (164). Acknowledging the blindspots, Trinh T. Minh-ha takes Said’s notion further by emphasizing that such limitations and imperfections can also reveal and speak to “the problem of the impossibility of packaging a culture, or of defining an authentic cultural identity” (22). Bowles’s Tangier stories share this sentiment by mocking the very possibility of cultural authenticity in an era of postcolonial hybridity. Her stories not only react to Tangier’s shift from being a colony to being an independent state,9 but also speak to its cultural diversity, diasporic tensions, and rising pan-Arab nationalism that are not that dissimilar from the multicultural tensions and nativist sensibilities pervading 1940s and 1950s America. Furthermore, her relationship to Tangier was fraught with ambiguity. Unlike her husband, who settled in Tangier in 1947, Bowles enjoyed moving back and 9 While on March 2, 1956, Morocco became an official independent state, the decolonizing process was far from immediate (Walonen 8).

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forth between Tangier, Málaga, and New York. As mentioned previously, she both welcomed and feared the different social structure of Tangier (Bowles, Out in the World 93).10 In one of her letters to Paul (October 1948), she complains about not being able to integrate into the Arab society and instead being viewed as a wealthy “European” (104). She writes: “And somehow I do love Tangier. I might be just horrified to wake up and find myself not in Africa” (105). Mentioning her “‘silly’ life with the market group”—a group of women including Tetum, Zodelia, and Cherifa (133), Bowles further elaborates on her precarious position as a white western woman in Tangier whose race and economic standing further affirms her privilege. She writes: “I don’t mind being liked for my money one bit. Being the richest woman in the world has certain disadvantages but I accept them” (132). Realizing her complicity in the transcultural paradigm of racial, gender, but also class, inclusion and exclusion, Bowles, unlike her husband, acknowledges that the American expatriates are “more spoiled than ever, ranting against civilization” in the medinas and bars of Tangier, far away from home (87). In her stubborn refusal to see Tangier or any other place as a way to escape “civilization” or the West, Bowles’s stories parody the tendency to tokenize or fetishize (post)colonial hybridity as a subversive solution. Rejecting the ­fantasy of subversion, Bowles exposes the various permutations of nomadic ­politics as caught up in ideological or mythical schemes that delineate the kind of ­nostalgia and “longing” for what Bowles refers to in one of her letters as “­being on the edge of something,”11 a space where fantasy and reality intersect, but do not necessarily meet. Much has been said about Bowles’s ambiguous travels in and out of Tangier in the 1940s (Dillon; Maier; Walonen).12 As Dillon notes in her biography of Bowles, Jane enjoyed Tangier. She was taken by the Arab world and the 10 11 12

See Chapter 7, ft. 13. See Jane Bowles’s letter to Paul Bowles (July/August 1948) in Out in the World: Selected Letters of Jane Bowles, ed. Millicent Dillon (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1985) 84–88. While Paul Bowles settled permanently in Tangier in 1947, Jane joined him in 1948. At the time, she stayed in the Hotel Farhar (see Walonen 17–18; see also Dillon, Part 2, 153–283). In 1959, she moved in to Paul Bowles’s apartment in the outskirts of the European Quarter, in the Inmueble Itesa (Walonen 18). But, unlike her husband, she continued to travel in and out of Tangier until her health deteriorated to the point of several hospitalization that culminated in her 1967 institutionalization in a psychiatric hospital in Málaga, Spain. For more details, see Millicent Dillon, A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles (Berkeley: U of California P, 1981). See also Michael K. Walonen, Writing Tangier in the Postcolonial Transition: Space and Power in Expatriate and North African Literature (­Surrey: Ashgate, 2011).

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­ omen there. But unlike her husband and other male expatriates in Tangier, w she refused to glamorize Tangier as an exotic, idyllic space of cultural emancipation. She voices this ambivalence in her letter to Paul Bowles (July/August 1948) where she concedes her fascination with Tangier as “being on the edge of something” (Bowles, Out in the World 85), but also emphasizes that her fascination is influenced by her own romantic interests, not to mention western privilege. She writes: “I continue loving Tangier—maybe because I have the feeling of being on the edge of something that I will some day enter…. [And yet], it is hard for me to separate the place from the romantic possibilities that I have found in it” (85). Here, Bowles exposes the western expatriates’ view of Tangier as an exotic place of “quasi-mythic dimensions…conjuring notions of excess, surfeit, and behavior not seen or permitted elsewhere” (Walonen 8). As Michael K. Walonen emphasizes, Paul Bowles, who settled in Tangier in 1947, greatly contributed to the fetishization of Tangier as a contact zone that provided the privileged Westerner with both economic and sexual liberties not available in the u.s. (10), as did Oliver Smith and Truman Capote. Morocco’s cultural diversity in particular—its Arab, French, and Spanish Diasporas— served as a welcome counterpoint to the nativist politics of containment of Cold War America. As Michelle Green explains in her study of the Bohemian expatriation in Tangier, “to the expatriates who landed there after World War ii, the International Zone of Tangier was an enigmatic, exotic and deliciously depraved version of Eden” (xi). But, unlike Paul, Jane remained suspicious of the fetishizing rhetoric of the anti-Western paradise. Her story, “The Iron Table,” is emblematic of her refusal to idealize nomadic sensibility and its rather dubious, (post)colonial schemes. Set in Morocco, the story explores the American expatriate myth of nomadism as a way out of Western society through the dialogue of a married couple who sits at an “old iron table” (Bowles, My Sister’s 465). The iron table marks the symbolic frontier between their radically opposite views of exile.13 While the wife represents the settler-part of the frontier myth, her husband is a born pioneer. The wife dismisses her husband’s desire to escape western civilization and despises his incessant “complaining about the West’s contamination of Moslem culture” (465). Unlike his wife, who doesn’t believe in some ideal place that can be found outside the limits of civilization, the husband constantly searches for 13

As discussed in Chapter 2, Barnes’s story, “A Duel without Seconds” (1929) uses the image of a mahagony table to represent the American quest for some pristine frontier idyll. In Barnes’s story, the contrast between civilization and nature is related to the characters’ nostalgia for the past and “the days that were no longer” (Barnes, Collected Stories 412). Cf. Chapter 2, ft. 6.

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“places where the culture has remained untouched” (466). And yet, although he complains about Western civilization, his belief in places “untouched” by civilization reveals his sense of cultural superiority that reduces other cultures to exotic sites of transgression and desire where “you wouldn’t have to face all this” (466). When his wife suggests that she is happy to go with him should it please him, he corrects her: “You’d go to an oasis because you wanted to escape from Western civilization” (467). Dismissing her husband’s escapism as a naïve posture, she retorts: “My friends and I don’t feel there’s any way of escaping [civilization]” (467). Through the wife’s character, Bowles confirms her scepticism of American nomadism by exposing it as an illusion, perpetuated by the very foundation of the American Dream in which an escape into and an appropriation of deserted wilderness play an important part. Aligned with a fantasy for a space between home and exile that confines rather than liberates, nomadic displacement in Bowles’s work fails to accomplish redemption, embodiment, or empowerment. Bowles’s work is particularly attuned to the tragic circumstances that underlie the American, romanticized version of the frontier: the colonization of the Native population, the myths through which American pilgrims justified their violence and cruelty, and the celebration of escapism as a way of coping with the tragedy of displacement. While, historically, American women have often been excluded from the American national guilt and associated rather with the marginal others (Heyne 5), Bowles’s narratives depict female characters as complicit in the fantasy of American pastoral nomadism. Women like Mrs Copperfield, Miss Goering, ­Sadie, or Harriet demonstrate and exercise their superiority over other, weaker subjects whose identities they appropriate through pretend games of being the other. Similarly, while the wife in “The Iron Table” detests her husband’s hypocritical nomadism, she does not reject the possibility of going to the ­desert, of succumbing to the desire to please him. However, what is clear from Bowles’s stories is that, while complicit in the kind of nomadic voyeurism ­depicted in “The Iron Table,” her characters’ struggle derives primarily from their confusion about whether to embrace or reject any kind of normativity. In “Everything Is Nice” (1966), which was first published as an autobiographical reportage titled “East Side: North Africa” in 1951, the character ­Jeanie, an American who befriends a Moroccan woman, Zodelia, exemplifies the challenges of cross-cultural female bonding but also speaks to the American (white) woman’s dilemma about gender expectations, heteronormativity, race, and performance of femininity. The story recounts the cross-cultural ­encounter between Jeanie and Zodelia, focusing specifically on the challenges of ­cross-cultural communication that ensue when Zodelia invites Jeanie

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to her home. What begins as a friendly invitation, however, soon turns into an internal and transcultural conflict for Jeanie who is forced to confront her own (­culturally constructed) assumptions not only as a foreign guest, but also as a privileged American woman in the Middle East. As critics like Maier and Walonen note, the story first and foremost mocks the western gaze whereby the native (racial and racialized) subject is framed and tokenized as foreign. Both Maier and Walonen refer to the opening scene of the story when Zodelia parodies Jeanie’s culture by performing a little skit in which she takes on the role of the “people of the hotel” (Bowles, My Sister’s 314). Through such “simulation of the other,” to quote Vizenor (47), Zodelia exposes what Vizenor calls the “reluctant tourist” (12), that is, the westerner whose travel stories are mere “simulations” and aesthetic fabrications of the cultures she visits. As she steps into the role of the western traveler, Zodelia’s imitation simulates Jeanie’s otherness, but also recalibrates the colonial “scheme” of un-naming and renaming the native. She says to Jeanie: “Your name is Jeanie and you live in a hotel with other Nazarenes. How much does the hotel cost you?” (314). Repeating Jeanie’s name and aligning her subjectivity with money, she turns the westerner’s n ­ omadic venture into a “Comédie Française” (Bowles, My Sister’s 314). The comedy of simulated power reversals continues when Jeanie, answering Zodelia’s question about what she will do, says: “I am going to a Moslem house to visit my Moslem friends, Betsoul and her family. I will sit in a Moslem room and eat Moslem food and sleep on a Moslem bed” (314). Zodelia, however, still playing the role of the “people of the hotel” asks: “Jeanie, Jeanie, when will you come back to us in the hotel and sleep in your own room?” (314). Zodelia’s question brings attention to the home-abroad boundary, but it also inevitably puts Jeanie in her place by suggesting that the hotel is where her home is. Here it might be useful to recall Trinh T. Minh-ha’s essay, “Other Than ­Myself/My Other Self,” in which she suggests that any kind of travel or cultural contact “involve[s] a re-siting of boundaries” (9). Travel narratives in particular stand to re-define the boundary between home and abroad, here and there. In her terms, “[t]hey not only bring the far away within reach, but also contribute… to challenging the home and abroad/dwelling and travelling dichotomy within specific actualities. At best, they speak to the problem of the impossibility of packaging a culture, or of defining an authentic cultural identity” (22). To take this argument further, it could be said that while travel stories reveal the impossibility of representing any culture authentically, they also create an alternative space where interpretations and any such re-siting of boundaries can be productively entertained. Nonetheless, as Bowles’s stories reveal, the

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risk of recalibrated alterity morphing into an aesthetic or aestheticized simulation remains since the very creation of an alternative space, be it in the name of female or cultural bonding, generates its own diasporic conditioning that is informed by racialized (and racist) power asymmetries. Zodelia reveals the dupery of so-called alternative spaces by bringing Jeanie to her home where other Moroccan women sit on mattresses and chat. As a strictly female space, the room can be described as an ideal zone for creating the kind of empowering, feminist networks outlined by Braidotti’s work on the positive aspects of nomadic ethic. However, as Jeanie sits down, all she encounters is the gaze of the women who “are fixated on the ‘visitor’ [Jeanie]” (Bowles, My Sister’s 317). The conversation that ensues between the women and Jeanie is emblematic of the difficulties and challenges of bridging cultural, racial, and gender myopia. Just as the Moroccan women cannot understand why Jeanie sits in Betsoul’s house rather than staying with her mother or her husband, Jeanie misinterprets their hospitality by declining the tea and cakes they offer. By refusing to eat, however, Jeanie inevitably refuses to participate in their culture. But the misunderstanding is bilateral. Similarly, when telling the women about America and critiquing its consumerist culture by mentioning how much she “hates trucks” (318), the women fail to understand Jeanie’s position and instead express their admiration for the trucks she hates. Their cross-cultural exchange speaks to the impossibility of packaging one culture into another culture’s frame of reference and vice versa. All that remains is the Moroccan women’s frequently repeated statement that “everything is nice”— the only, albeit empty, cross-cultural caché produced by the re-siting of their cultural spaces. In spite of venturing into a Moroccan women’s space, Jeanie remains stuck on the frontier, represented in the story by the wall that separates the medina from the hotel. Walking to the hotel, Jeanie comes upon the wall where she originally met Zodelia. As she touches the wall, “a little of the powdery stuff came off” (320). Walonen interprets this moment as Jeanie’s inability to “enter into the space of Moroccan women.” In Walonen’s terms, “she has come into contact with the cultural barriers that prevented her from entering into the space of the Moroccan women and this contact has left a trace upon her” (70). And yet, while Walonen is correct in pointing out the cultural barriers that limit Jeanie’s encounter with the women, it can be argued that the very limitation allows for a “different form of seeing,” as Trinh T. Minh-ha suggests, where the “I-the-Seer am bound to mis-see so as to unlearn the privilege of seeing” (25). In this respect, Jeanie, Zodelia, and the Moroccan women are all forced to face a different kind of frontier, a frontier where sight becomes an oversight,

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but also an imperfect way of seeing differently.14 Both Maier and Walonen concede that Bowles’s story challenges the western versus non-western, colonizer versus ­colonized binary. However, suggesting that Zodelia “dictates the terms” in the story and thus “reverses, at least, in part, the conventional pattern of ­relationships between Westerners and natives in colonial situations” entertains the kind of emancipatory conclusion which Bowles vehemently d­ ismisses (Walonen 75). At the end of the story, Jeanie is forced out of the centre to the margin, and yet, no matter how displaced, Bowles reveals that she cannot quite bond with the women sitting in Zodelia’s house. Nor can she quite bridge the communication and cultural gap that exists between her and Zodelia. Instead, she can only long for the moment when their differences become a point of acceptance rather than remain a form of irreconcilable schism. Like the table in the “Iron Table” story, the wall is the frontier where the American comes across, but does not necessarily re-site or erase her own indelible privilege. Through the ambivalent position of her characters, Bowles’s stories problematize the expatriate fantasy of the nomadic idyll and expose the ways in which this fantasy remains locked in the New World’s utopian mythographies. Bowles depicts the American pastoral nomadism as a fantastic “scheme” that allows the travellers and expatriates the luxury of remaining in-between, uncommitted to dependence or independence, home and exile, the self or the other. Furthermore, by troubling the patronizing quality of American ­women turned nomad, Bowles’s work poses a challenge to Braidotti’s celebration of nomadic consciousness as a means towards women’s emancipation and ­empowerment. In Bowles’s work, nomadism does not figure as a way to women’s empowerment; rather, it is deployed as a romance with consumption that remains unconsummated. Just as Jeanie won’t eat the cakes, the native, to paraphrase Chow, will not remain within the prescribed “frame” (28), thus exposing the racial barriers that separate them.

14

Cf. John Maier, “Jane Bowles and the Semi-Oriental Woman” in which Maier argues that despite the cultural differences Jeannie manages to “establish a rapport with the cultural other” (94).

chapter 9

Theatre of Pastoral Cruelty I dreamed I climbed upon a cliff My sister’s hand in mine.

jane bowles, A Quarreling Pair (418)

…

I thought we’d found a paradise at last—the perfect place—but you don’t want paradise. …You want hell. jane bowles, In the Summer House (213)

…

We’ll leave some of our land wild, with just natural pastures and woods…. jane bowles, At the Jumping Bean (42)

⸪ The nomadic and antiphonal thrust of Bowles’s stories also pervades her plays. Although the critical attention to Bowles’s plays remains marginal, artists like Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Oliver Smith frequently commented on and admired Jane Bowles’s dramatic talent. For example, in 1943, right after the publication of Two Serious Ladies, Oliver Smith nudged Bowles to write plays, even giving her money to write them (Dillon, Original Sin 94). Similarly, Tennessee Williams praised her work for its originality and a deep sense of irony that captures the dramatic complexity of human nature (Bowles, Feminine Wiles 7). And yet, like Barnes, Bowles struggled with the dramatic form, trying her hand first at a one-act puppet play, A Quarreling Pair (1945), and later finishing a two-act play, In the Summer House (1951; 1953), which took her almost ten years to write. In addition to A Quarreling Pair and In the Summer House, Bowles also left behind an unfinished play script titled At the Jumping Bean which she started writing around 1955 when visiting Ceylon. Spanning the 1940s and 1950s, these three plays present an interesting transition from the anti-humanism of modernist drama to the (in)human qualities

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004314436_012

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of realist drama and its emphasis on Lee Strasberg’s “iconography of neurosis” inscribed in Barnes’s 1950s play, The Antiphon, discussed in Part 1 of this book (Counsell 66). This neurotic iconography is reflected in the compulsive behaviour of Bowles’s characters that drives her plays. Their fleetingness embraces and simultaneously rejects the nomadic ethic underpinning the American Dream and its pursuit of happiness via the increasingly consumerist route. Like her stories, all three plays echo Bowles’s preoccupation with frontier ­politics through characters whose nomadic schemes respond to, but also frequently subscribe to the domestic and international policies of containment and normativity that pervaded post-war America. What connects Bowles’s brief yet intriguing puppet play with her 1950s drama, In the Summer House, and its unfinished counterpart, At the Jumping Bean, is the kind of “double optic” characteristic of the 1940s and 1950s drama that combines the modernist themes of alienation and epistemological uncertainty with pragmatic realism and postmodern irony.1 In Elin Diamond’s terms, “the double optic…involve[s] epistemology—what the I/eye sees [or “consumes”] and therefore knows—but it places at least two irreconcilable realities in view” (11). In Bowles’s plays, the epistemological uncertainty not only shatters unilateral perspectives but is also subjected to what Stanton B. Garner refers to as the “clinical gaze” of (post)modernity (Garner 77).2 In other words, the double optic becomes a dramatic means of surveying and pathologizing the characters’ nomadic antics, on the one hand, while simultaneously exposing the irony and irreconcilability of their dreams and realities. Thematically similar to Two Serious Ladies and her short stories, Bowles’s plays explore the failure of the American Dream by examining the characters’ most intimate relationships as an extension of the state ideologies pervading 1940s and 1950s America. On the one hand, Bowles comments on the desperate search for “pristine Arcadias” outside America’s geophysical boundaries (as exemplified, for instance, in the Beats’ expatriation to Central and Southern America, or as manifested in America’s economic colonization of Mexico) (Pells 23). On the other hand, Bowles also speaks to the 1950s attempt to curb the nomadic enthusiasm at home by cultivating the doctrine of domestic bliss and re-enforcing (hetero) normativity as a model of “good citizenship” through the persistent gendering and pathological confinement of the body (Ahmed, The Cultural 136). .

1 See Elin Diamond’s “Modern Drama/Modernity’s Drama” for her succinct, yet astute introduction to Modern Drama: Defining the Field, ed. Ric Knowles, Joanne Tompkins, and W.B. Worthen (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2003) 3–14. 2 See Stanton B. Garner, Jr. in Knowles et al., Modern Drama 67–79.

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This pathology is particularly exemplified in the ways in which the characters’ Arcadian “dreamtime” fails to lead to some blissful idyll of love and transcendence. Instead, their dreamtime frequently degrades into proprietary politics where one is consumed by the other, and vice versa, in the very name of love. As Sara Ahmed writes in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, identification with the other not only pervades intimate relationships, but also underpins state ideologies. Viewed in this light, the narrative of love is manifested as “being-for-others” or “being-for-the nation” where “emotions create the very effect of an inside and an outside” (Ahmed, The Cultural 10). State ideologies frequently deploy the cultural significance of love as a “sign of respectable femininity” and hence good citizenship (123). As Ahmed writes, “love relationships are about ‘reproducing’…[the national ideal]” through racial and gendered prejudices that re-enforce normativity as “a sign of the love for the nation” (124). As in most of Bowles’s work, the characters in her plays are similarly confronted with the cultural significance of love as they struggle with what it means to be intimate, what it means to love, but also what love means in different spaces—specifically, in private and public spaces. Mobilized by their desire for intimate bonds, Bowles’s characters, in their ­desperate quest to love (an)other, often end up confusing love with ­consumption. In A Quarreling Pair, Harriet wants her sister to identify with her neatness, to become like her. Similarly, In the Summer House, Bowles explores three different sets of mother-daughter relationships in order to expose their proprietary politics. In their exploration of family and/as state politics, Bowles’s plays echo some of Barnes’s antiphonal themes. By dramatizing the characters’ desperate need to identify with the other as a form of appropriation, the other is fetishized or otherwise monopolized. Referring to these ­intimate relationships between sisters, friends, or mothers and daughters, this chapter argues that Bowles’s plays relate the often colonial and colonizing dynamics of the characters’ love politics to larger political events that plagued postwar America. If Barnes’s concern is with aesthetics, Bowles’s plays explore the politics of nomadic sensibility while simultaneously exposing its oppressive agendas. Her plays reveal the oppressive politics of containment through characters whose contrapuntal mannerisms expose the racial and gendered anxieties pervading the postwar neoconservative agenda, mainly its emphasis on America as what Caputi calls “the New Garden of Eden located outside of chronological time, a nation of pioneers on a spiritual journey unlike that traveled by Europe” (6). Bowles’s “pioneers” are primarily women whose spiritual journeys or, to use Rosi Braidotti’s words, “dreamtime,” not only reflects their nomadic subjectivity (189), but also discloses the rather consumerist and proprietary thrust of

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their love relations and attachments. In her plays, Bowles in particular exposes the neoconservative appropriation of femininity as a space of normative domesticity that is frequently more stifling than empowering. Critiquing the ways in which the neoconservative ideology of 1950s America infiltrates personal relationships, Bowles also points to its racist underpinnings, specifically by uncovering the colonial heritage of what Caputi refers to as “the mythical substrate of America” (3). These socio-cultural anxieties of the 1950s are specifically exemplified in her two-act play, In the Summer House where the main character, Gertrude Eastman Cuevas oscillates between her desire to love and her need to appropriate. After her Spanish husband dies, she decides to marry Mr Solarez for “business” reasons rather than love. Gertrude’s “marriages” can be viewed as a figurative extension of America’s historical ties to Spain, not to mention its economic interests in Mexico. Gertrude loathes Mr Solarez’s “joie de vivre,” his big family dinners, and what she calls his “uncivilized” behavior (Bowles, My Sister’s 279). In its emphasis on the politics of love as another form of American consumerism, the play reveals the ways in which state ideologies frequently connect motherhood and mothering with the cultural significance of love as a metaphor for national belonging. Therefore, Sara Ahmed’s theorization of the complex relationship between the narrative of love and state ideologies, particularly her emphasis on how “emotions are bound up with the securing of social hierarchy” will be useful in exploring the oppressive and frequently colonizing dynamics of Bowles’s plays (Ahmed, The Cultural 4). According to Ahmed, “[t]his positioning of the national ideal requires the projection of sameness onto others” (The Cultural 139). This so-called ideal however suggests that others become like “us.” While the very dream of a pastoral idyll relies on the promise of collective merging, such a symbiosis is far from idyllic as, in the name of love, it eliminates rather than celebrates difference by “project[ing] … sameness onto others” and transforming “sameness into perversion and pathology” (Ahmed, The Cultural 139). Numerous studies show that 1940s and 1950s America was famous for its renunciation of excess in the name of contained domestic and foreign policies, denouncing anything outside the “norm” as perverse or pathological.3 In her plays, Bowles, however, challenges the hypocrisy of such domestic and foreign policies by queering the characters’ “dreamtime” and their intricate nomadic schemes, thus rejecting both heteronormativity and cultural fetishism. But in her emphasis on “divided” domestic spaces, Bowles also exposes the perversity 3 See Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes, Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, or Mary Caputi’s A Kinder, Gentler America: Melancholia and the Mythical 1950s.

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of the American pursuit of consumer happiness as a hunger for dominance and as a kind of figurative cannibalism. Not surprisingly, food figures prominently in all three plays. It becomes a means of bonding, but also a vehicle of ideological or commodity bondage. Consequently, most of the plays take place in the liminal space of the frontier where those who eat run the risk of being eaten.

Crossing the Frontier: A Quarreling Pair

In A Quarreling Pair, written shortly after the publication of Two Serious L­ adies and staged in 1945, Bowles dismantles the perverse pathologies of 1940s ­America, specifically their return to the ideology of domesticity and consumerist bliss by queering the domestic space, but also by exposing the myopia of neoconservative nostalgia and its dream of America’s idyllic, yet simpler revival.4 A puppet play, A Quarreling Pair queers social norms and expectations of femininity through two sisters, Harriet and Rhoda, who couldn’t be more different. While Harriet likes to fit the “mold” (Bowles, My Sister’s 418), Rhoda wishes to strike out into the world even though she is “disgusted with it” (415). Harriet likes to follow the rules. Rhoda, on the other hand, feels suffocated by society and its rules. Through a quick yet sharp repartee between the two sisters, Bowles returns to her favourite theme of intellectual sparring that once again tackles the issue of the domestic idyll gone wrong. Like many of Bowles’s characters, the two sister puppets represent the various polarities and power asymmetries generated by socio-cultural conditioning and gender expectations. Their ten-minute tête-à-tête centres bathetically on the topic of milk, specifically whether they are going to drink milk in Harriet’s part of the room or Rhoda’s. In its brevity and quick turns of phrase, the play resembles a simple ditty, a nursery rhyme in which the sisters’ differences are re-enacted through their daily ritual: that is, drinking milk. The act itself becomes symbolic of their wish to bridge their differences, but also their desire to nurture and be nurtured. Drinking milk serves as a frontier or a “dividing line” that both connects and separates them from each other, their respective spaces, and their repressed desire to consummate their relationship (416). Exploring the undercurrent, intimate tensions of their dyadic conflict, the play ends with no resolution: the sisters’ differences are

4 As Mary Caputi emphasizes, the neoconservative thrust of the 1950s relied on the rhetoric of nostalgia that “would be the road home to a safety and innocence,” “an Eden” of sorts (2).

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not reconciled, but suspended in an uncanny hiatus, the only bridge between them is the milk they agree to drink together. As a puppet play, A Quarreling Pair queers the limits of corporeal theatre by deploying humans as social puppets objectified and manipulated by society. While Barnes’s The Antiphon incorporates the puppet theatre to mirror the emotional detachment of the Hobbs’ family, specifically Augusta’s lack of empathy towards her daughter, Bowles’s puppet theatre is embodied. Whereas Barnes’s The Antiphon sustains the separation between the puppets and the humans, Bowles’s puppet play blurs the difference between the two, thus doing away with the liminal space that separates the puppets from their human counterparts. The play was first performed at Spivy’s Roof in New York, an avant-garde night club that provided a perfect ambiance for this experimental piece. As Regina Weinreich notes, Paul Bowles supplied the music and Surrealist Kurt Seligmann designed the puppets (78).5 The production was a combination of primitive rituals and surrealist drama. In its emphasis on the “civilized” Harriet and raw, untamed Rhoda, the play certainly offered an interesting revision of surrealist drama. According to Weinreich, the Spivy production of the play in particular had a “great surreal effect” (77). Dillon similarly applauds the surrealist bend of the play in her biography of Jane Bowles while simultaneously acknowledging that Bowles was suspicious of the surrealist agenda, specifically their anti-civilization rants, emphasis on nature, and noble savage mentality (Dillon, Original Sin 93). Viewed in this light, the play could be seen as a mock critique of surrealist drama rather than its endorsement.6 The minimalist staging and the perverse conversion of the unconscious into a site of uptight domesticity, enhanced by the claustrophobia of the small room to which the two sister puppets were confined, ridiculed the surrealist preoccupation with the wild, untamed spaces far away from civilization. As Louise Tythacott emphasizes, surrealists idolized the wilderness as an important counterpoint to the cityscape which they found oppressive.7 However, as in her novel, Two Serious Ladies, or her stories like “Going to Massachusetts,” “Camp Cataract,” or “The Iron Table,” the puppet play resuscitates the surrealist banter against civilization by having a good laugh at its platitudes. Not only are the two sisters confined to a single room, 5 See Jennie Skerl, ed. A Tawdry Place of Salvation: The Art of Jane Bowles, 78. 6 While both Dillon and Weinreich suggest that A Quarreling Pair is a unique piece of surrealist drama and Bowles’s attempt at “her new experimentation with dramatic form” (78), this chapter argues that the play challenges such assumptions by mocking rather than endorsing or even borrowing from the surrealists. 7 See Louise Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic (New York: Routledge, 2003).

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but their repressed desire is perhaps as close as the audience gets to any sense of wilderness or to mining their unconscious. The Spivy production enhanced the play’s parodic effect by having one of the puppets sport a “skyscraper wig” that could “rock back and forth” (­ Weinreich 78). While Weinreich and Dillon interpret this gesture as a testament to Bowles’s artistic flirtation with surrealist ideas, the play’s major thrust parodies rather than panders to the surrealist agenda which Bowles openly loathed. In its more recent restaging by Aphids Arts Company in La MaMa E ­ xperimental Theatre Club in New York (October 29–November 8, 2009), d­ irector Margaret Cameron has not only retained the experimental feel of this unique piece, but also enhanced its parodic quality by juxtaposing human a­ ctors with miniature puppets who are not political but rather bathetic. In their revisionist treatment of surrealist drama, both productions highlight the ways in which puppets draw attention to the complexity (and woodenness) of human relationships by transforming humanity and its foibles into what Cynthia Troup calls the “theatre of the impossible.”8 This “theatre of the impossible” is particularly evident in the textual aspect of the play that is self-consciously anti-textual and antiphonal. The play unfolds as an intimate conversation between Harriet and Rhoda, two sisters who sit on “the dividing line” that separates their room into two separate spaces (Bowles, My Sister’s 414). While Harriet enjoys the domestic world, Rhoda suffers from a sense of existential homelessness because, as she explains, “[her] heart’s too big to make a home… [and] because the world and its sufferers are always on [her] mind” (415). Harriet mocks and dismisses Rhoda’s suffering as mere indulgence caused by her inability to separate herself from the world’s sufferers. And yet, even though she criticizes Rhoda’s continual merging with others, she wishes to “[climb] upon a cliff, [m]y sister’s hand in mine” (418). In its delicate antiphony, the play uncovers an interesting paradox. Although the sisters yearn for each other’s love, their love constitutes the insurmountable barrier that separates them. In the Lacanian sense, their l’amour (love) here is also le mur (a wall) (Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality 4, 4n15).9 Their desire is for 8 See Diana Caporoso’s interview with Cynthia Troup, “Not Your Average Punch and Judy: Aphids’ ‘A Quarelling Pair,’ a Triptych of Miniature Puppet Plays” (2009), accessible online at http://www.nytheatre-wire.com/gc09104t.htm. 9 For more see Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, (New York: Norton, 1981). Also see Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay, “Shattered Love” in The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991) 84–109. In this essay, Nancy evokes Lacan when he emphasizes that love “happens,” as it were, always in the process of being in transit towards/ from the other (97).

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that which the other sister represents. Yet unable to grasp that representation, they are walled into their outlined space like puppets in a doll house. Linking oppressive family dynamics to a puppet theatre, the play has a lot in common with Djuna Barnes’s The Antiphon, written in the late 1950s (see Chapter 6). However, unlike the tragic ending of The Antiphon where both opponents die—as the mother and daughter kill each other with a bell, Bowles’s A Quarreling Pair offers no hope of catharsis or family psycho-drama. The sisters’ resilient antiphony is like spilt milk—it causes no harm, only a ­temporary annoyance. And yet, like Barnes’s 1950s play, The Antiphon, Bowles’s ­puppet play takes serious punches at the oppressive ideology of domesticity of 1950s America and its dismissive attitude to women artists in particular. While ­Rhoda’s unbridled love for the people is a sore point for the tame and domestic Harriet, who is “behaving the way [she] was molded to behave” and w ­ ishes to do nothing else but “thin[k] about milk” (Bowles, My Sister’s 418), their ­mundane preoccupation with milk is a charge against social expectations of repressed femininity. Through such parody of social role-playing, A Quarreling Pair strives to provide an alternative interpretation of intimacy, but also, by extension, of love politics that is ambiguous and undefined rather than normative. Pervading Bowles’s work is her ambivalence about any kind of normative “mold” (418). Not surprisingly, like most of her characters, the sisters also represent the frontier between normativity and transgression. Harriet claims to “be appreciative of the mold [she] was cast in” (418), while Rhoda is “disgusted” with it (415). Though critics like Dillon and Weinreich read the puppet play through the lens of Bowles’s biography—mainly Bowles’s intimate relationship with Helvetia Perkins,10 such readings tend to obscure the socio-cultural context of the play. Rather, the sisters’ domestic space, riven into two separate spaces, evokes the “double optic” that presents two different viewpoints and realities ­(Diamond, “Modern Drama” 11). The sisters’ contrapuntal views then serve as a socio-cultural critique of the American quest for happiness in the realm of consumer domesticity. This critique is exemplified in Bowles’s representation of women’s dreamtime communality as a claustrophobic space rather than as a site of “open potentiality” (Braidotti 189). Bowles not only dismisses the kind of “essentialism with a difference” that Braidotti aligns with nomadic ­feminist subjects and their alternative sisterhoods (186), but also mocks the pastoral dream of what Rhoda imagines as a kind of “fleeing toward the woods” (Bowles, My Sister’s 417).11 Neither Harriet nor Rhoda can quite embrace their 10 11

See Weinreich 80; Dillon, A Little Original Sin (116–118). Rhoda’s desire for the woods echoes Barnes’s story, “A Night in the Woods,” in which the protagonists (the Trenchards) idealize the woods as a sacred space, a space away from

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normatively alternative positions. While Rhoda embodies the nomadic spirit of Jane Bowles’s fellow expatriates, singing of a “horse run[nning] across the fields on many afternoons” (417), she can only “glimpse him fleeing toward the woods/And then not at all” (417). Harriet, on the other hand, dreams of “climb[ing] upon a cliff/My sister’s hand in mine” (418). The cliff here represents an intimate, but deadly, socially unacceptable frontier that she cannot, must not cross. Hence, the only cliff she can make herself face is the glass of spilled milk that Rhoda knocks out of her hand. As in Bowles’s short stories, the attempt to cross the frontier or invite the other person into one’s space is associated not so much with bonding, but rather with an act of consumption and bondage. In this case, the frontier in question is the milk that the sisters consume every day, a ritual that keeps them occupied but also tied to each other. Milk becomes the symbol of their bond that must be nurtured, but also severed as social expectations do not allow Harriet and Rhoda to “enjoy” such symbiotic bonding. Not surprisingly, Rhoda does not wish to drink her milk in Harriet’s room, nor will she. The crossingover reminds her of the kind of normative domesticity that she refuses to participate in. Thus, in rejecting her sister’s glass of milk, Rhoda not only refuses to consume, but also to be consumed in the name of sisterly love. If, as Ahmed suggests, state ideologies are shaped by love politics or what she calls “being for the nation” (The Cultural 123), then it is not surprising that in 1940s and 1950s America, love was frequently deployed as “a sign of respectable femininity, and of maternal qualities” (124). Bowles’s puppet play mocks such an ideal—be it ideal femininity or symbiotic merging with the mother/sister figure embodied by Harriet. By contrast, it dismisses the national ideal of consumer bliss by pointing to its perverse, narcissistic pathology that must be destabilized at all cost. Similarly, Rhoda’s refusal to engage in nomadism and flee to the pastoral woods challenges rather than re-scripts binaries. Instead of serving as an easy counterpoint to Harriet’s sedentary lifestyle, Rhoda’s dreaming or mental nomadism is marked by ambiguity and indecision. The kind of mobility her dreams embody is inaccessible, if not unacceptable to Rhoda. As she says to Harriet, “the moment hasn’t come yet, and it won’t come today because the day is finished and the evening is here. Thank God!” (Bowles, My Sister’s 419). Rhoda’s stalling and waiting for another day is reminiscent of Bowles’s story, “Going to Massachusetts,” where Bozoe is equally reluctant to go all the way to Massachusetts because she is not quite yet ready.

civilization only to find out that it, too, has been compromised by progress. For more details, see Chapter 2.

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Though Weinreich suggests that Rhoda fears the freedom she wants, the play, like most of Bowles’s work, offers an alternative reading that refuses binaries and instead entertains a space where discomfort and hunger are not sated, but rather cultivated as a queer space of non-normative difference. More interestingly, Bowles refuses to transform this queer space back into the heteronormative mold that Harriet appreciates, but rather embraces its ambiguous nature as a means of what Ahmed calls “inhabiting norms differently” (Ahmed, The Cultural 155). This refusal to “legislate” queer feelings in any particular way allows Bowles to expose the perversity of the pastoral idyll as a desire for enforced sameness, be it in the name of love, state politics, or consumerism, while simultaneously suggesting that the kind of freedom with which it is associated might be the most normative of all. In other words, fleeing to the proverbial woods figures as a nostalgia for the idyllic space that turns out to be the opposite of freedom and the embodiment of what Harriet calls “contentment in a box” (Bowles, My Sister’s 416). Ironically, it is the contentment in the box that Rhoda delivers at the end of the play as she gets up and goes to get H ­ arriet a glass of milk. The ending resorts to accommodating both normative and alternative positions: discomfort is the part of a bargain the sisters pay to make sure that their crossing-over happens within the liminal space of the “dividing line” that separates them. Aesthetically, Bowles’s use of puppets only further highlights the dividing line that mobilizes the sisters’ divergent viewpoints. The puppet as a visual and “plastic medium” transforms the dividing line as a space where the human and the inhuman meet (Francis 99), and where empathy for the other, even a puppet, becomes a possibility. Moreover, the incorporeality of the puppets allows Bowles to comment on the commodity world driven by desire and the daily “milk” that the characters drink in the name of love that cannot be consummated or requited. Consequently, through the incorporeal puppet, Bowles is also able to explore and expose the ways in which “commodity fetishism describes how capitalist society promotes fetishistic consciousness, which invests objects and bodies with particular symbolic properties and value” (Lee, “Bodies” 153). Harriet is especially invested in fetishizing her space as the embodiment of a domestic bliss, insisting, throughout the play, that her side of the room is “more agreeable” (Bowles, My Sister’s 416). But even though Rhoda resists her sister’s fetishization, she cannot help but entertain its symbolic value. As ­Josephine Lee emphasizes, such ambivalent “love” politics was indicative of America’s 1940s cultural nationalism (153). By visualizing the increasing emphasis on the commodification of the American Dream, Bowles’s puppet play thus points, albeit cheekily, to the ways in which the normalized subject is nothing more

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than a commodified puppet, exhausted by the mundane yet ready to drink to what Harriet calls “liv[ing] in the right” (Bowles, My Sister’s 419).

Love and/as Hate in the (Post)Colonial Garden and the Cruelty of Pastoral Idyll: In the Summer House

America’s 1950s preoccupation with the pastoral idyll and nomadic utopias comes under fire in Bowles’s two-act play, In the Summer House (1951; 1953), which she started writing in 1943, though it took almost ten years to finish. The play was first produced by the University of Michigan’s Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre in Ann Arbor, in May 1953. It saw its first Broadway debut a few months later, on December 29, 1953, and was produced by Oliver Smith, who supported Bowles through the writing process both intellectually and f­ inancially ­(Dillon, Original Sin 94). While the reviews were mixed (Dillon, Original Sin 227), ­Tennessee Williams lauded the play for its originality, describing it as “one of those very rare plays which are not tested by the theater but by which the theater is tested” (qtd. in Dillon, Original Sin 227).12 1990s revisionist studies of Bowles’s work have noted its unique, dreamlike quality. In her 1990 study, Gayle Austin, for instance, described the play as “one of ellipses and absences, dreamlike and nonlinear at times, but with many ­trappings of realism” (68). While the play certainly cannot deny traces of 1950s realism, it retains an avant-garde, experimental feel through its acute ­symbolism and anti-humanist character that is reminiscent of Maeterlinck’s symbolist plays like Interior and The Intruder in which the inside becomes symbolic of the encroaching world outside. Similar to Maeterlinck, Bowles explores the invasiveness of the outside world and its impact on the characters’ “interior.” In addition, In the Summer House exposes both the ­porosity and l­iminality of the inside and outside through characters who, in their quest for intimacy, confuse love with consumption and, by extension, with the ­commodity culture they loathe in the first place. In spite of the title being In the Summer House, the play mostly takes place outside the beach house, in a messy, dilapidated garden with “ragged cactus plants and broken ornaments scattered around” (Bowles, My Sister’s Act 1, 207). It focuses on the lives of Gertrude Eastman Cuevas and her daughter, Molly, who spends most days hiding in a tree house. A widow, Gertrude is eager to remarry, so she pursues Mr Solarez, a Mexican man, who reminds her of her deceased Spanish husband. Her attachment to these men is mainly a matter of 12

See also Diamond 128.

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convenience. She is reluctant to cultivate any form of intimacy outside of the relationship that she has with her daughter. While Molly, Gertrude’s daughter, spends most of her time “dreaming” inside the summer house (Act 1, 208), the play unfolds as a series of mother-daughter interactions that are set outside rather than inside the house. Gertrude spends most of her time entertaining Mr Solarez and his extended family, or arguing with Molly, who lives primarily in her imagination and “can’t picture anything being any different than it is” (Act 1, 235). Their bickering is interrupted by the arrival of two intruders: Lionel, who adores Molly, and Mrs Constable, whose daughter Vivian decides to become Gertrude’s boarder. Set in Southern California at a beach house overlooking the ocean, the play centers on a garden that Gertrude Eastman Cuevas is unable to nurture and cultivate. As Gertrude complains to Vivian, her new boarder, the “garden is a wreck,” a “dark place without any air” that she finds “stifling” (Act 1, 223; Act 1, 253). Throughout the play, Gertrude avoids the garden the best she can, sitting on the balcony or spending time walking on the beach. As a place of suffocating darkness, the garden becomes a symbolic extension of Gertrude’s toxic, suffocating bond with her dream-focused daughter, Molly. To avoid this place of suffocation, arguably a maternal suffocation, Molly hides from her mother’s controlling behaviour in a pastoral space of her own: the summer house whose outside is “covered in vines” (Act 1, 207).13 Like Barnes’s The Antiphon, Bowles’s In the Summer House is much more than a play about the mother-daughter struggle, it is also an intriguing dramatization of America’s (post)colonial anxieties haunted by the dream of mythical America whose “legitimacy rests on a history of usurpation and violence” (Féral 52). This history is exemplified in Bowles’s return to the Hispanic conquest of Americas and North America’s anxious relationship to its own, colonial history. Similar to the first version of Two Serious Ladies (which was originally titled Three Serious Ladies), the play imagines these complex mythographies through three sets of (mother-daughter) relationships: the ­oppressive Gertrude Eastman Cuevas and her Spanish-American daughter Molly; the passive Mrs Constable and her daring daughter Vivian; and, finally, the loving, compassionate relationship of Mrs Lopez (the sister of Mr Solarez) and her daughter Frederica. While Gertrude sets out to marry Mr Solarez, he 13

Most critics interpret Bowles’s parody of the pastoral spaces like the garden or the s­ ummer house as a commentary on dysfunctional mother-daughter relationships. Gayle Austin calls Molly’s summer house “womblike” (69). However, the play is far more than a psychodrama in its subtle, yet incisive critique of America’s 1950s politics of domestic and international containment.

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remains marginal to the play’s arc, the main focus being on the relationships between mothers and their daughters. Once again, the symbolism of the frontier and the “garden” becomes the liminal point that divides the characters into those who curb their enthusiasm and fit the mold, and those who seek escape from the mundane. As a liminal frontier rather than idyllic utopia, the garden separates the summer house from the beach house, but it also represents a trans-cultural, racialized space where Gertrude entertains (at times begrudgingly) her Mexican husband-tobe, Mr Solarez, and his large family. On the one hand, Gertrude is looking for an idyllic experience that lies outside the contained space of the garden as she observes the world from her balcony. On the other, she cannot stand the “messy” politics that trans-cultural and racial encounters often entail. Instead, Gertrude spends most of her time complaining about Mr Solarez and his family’s overwhelming picnics. She asks: “Do you people always eat such a big midday meal? Molly and I are in the habit of eating simple salads at noon” (Bowles, My Sister’s Act 1, 219). Gertrude’s use of the term “people” reveals her sense of cultural superiority which is further reflected in her panoramic gaze. In Act 1, she spends most of her time surveying the Solarez family from the top of the balcony. Embodying the western gaze, she persistently strives to normalize their difference by emphasizing the superior value of American over Mexican cultural traditions. As she says to Mrs Lopez, she and Molly, like most Americans, “usually have a simple salad” (Act 1, 219). Not surprisingly, as early as the first scene of Act 1, food turns into a cultural marker of difference that the native fears, but also desires, which becomes clear in Gertrude’s intention to marry Mr Solarez in spite of the fact that they have nothing in common. In other words, what attracts Gertrude to Mr Solarez is what also repels her: his attachment to his large family, his love of dancing (which she loathes), food, mountains, and, last but not least, his “joie de vivre” (Act 1, 217). As Richard Pells notes, since the 1930s, America has been “in search of some mystical experience. In each case, [Americans] were attracted to societies that seemed outside the pale of capitalist civilization” (101). With the 1950s emphasis on containment and commodity culture, the desire for the pastoral space only intensified, resulting in a form of affective nomadism that reproduced rather than subverted the colonizing dynamic of consumerism. The dynamic is reflected in the ways in which Gertrude mourns the loss of her Spanish husband while simultaneously edging towards marrying into the large M ­ exican family of Mr Solarez. Deployed as the ultimate colonizer and consumer, ­Gertrude prides herself on her “controls,” yet remains blind to her racist remarks about her Spanish husband’s macho lifestyle and Mr Solarez’s obsession with his family and food (Bowles, My Sister’s Act 1, 226).

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Elin Diamond critiques Bowles’s depiction of “the slovenly, good spirits and spontaneous affection of the Mexicans” as an indication of Bowles’s ­“unselfconscious” racism (“The Garden” 129). Such an indictment however ignores Bowles’s strategic dramatization of the racist politics of 1950s American nativism. By contrast, her emphasis on the Solarez family’s refusal to fit into the prescribed frame of the foreign “other” challenges the western gaze and echoes Rey Chow’s argument that, by drawing attention to such stereotypical images, the image of otherness becomes “implicitly the place where battles are fought and strategies of resistance negotiated” (Chow 29). However, as Chow emphasizes, such a stance also forces westerners to acknowledge “the discomforting fact that the natives are no longer staying in their frames” (28). Throughout the play, the Solarez family resists the western framework by rebelling against Gertrude’s tokenization of their cultural traditions as ­outlandish and excessive. Mrs Lopez proudly asserts her culture by highlighting the fact that a traditional Mexican meal consists of diverse food groups, not just a salad. She laughs at Gertrude’s lack of appetite and need for controls. Instead, she lists the meals “with gusto” (Bowles, My Sister’s Act 1, 219): “For breakfast: chocolate and sugar bread: for lunch: soup, beans, eggs, rice, roast pork with potatoes and guava paste…” (Act 1, 219). As in Bowles’s short stories and her other plays, food serves as a means of bonding that highlights transcultural encounters and the racialized power dynamics that underpin them. Evoking Bowles’s short story, “Everything Is Nice,” where Jeannie refuses to eat Zodelia’s cakes, the play parodies, but also rewrites the western consumption of otherness by refusing to deploy the Solarez family as victimized or otherwise consumed by Gertrude’s (white) gaze. By contrast, Mrs Lopez frequently shakes her head in dismay when Gertrude speaks, mocking the prejudice of her so-called controls by enjoying her food. The prejudice of Gertrude’s controls is further exemplified in her p ­ aradoxical admiration of the ocean and nature. Both symbolic of change and mobility, the ocean and nature connote movement and desire, fluidity and p ­ orosity— qualities that she despises in her half American, half Spanish daughter, Molly, but also in the Solarez family. In other words, any idea of change or ­crossing the frontier—imaginary, cultural, or physical—frightens Gertrude. Not ­surprisingly, when Mr Solarez arrives with his relatives in tow, she, like ­Jeannie in “Everything Is Nice,” refuses to eat his food and instead prefers to eat hot dogs, spaghetti, and meatballs. Her prejudiced unwillingness to cultivate ­cross-cultural relationships is further echoed in her troubled and troubling relationship with Molly who becomes a symbolic extension of Gertrude’s dilapidating garden (Act 1, 207). Molly is a combination of passion and dreaminess, but Gertrude finds such qualities frustrating, comparing Molly’s “nature” to her

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(Spanish) father: obstinate and “dangerous” (Act 1, 253). When Molly tells her how much she loves her at the end of Act 1, Gertrude, curtailed by her controls, feels violated by too much emotion. She scolds her daughter instead, saying: “Are you insane? …I’ve always known it was there, this violence” (Act 1, 253). She goes on to link Molly’s violence to the garden which has become a “dark place without an air” that stifles her (Act 1, 253). Bowles here dismantles the archetypal image of the garden as a site of idyllic repose, deploying it instead as a site of confinement and cruelty, but also racial inequity. Like Barnes, however, Bowles refuses to succumb to the kind of binary replay of merely reversing the opposites. She deploys the garden not so much as a site of communal bonding, but rather as a “controlled” and hence “stifling” place that is reminiscent of the political climate of 1950s America. Arguably, Gertrude’s stifling garden symbolizes 1950s America of unhappy housewives, Cold War politics, and nativist anxieties. The surrounding decay is further reflected in both Gertrude’s inability to “make things grow” in her own garden and her unwillingness to cultivate a domestic politics of open-mindedness whether it pertains to intimate or cultural relations. As she says, “I believe in using controls. It’s a part of the law of civilization. Otherwise we would be like wild beasts. We are bad enough as it is, controls and all” (Act 1, 226). The love-hate dynamic behind Gertrude’s garden politics evokes the state ideologies of the time, particularly their emphasis on domestic “controls” as an extension of 1950s nativism and conservatism. Such rhetoric pervaded the era of McCarthyism that victimized left-wing artists like Jane and Paul Bowles, Truman Capote, Aaron Copeland, or William Burroughs. In his quest to “root out internal dangers” lurking at home (Caputi 143), McCarthy was famous for accusing artists of anti-American activities that undermined the neoconservative agenda. As Caputi wrote, in the 1950s, “neoconservatism would be the road home to a safety and an innocence, an Eden, that had long been the mythical substrate of America” (2). To ascertain such idyllic return, “motherhood” became elevated and consummated as the national ideal of good citizenship (Caputi 2). Critiquing the preoccupation with domestic normativity, 1950s playwrights like Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, and Arthur Miller challenged the cruelty of idyllic pastoralism through possessive and domineering mothers who served as a symbolic extension of the nation’s tyrannical “mothering.” Noting the 1950s economy of domestic consumption and fetishization of maternal care, Elin Diamond aligns the play with Bowles’s “deadly accurate sense of the misogyny of the 1950s” (“The Garden” 32). Judith Olauson similarly points to Bowles’s contrapuntal female characters: mothers who are either dominant and domineering like Gertrude, or passive like Mrs Constable; and daughters

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who are either passive like Molly or ruthless like Vivian who asserts her freewill, ignorant of her mother’s feelings and affection. Unlike Molly, Vivian bullies her mother, Mrs Constable, who contrary to Gertrude, doesn’t quite know how to use her “controls” to rein in her independent daughter. In her assertion of free will at all cost, Vivian monopolizes relationships and spaces, filling these spaces like the cactus plants that stifle Gertrude’s overgrown garden. In many ways, Vivian is the ultimate symbol of America’s colonial past. She pursues her happiness at the expense of others, while ­simultaneously usurping their sense of agency. Molly uncovers the colonizing tendencies that lurk under Vivian’s pursuit of “freedom” and ­“excitement” (Bowles, My Sister’s Act 1, 231). She confronts her by saying: “You’ve tried in every way since you came to push me out” (Act 1, 238). While she refers primarily to her relationships with Gertrude and Lionel, Molly also feels violated by Vivian’s figurative conquest of her domestic idyll, no matter how illusory it may be. In addition to the dominant-passive paradigm, Bowles introduces another alternative in this plot: a relationship where the mother and her daughter are not engaged in the toxic power dynamic as in Mrs Lopez’s relationship with Frederica. It is particularly important to note that Bowles chooses to align the healthiest mother-daughter relationship with the Mexican rather than the American family. In this way, she not only challenges the positionality of socalled otherness, but also exposes the ways in which the pastoral idyll of the American Dream has gone awry, transforming the Garden of Eden into a site of cruelty and toxic consumption. Act 1 brings the cruelty of consumption to a climax by closing with a double wedding where everyone gorges on hot dogs and where the two brides, Gertrude and Molly (who marry Mr Solarez and Lionel, respectively), mother and daughter, are bonded in their estrangement. The act closes with Molly trying to express her love for Gertrude, and Gertrude rejecting her daughter’s overtures as “heavy and dangerous” (Act 1, 253). Instead, as mentioned above, Gertrude voices her need to “get away, out of this garden” because it is “stifling” (Act 1, 253). Yet, her marriage to Mr Solarez and eventual escape to Mexico fail to live up to the kind of oceanic bliss that she hoped to glean from her balcony. Bowles thus reveals that a search for nomadic utopia is frequently motivated by what Machor calls “pastoral ideography” where the “desire for a way of life in which the personal conflict between self-fulfillment and group identification…are reconciled” (18). However, as in most of Bowles’s work, the possibility of any idyllic reconciliation is thwarted as its darker, oppressive aspects come to light. Set mostly in Lobster Bowl, a restaurant where Lionel and Molly work, Act 2 brings the outside in, further highlighting the claustrophobia of

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c­ onsumption—be it in the name of love, hatred, or desire. The opening scene of Act 2, for example, highlights the disturbing claustrophobia of 1950s politics of containment through Lionel’s and Molly’s stifling marriage. The ­lighting ­directions add another dimension to the claustrophobia of the national ideal, which is symbolically represented through the conventional, oppressive aspect of Molly’s and Lionel’s relationship. As they play cards, “they are sitting in circle of light” while “the rest of the stage is in darkness” (Bowles, My Sister’s Act 2, 259). While the circle of light can be deployed as a symbol of the pastoral idyll (note the celestial connotation here), Molly and Lionel talk at cross purposes, never quite hearing each other. Lionel, tired of Lobster Bowl, wants to get away while Molly agonizes over her mother’s return. The emphasis on intimate bondage pervades the play, but becomes even more prominent in Act 2 as an extension of America’s consumerist politics. As Caputi emphasizes, the 1950s ideal of domesticity was tied with the notion of a “happy nuclear family” that became the poster child for white, heterosexual, middle-class America as a “land flowing with milk and honey” (Caputi 17). In Caputi’s terms, “[i]t was a visual culture whose visual magnificence projected an image of Edenic wholeness” (115); nonetheless, “its veneer conceal[ed] glossy truth, given that the decade had no dearth of strife, conflict, anguish and violence” (115). In other words, 1950s was not only an era of domesticity, but it was also an era of Cold War distraction by the ideology of consumerism. Advertising, comics, sitcoms, and cars were all part of the consumerist menu.

Nomadism and/as Consumerism

Act 2 in particular takes the visual culture of American consumerism to task. Its symbolist setting dismantles the glitzy imagery of advertising by placing the characters inside or outside the restaurant called Lobster Bowl. The name alone signifies containment while simultaneously pointing to the kind of plenitude that consumerism promises. In Act 1, the restaurant is associated with the oceanic feeling that Gertrude desires, but simultaneously fears. In scene 1, Lionel interrupts Gertrude’s picnic as he arrives with cardboard figures of ­Neptune and mermaids to advertise Lobster Bowl. While Gertrude finds them to be a horrible intrusion, Lionel explains that he needs to carry them around for a few weeks, emphasizing that “[e]verything [is] connected with the sea in some capacity” (Bowles, My Sister’s Act 1, 221). Lionel’s alliance of the Lobster Bowl advertising with the sea points to the flow of consumer desire that must be persistently mobilized and stimulated. The play thus provides an ­intriguing and revealing connection between different kinds of nomadism: affective,

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­geophysical, and cultural. Moreover, it highlights the nomadic politics of consumerism: mobility is its premise, so is the flow of desire. Bowles visualizes this flow of desire through the exaggerated size of the ­advertising figure-puppets. The cardboard figures that Lionel brings into the garden not only interrupt the idyllic picnic Gertrude is trying to host (no ­matter how begrudgingly), but they also symbolically demarcate the garden as a frontier or liminal space where tragedy and comedy, consumption and consummation meet. As advertisements, the figures become more than inanimate objects. They become symbolic markers of America’s consumer culture. Their symbolic significance is further reflected in Gertrude’s complaint that they are “larger than life size” (Act 1, 221). Their visual dominance thus speaks to the increasing invasion of the American Dream (symbolized by the waning pastoralism of the dilapidating garden) by the culture of consumerism. The stage directions further highlight their invasive dominance. According to the stage directions, the figures quite literally invade the garden: “Lionel opens the gate and enters the garden, followed by the other figure bearers. The garden by now has a very cluttered appearance” (Act1, 221). The whole garden is inundated with advertising billboards that are larger than life, god-like. As Lionel explains to Molly, one of them is “Neptune, the old god” (Act 1, 221). The other figure is a lobster that “looks like a real lobster” (Act 1, 221). As Molly suggests, “[i]t even has those long threads sticking out over its eyes” (Act 1, 221). Lionel, in a true advertising spirit, pulls out another real-like lobster figure from his pocket, saying, “Here. Take this one. I have a few to give away” (Act 1, 222). Simulating reality, the lobster mannequins are a parody of America’s consumerist culture. By mocking the crass tackiness and iconography of consumer culture, the play strives to expose America’s dependence on advertising, but also emphasize how increasingly blurred the line between consumption and consumerism has become. At the same time, however, Bowles’s use of advertising elements for a ­dramatic effect echoes modernist experimentation with the use of visual ­tableaux, masks, or puppetry as a depersonalizing mechanism, evoking the postwar ethos of alienation and ennui. For instance, the Neptune figure is also ­reminiscent of F.S. Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, in which the “eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg…look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of e­ normous ­yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose” over the increasing corruption of the American Dream by the culture of greed (23). Like the eyes of T.J. E ­ ckleburg surveying the “dumping ground” of a “valley of ashes” (Fitzgerald 24, 23), the cardboard figures become the embodiment of the consumerist gaze that turns Gertrude’s garden into a “wreck” (Fitzgerald 221).

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By highlighting the animated object-hood of the cardboard figures, Bowles manages to challenge, if not subvert the very limits of realist drama. As in symbolist theatre, the figures violate and shock with their visual dominance. ­Further, by violating the audience’s or reader’s own assumptions and perceptions, Bowles injects realism with an object theatre that exposes the ­fictional, abject quality of the real. As Alice Rayner emphasizes, in object theatre ­“objects presented on stage have a unique status” (181). Apart from turning into ­“signifiers with historical attachments” (Rayner 181), they also fulfill an aesthetic function that extends “beyond [their] materiality” (181). Viewed in this light, Lionel’s cardboard figures take on the role of what Penny Francis refers to as “object-puppet[s]” (Bowles, My Sister’s Act 1, 19). Like object-puppets, they animate the humanity abjected by the culture of consumerism, which is represented in Bowles’s play by the restaurant Lobster Bowl as a space of public consumption. But the figures also speak to the ways in which consumers frequently act like puppets—in other words, they point to the ways in which humans are commodified, turned into objects by commodity culture and state policies that strive to police and contain them. For example, before Gertrude and Mrs Lopez realize that the figures entering the garden are ­inanimate objects and mere tools of advertising consumption, they first think they are human. Mrs Lopez asks Getrude, “Friend come and see you?” (Act 1, 220). Gertrude, “bewildered, staring hard” as the stage direction describes her, says: “No, it’s not a friend. It’s…It’s some sort of king—and others” (Act 1, 220). Bowles’s exquisite use of irony is undeniable here as she turns the meaningless cardboard figure into a “king”; or to put it differently, the characters, like the good consumers that they are, assign the cardboard puppet a sovereign-like power. But with an emphasis on the power of advertising and the humanoid s­imulacra, Bowles’s play also anticipates the 1960s “theatre of images” that combined presentational and abstract elements with visual imagery ­representing the increasing impact of television and cinema on American theatre. As B ­ onnie Marranca suggests, it is not surprising that “America, a highly ­technological society dominated by aural and visual stimuli, should produce this kind of theatre” whose emphasis was on simulating the “audience’s capacity to perceive” and thus enhance the “critical activity of the mind” (xi). In sum, the play’s aesthetics challenge the consumerist thrust of 1950s theatre by refusing to turn into an indulgent psychodrama. Unfortunately, most reviewers who saw the play’s University of Michigan and Broadway productions refused to see beyond the veneer of what the ­Detroit Times review called its “study of psychic difficulties of as useless a

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bunch of characters as we’ve ever seen assembled on the stage” (qtd. in ­Dillon, ­Original Sin 227). After the opening night at the Playhouse Theatre in New York on ­December 29, 1953, Brooke Atkinson praised the play for its originality, though he similarly accused it of “flatness” and called the characters “neurotic” (qtd. in Dillon, Original Sin 282). Alice Toklas’s dismissal of the play as a mere reflection of Jane Bowles’s immaturity only added to the already-scarred reputation of the play (qtd. in Dillon, Original Sin 282). However, as this chapter has argued, the play rejects the kind of neurotic indulgence with which it has been frequently associated. By thwarting any possibility of a quick fix, it goes against the instant gratification that not only defines, but also mobilizes consumerist desire. The characters cannot find an instant gratification no matter which space or spaces they occupy. The connection between Gertrude’s dilapidating garden and Lobster Bowl’s sole purpose to be the force of consumption is undeniable. Both spaces serve as important sites of the play’s social satire. Bowles connects the cultural demise that these spaces evoke with dysfunctional relationships in general. As in Act 1 where Bowles deploys Gertrude’s toxic control of Molly as a kind of figurative consumerism, but also as a form of racism, Act 2 continues this thread by linking the depressing, albeit colourful space of Lobster Bowl with Lionel’s and Molly’s dysfunctional marriage. In the opening scene of Act 2, Lionel tells Molly that he is tired of her not listening to him. He says: “I don’t want you to half hear me any more. I used to like it but…” (Bowles, My Sister’s Act 2, 262). He is similarly dissatisfied with Lobster Bowl: he wants to “get out of here” because “[t]his place is a fake” (Act 2, 262). Molly, however, is distracted by her mother’s expected “second coming.” When Gertrude finally does arrive on the scene, Molly is confronted with her mother’s desire to bring her back into the “garden” of the mother-daughter fold. But similar to Miranda’s rejection of dreamy Augusta in Barnes’s The A ­ ntiphon, Molly hesitates to plunge back into the familiar. Here, Molly’s reluctance to believe in her mother’s ability to cultivate their relationship, or to put it differently, their “messy” garden, further uncovers the ruse of consumerist idyll represented by the claustrophobic space of Lobster Bowl. As many critics have noted,14 Bowles rewrote the act numerous times, playing with the idea of three different endings. In the original ending, Gertrude’s oppressive mothering propels Molly to her death. This ending evokes Barnes’s The Antiphon in which the dysfunction of the mother-daughter’s relationship (an extension of the ailing state) results in their tragic death as they kill each other with a bell. Bowles’s 14

See, for example, Gayle Austin, Feminist Theories for Dramatic Criticism, 68; or, Elin ­ iamond’s essay, “‘The Garden Is a Mess’: Maternal Space in Bowles, Glaspell, Robins,” 132. D

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second ending, on the other hand, resonates with 1950s domestic cult where the daughter is brought back into the domestic fold by affirming her mother’s health (Diamond, “The Garden” 132). Maternal health, as Diamond points out, was important to the clinical gaze of 1950s America where any veering from the domestic ideal was viewed as a sign of perversity or illness. This second ending entertains the tragedy of such pathology by having Gertrude convince Molly that she is a danger to herself and others (Diamond, “The G ­ arden” 68). Last but not least, the published version of the ending brings the act of consumerist nomadism back full circle by having Molly reject her mother in exchange for a heteronormative fairy-tale-like ending with her husband. Like the final scene of Barnes’s The Antiphon, Bowles’s In the Summer House portrays the state of the mother-daughter dysfunction by the mother’s act of barring her daughter’s exit. In the final scene of Bowles’s play, the mother becomes the ultimate “frontier” that her daughter must cross. But while in Barnes’s play, neither the mother nor the daughter can find any form of reconciliation and hence they must both die, Bowles’s opts for a more ­conventional, melodramatic ending that reflects the 1950s emphasis on the so-called d­ omestic bliss of heterosexual marriage. However, bearing in mind the deep sense of irony that pervades the play, it is plausible to suggest that Bowles’s conventional ending is an incisive commentary on 1950s America. As Olauson suggests, “[t]he extraordinary effects of Bowles’s psychological probing are heightened by a strong thrust of ironic humour” (86). The play ends with such an ironic thrust as Gertrude, the self-proclaimed non-dreamer, is left standing in her dilapidated garden alone, whispering: “When I was a little girl…” (Bowles, My Sister’s Act 2, 295). Like Barnes’s Augusta, Gertrude takes on the role of an infant: her garden has left her bare and open to the cruel devices of her own imagination, mired in the memories of a pastoral childhood that she never quite had.

“Jumping Specials” and the Refusal to Eat: Escaping America’s Consumerism and At the Jumping Bean

Bowles’s critique of the ways in which the nomadism of 1950s artists conspicuously reflected, if not played into, the consumerist culture from which they were running also pervades her unfinished play, At the Jumping Bean, which she started writing in 1955 during her visit to Ceylon (Bowles, Feminine Wiles 36). The scene or the unfinished fragment is set inside The Jumping Bean, a bar. Evoking Act 2 of In the Summer House, the bar, like the restaurant L­ obster Bowl, is the embodiment of American consumerism with its huge neon sign and a junk food menu that lists the bar’s specials, called “free jumpers” ­(Feminine

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Wiles 39). The married couple, Beryl Jane and Gabriel, sit at a table. As they wait for their food to arrive, they spend their time talking about life. Examining the “Jumping Specials,” they start discussing the reasons why the bar is so popular, but soon their discussion turns to more serious matters: humanity, the value of art, and their dream of living a pastoral life on a farm with pigs and chickens. As the scene progresses, Bowles once again returns to the theme of consumer culture and its commodification of art. Gabriel is a poet while Beryl Jane is a dreamer who dreams of having a farm. Unlike Gabriel, Beryl is like a child who prattles and talks about the future, which mainly involves having babies and climbing trees. For the entire scene, Gabriel is mostly quiet, interjecting now and then with polite questions and “looking sad” (42). Never quite pausing and mainly talking about the mundane, Beryl, in her naïveté and desire to please, echoes what Benjamin R. Barber refers to as “the infantilist ethos” of consumerism (3). As Barber explains, consumerism depends on stimulating human desire for plenitude while making sure that this desire is never quite fulfilled. This dynamic, according to Barber, strives to “encourage adult regression, hoping to rekindle in grown-ups the tastes and habits of children” (7). Many critical studies have commented on the prevalence of childish and child-like female characters in Bowles’s work. Robert Lougy in his analysis of Bowles’s story, “Camp Cataract,” highlights Sadie’s childlike behaviour (124), while, in his reading of Two Serious Ladies, George Toles critiques Mrs Copperfield’s childishness (101). Similarly, Millicent Dillon persistently points to the regressive nature of the characters in her biography of Bowles.15 In the play, At the Jumping Bean, Beryl Jane not only admits that she is “like a kid” (Bowles, Feminine Wiles 43), but she sulks whenever Gabriel strives to rebuke or correct her child-like mannerisms. She asks, hoping for his approval: “I’m like a little girl? Don’t you think so?” (43). But rather than validating her behavior, Gabriel ignores her. Disinterested and annoyed, he focuses on the menu and complains that it is fit for children. He says: “Why do they treat us like kids on these routes? It’s the same way at Larry’s Devilburger” (44). In the play, Gabriel serves as an interesting counterpoint to Beryl’s infantilism. As a poet and artist, he finds the bar’s advertising of “free jumpers” revolting and suffocating and he is disturbed by the ways in which the waitress treats them “like kids” (44). Beryl, on the other hand, enjoys what the bar has to offer and feels embarrassed by Gabriel’s behavior. Echoing the ways in which consumer culture relies on “creating childlike dependency in its clients” (Barber 28), Bowles’s play provides an intriguing 15

See also articles by Allen, Weinreich, Maier, Schloss, and Skerl.

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s­ ocial commentary on the increasing encroachment of consumer culture on art and life in general. Even in its relative brevity, At the Jumping Bean serves as an ­incisive satire on what Benjamin R. Barber refers to as “an ethos of induced childishness: an infantilization that is closely tied to the demands of consumer capitalism in a global market economy” (3). The play not only parodies ­American overconsumption by dramatizing the marketing jargon and branding savvy of The Jumping Bean, but also exposes the 1950s emphasis on domesticity as hitched to the consumerist wagon. Beryl talks about having a child, but her understanding of motherhood, fed primarily by c­ ommercials and the public view, is based on the idyllic “future” that she associates with the pastoral farm where the “pigs aren’t going to be walking in and out of the house” (Bowles, Feminine Wiles 42). While Beryl “love[s] the future” (42), ­Gabriel avoids talking about it at all cost. As is typical of Barnes’s work, Bowles similarly turns antiphony, or characters’ responding to each other in counterpoint, into an important means of ­examining the culture of greed and its mythographies. Beryl is a perfect image of the 1950s suburban wife: dressed in a “very feminine, pert manner,” she chatters away about ordinary subjects, covering everything from childhood to motherhood. Like the consumerist culture she represents, Beryl never wishes to grow up. She keeps reminding Gabriel that she is “more like a child than most girls” (45). She likes cocoa and a “child’s dinner” (45). Like a child, she fails to separate her “self” from the world, echoing the very logic of consumer capitalism, which relies on the consumer’s regression to a childlike state where they are unable to “distinguish self and world” (Barber 34). Gabriel, on the other hand, evokes one of the characters in Bowles’s short story, “The Iron Table.” Like the husband in the story, Gabriel is more concerned with civilization while Beryl is more interested in pig farming. The juxtaposition of Gabriel’s poetic ambitions with Beryl’s dreaminess and yearning for a pastoral space “with just natural pastures and woods” hones the play’s critique of America’s 1950s preoccupation with cultural and bodily consumption (Bowles, Feminine Wiles 42). The dialogue never quite takes off; rather, most of the time, the focus is on characters’ body language. Neither of the characters is comfortable. Beryl’s face is persistently searching for Gabriel’s approval, but he is hardly listening. The tension is mounting and its effects are apparent on Beryl’s face whose smile is described as “crooked as if she were being trampled inside” (43). Gabriel, on the other hand, has a “black look on his face” and becomes angry towards the end of the scene when they finally walk out of the Jumping Bean (45, 46). The scene ends with Gabriel asking Beryl about what she thinks is beautiful, but, in her child-like way, she starts prattling about snakes and tea-roses.

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The entire scene is filled with tension and mounting frustration between the characters. As in “The Iron Table” story, the table at which Beryl and Gabriel sit serves as a symbolic frontier between what at first sight seems like the characters’ vastly different worlds. And yet, as is typical of Bowles’s work, a deep sense of irony pervades the plot line. The couple’s apparent difference, G ­ abriel’s disinterest in Beryl’s childish prattle, and Beryl’s inability to connect with ­Gabriel’s world—his art—point at the deep sense of ennui and alienation that they both feel not only towards each other, but towards the world in general. Unlike Bowles’s previous plays, the unfinished fragment, At the Jumping Bean, is more of a visual drama, or what Marranca refers to as the “theatre of images” (x). In contrast to realist drama, the theatre of images is characterized by the limited amount of or the complete absence of dialogue. Moreover, the characters take on the roles of “icons and images” that represent the sensibility of the times through visual references and the use of popular culture forms like consumer spaces (xi). The major thrust of the theatre of images is its presentation rather than its representation of the consumer culture as a “crisis” that must be handled meta-theatrically. In other words, the focus is not only on the creative process of making art, but also on the psychologies and cultural mythographies that shape the artistic process. As Marranca emphasizes, “In the Theatre of Images the painterly and sculptural qualities of p ­ erformance are stressed, transforming this theatre into a spatially-dominated one activated by sense of impressions, as opposed to a time-dominated one ruled by linear narrative” (xii). Such emphasis on spatiality rather than a linear time progression underpins this unfinished fragment. Most of the scene focuses on space—be it the kitschy environment of the Jumping Bean bar or the contorted faces of the characters who no matter how much they try to speak are frequently reduced to facial acrobatics that expose their inner and conflicting psychologies. What is intriguing about this unfinished fragment is its complete rejection of the dialogue as making sense. ­Rather, the nonsensical progression of their chatter forces the audience to ­focus on the expression their faces make. Like a canvas, their faces “speak” without verbalizing their feelings. Their bodily language however speaks ­volumes about the darkness lurking within. In this respect, Bowles is able to uncover the abject facets of the characters’ (in)humanity, and the characters thus become tableaux-like. Similar to the object-puppet advertisements that clutter the garden in Bowles’s play, In the Summer House, Beryl and Gabriel function more like props than real human beings. Through such a reversal, however, Bowles is able to provoke the audience by probing them to question their desire to consume or be consumed. In this way, Bowles’s work not only “demonstrates a radical refunctioning of naturalism” (Marranca xiii), but also creates its own experimental language, which reaches beyond spoken words

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into the inner depths of the soul, an act that her characters so often dread. Similar to Barnes, Bowles points to nature as a point of departure and return, as a space where the nomad figure exposes the fine line between humanity and violence and creativity and destruction.

Out of the Green Gardens and into the Consumer Hell: Nomadism and its All-Consuming Politics

Bowles’s three plays share a commonality in their emphasis on the abortive ­cruelty of pastoralism. Whether it pertains to the safety of the room in her ­puppet play, A Quarrelling Pair, the oceanic space in the two-act play, In the Summer House, or Beryl’s dream of a farm life in At the Jumping Bean, the ­characters’ idyllic return to nature is dismissed as illusory but also deployed as a dangerous quest that leads to the characters’ figurative self-­commodification rather than emancipation. Emphasizing their potential for becoming complicit in the culture of mass consumption, Bowles exposes the characters’ nomadic ethos as participatory of the politics of consumerism. Consumerism, Bowles’s work suggests, is like an endless travel: it propels the consumer on a quest for some utopia where idyllic plenitude provides the reconciliation that her characters seek. But Bowles’s portrayal of consumerism also echoes the 1950s policies of containment that promise happiness under the guise of cruel manipulation where the branding of infantilist and infantilizing rhetoric replaces logic and reason as well as ethics and compassion, exploiting the less privileged, marginalized groups. Bowles’s questioning of the nomadic ethic pervades her work. Not only are her characters immobilized by their mobility, they are also frequently exposed to its all-consuming (and colonizing) politics. As Janet says in Bowles’s story, “Going to Massachusetts,” “[w]ell, here it is again…. Here it is in all its glory” (Bowles, My Sister’s 462). In the story, Janet reacts to Bozoe’s need to go “out into the world” to find herself, away from her roots and away from everyone she knows. Janet mocks what she sees as Bozoe’s infantile affectation. Whether her sentiment of “here it is in all its glory” refers to the ethics of consumerism or whether it reflects Jane Bowles’s own sense of being consumed by the 1950s and its exilic ethos is a question that she continued to investigate even when overtaken by bouts of self-doubt and severe writing blocks. By 1957, incapacitated by stroke, Bowles resigned herself mostly to writing letters. Though her letters are frequently read as a continuation of her oeuvre,16 16

Christopher Wanklyn, a friend, once described Jane’s life and fiction as follows: “Her life was invention as much as her work. There were no barriers between them. Perhaps that’s

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Bowles was adamant about keeping her present experience “removed from… writing” (Bowles, Out in the World 34). Like Barnes, she persistently and stubbornly insisted that her writing was not autobiographical. As Paul Bowles noted in his interview with Jeffrey Bailey, “She wrote slowly. It cost her blood to write. Sometimes it took her a week to write a page” (qtd. in Caponi 125). Similar to Barnes, Bowles ended up questioning everything she wrote, drafting and deleting, revising and re-visioning. From 1948, Bowles continued to work on what was to become her second novel. The novel’s preliminary title was Out in the World, a title that evoked Bowles’s nomadic shuttling between countries and cultures, leaving her constantly “on the edge of something.” Though the title also exemplifies the kind of theatre of pastoral cruelty that pervaded her dramatic work (Bowles, Out in the World 93), it also exposes her desperate need to find a sense of belonging while remaining mobile. To put it differently, this second, unfinished novel can be viewed as Bowles’s attempt at understanding her own performance of mobility: the movement and stasis that haunted her life, but also interfered with her ability to write. In this sense, the unfinished novel can be viewed as Bowles’s last and final attempt at a theatre of a different kind, an intimate staging of her being “out in the world” without quite accepting the sense of exile and isolation that her lifestyle frequently produced. Like her plays, A Quarreling Pair, In the Summer House, or At the Jumping Bean, Bowles’s 1950s writing efforts reflect her concern that nomadic politics often lead to different forms of diasporic efforts. These diasporic efforts deploy “homemaking” as an attempt to find a sense of locality, albeit a temporary one. As Thomas Faist emphasizes, from the twentieth century on, the very notion of diaspora takes on more of a politicized yet opaque meaning, denoting the complex dynamics of migrant lifestyle (Baubőck and Faist 18). In her study, Janine Dahinden, for instance, coins the term “transnational mobiles” to define people who are highly mobile, but remain rooted in one way or another to a particular locality (53). In her words, “in order to be able to stay mobile, it is necessary for migrants to develop some local ties and to be embedded in specific localities” (52). While persistently moving, Bowles frequently noted and critiqued the all-consuming politics of nomadism in her writing. And yet, even after her stroke, writing remained a means by which Bowles performed her own sense of “locality in mobility” and “mobility in locality” to use Dahinden’s terms (52). Through her letters and through the hundreds of pages of the unpublished manuscript, Out in the World, Bowles continued to question, why she couldn’t finish anything. There was no relief for her in daily life” (qtd. in Dillon, Original Sin 268). See also Dillon.

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interrogate, and self-doubt both her writing and her self-imposed exile from this sense of home and belonging she so desired and needed. Like her work, her letters echo her quest for a sense of an ideal(ized) location, no matter how fluid or imagined and imaginary. In one of her letters to Paul, written in 1947, Bowles complains: “The more I get into it, which isn’t very far in pages but quite a bit further in thinking and consecutive work the more frightened I become at the isolated position I feel myself in vis-à-vis all the writers whom I consider to be of any serious mind. I am serious but I am isolated and my experience is probably of no interest at this point to anyone” (Bowles, Out in the World 33). She then goes on to describe her approach to writing as “serious and ponderous” (33), and critiques own her self-doubt and inability to concentrate.17 Although she joined Paul Bowles in Tangier in early 1948 so that she could make headway on her new novel, she found herself distracted and unable to write. In a letter written to Paul during one of her trips to Paris in 1950, she explains: I do feel very strongly that I should give up writing if I can’t get further into it than I have. I cannot keep losing it the way I do, much longer. This is hard to explain to you who work so differently. I may really have said all I have to say. Last night I felt so bad about it, I drank almost an entire bottle of gin. I had gone back to my desk after the most terrible crise of despair and forced myself to work after I had very nearly thrown everything in the fire (mentally).18 bowles, Out in the World 149

The letter expresses the nature of her endless struggle with crises of self-doubt and self-censorship. Tormented by her pervading sense of despair, she nonetheless continued to write, spending hours “chewing [her] cud as one does when one’s writing” (145). Bowles’s disorganized Tangier writing efforts thus led to numerous drafts of what was intended to be her second novel, Out in the World, an approximately 400-page composite of notebooks, drafts, and ­letters, that now remains an unfinished novel in pieces (Dillon, Original Sin 192; ­“Experiment” 145). In one particular section of Out in the World, published in the 1950s as a story titled “Emmy Moore’s Journal,” Bowles explores the complexity of the writing 17 18

See Letter #18. The letter was written in the United States before Jane Bowles’s departure for Tangier in 1948. See Bowles, Out in the World 32–38. See Letter #49 in Bowles, Out in the World 149–151.

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process through Emmy, an aspiring writer, who comes to the Hotel Henry to focus on her work. The story is written in the form of a letter to her husband, Paul, which repeats many of the concerns mentioned above (her sense of crisis and despair, her writing blocks, and her self-doubt). The story begins with Emmy transcribing her letter into her journal that “is intended for publication” (Bowles, My Sister’s 443). To “strengthen [her] position” (442), Emmy goes through four drafts, but when she has finished the fourth draft a breeze from the window forces a few sheets of her letter to take flight. As if taking on the symbolism of this event as being her own failure as a writer, Emmy is struck by a terrible sense of doubt: “‘I don’t feel that I have clarified enough or justified enough’” (449). Like the majority of Bowles’s characters, Emmy wishes to forge a path for herself, but her need to make her journey into the unfamiliar a safe one ­prevents her from pushing forward and from getting her journal published. Instead, her journal writing comes to an abrupt end as her pervading sense of doubt slowly dismantles what she has written. The following passage ­reveals this process as a form of what Paul de Man calls autobiographical “de-­facement” whereby the previously inscribed position is dismantled to the point of absolute ­self-annihilation (de Man 930): ‘I have said nothing,’ she muttered to herself in alarm. ‘I have said nothing at all. I have not clarified my reasons for being at the Hotel Henry. I have not justified myself.’ Automatically she looked around the room. A bottle of whiskey stood on the floor beside one of the legs of the bureau. She stepped forward, picked it up by the neck, and settled with it into her favourite wicker chair. bowles, My Sister’s 449

Such an act is clearly a form of self-sabotage, and not an inauguration of what Toles views as Bowles’s “unwavering objective…to efface herself so that true writing can happen” (86). As the excerpts above reveal, persistent revisions and rewrites had a dislocating, stifling effect on Bowles’s life, but also on her writing (Dillon, Original Sin 275). While Braidotti’s theory of feminist nomadism calls for such deliberate self-dislocation and aligns the oscillation between having and not having a position as a way towards female empowerment (179), Bowles’s life and work interrogate rather than romanticize nomadism or any other form of radical displacement as an act of personal, gender, cultural, or artistic re-invention. The Bowles in her letters is a woman who does not see writing as a way of working through her sense of isolation, but rather as an act of confirming her

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inability to go on. Refusing to idealize exile as a way out of social, cultural, and gender oppression, Bowles, like Barnes, deploys nomadic restlessness as a tragic symptom of modernity that can instigate creativity and challenge its established norms—be they gendered, racial, cultural, or textual, but they can also potentially destroy, shatter, and consume one’s sense of self. What remains are shards of memories whose nomadic fluidity is immobilizing. Arrested in movement, the nomadic subject is forced to recognize that exile is a vexed, yet fluid locality, or as Yehoshua puts it, “a neurotic solution” at best (52).

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Conclusion: “Two Very Serious Ladies” and Their Journeys Live with your century, but do not be its creature, render to your contemporaries what they need, not what they praise. friedrich schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (54)

…

This century has seen many great movements… Art mirrors its age, therefore it had to change completely, as the world changed so vastly and so quickly. peggy guggenheim, Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict (363)

⸪ By the late 1950s, the creative genius of Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles was ­drying out. Stifled by the oppressive politics of the Cold War, but also by their own sense of alienation from 1950s America, both Barnes and Bowles devoted their time to rewriting and revising, desperate to resuscitate the creative drive that had propelled their nomadic aesthetics and diasporic journeys. While Barnes hid within the four walls of Patchin Place, refusing to give interviews or have her works republished, Bowles struggled with self-doubt and a general sense of anxiety that was partly induced by stroke and partly by her r­ eliance on alcohol. As Emily, one of her characters, writes in “Emily Moore’s Journal,” she felt that she had not “clarified enough or justified enough” (Bowles, My Sister’s 449). One of Barnes’s later stories speaks to a similar sense of ennui and creative crisis. In “Saturnalia,” a story published in the collection titled 50: A Celebration of Sun and Moon Classics (1995), edited by Douglas Messerli, Barnes gives voice to the rift between the early twentieth-century’s literary ­experimentation and the stifling spirit of the 1950s. Set in the West Indies, the story comments on the “expatriates farming up there” (Barnes, Collected Stories 461), referring to the 1940s literary expatriation to South America. Juxtaposing the voices of the American Miss Kittridge and the South American Señorita

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Carminetta Conchinella, Barnes bemoans the increasing commodification of the arts. Both “ladies” are serious about their travel experiences; both are disillusioned by the times in which they live. Señorita Conchinella complains about the consumerist craze in America, saying: “the young people are talking psychiatry and Zen, and about diseases and nerves: the old people of cures and healings…” (Barnes, Collected Stories 461). Miss Kittridge agrees, adding that, upon her return to America, she “found people behaving very oddly—all looking for something, beating the old gods up into hundreds of new forms, trying to find something…” (461). Echoing the ennui that pervades some of Bowles’s own stories, Barnes’s “Saturnalia” highlights the discrepancy between the ­experimental zeitgeist of the first half of the twentieth century and the political demagogy of the 1950s. As the two stories attest, both Barnes and Bowles felt out of place in 1950s America. The era of creativity and experimentation was gone. Instead, as Mrs Beadle says in Barnes’s “Saturnalia,” “sanatoriums and isms” were springing “like mushrooms” (Barnes, Collected Stories 461). The home to which Barnes returned was a different locale altogether: an exile itself from Bohemian ideas, avant-garde movements, and artistic salons. Bowles, on the other hand, spent most of her time in and out of America—living in Tangier and Spain. The ­anti-communist propaganda and the conservative embrace of domesticity were not conducive to the kind of experimental art culture Bowles and Barnes espoused. As Peggy Guggenheim, a supporter of the arts and Barnes’s good friend, noted in her memoir, Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict (1979), the art world could not compete with the postwar agenda of consumerism and containment. Bemoaning the increasing commodification of art, she writes: “In fact, I do not like art today. I think it has gone to hell, as a result of the financial attitude” (363). Instead, Guggenheim describes the first half of the twentieth century as the time of creative genius and artistic creativity that changed the “face of art” for centuries to come (364). Critiquing the lack of originality pervading 1950s art, she complains: “One cannot expect every decade to produce a genius. The twentieth century has already produced enough. We should not expect any more. A field must lie fallow every now and then. Artists try too hard to be original” (364). The fallow field of the art world that, similar to Guggenheim, Barnes and Bowles encountered in the 1950s must have been a shock to these two nomadic writers who “lived with their century,” to quote Schiller, but who refused to be “its creature” through their journeys— both physical and literary. In spite of their marginal(ized) status, one of Barnes’s and Bowles’s major legacies is their contribution to the nomadic aesthetic of American modernism, specifically its pastoral ideographies and (post)colonial ecologies, but

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also its regional and transcultural varieties. These contributions are exemplified in Barnes’s formal experimentation and use of intermediality to comment on socio-historical events, and in Bowles’s attention to (post)colonial gender ­politics. Both writers wrote short stories, novels, and plays. While towards the end of her life Barnes dedicated herself primarily to writing poetry, Bowles resorted to journaling. Be it through poetry or intimate journals, Barnes and Bowles continued searching for a way to humanize (in)humanity, probing into the very nature of humanity by persistently returning to it through the pastoral, that is, through their persistent “re-siting” of nature, to use Trinh T. ­Minh-ha’s words (9). Their nomadic characters both embrace and reject nostalgia, moving compulsively at times and with calculating speeds at others. Their works challenge gender, cultural, racial, and sexual norms and boundaries, but they also embrace the very norms they reject, identifying the various tensions between localities and the spaces that their characters visit, share, and occupy and engaging with their idiosyncrasies and rituals. As Dr O’Connor says in Barnes’s Nightwood, “ritual itself constitutes an instruction” (146). As this book suggests, the literary travels of Barnes and Bowles produce their own, albeit nomadic, constantly shifting, and re-siteable forms of instruction. Instead of reading Barnes’s and Bowles’s works as mere extensions of their complex biographies, this book has argued that their works have a lot to teach us about the ways in which the nomadic politics of the first half of the ­twentieth century not only shaped their experimental aesthetics, but also reflected the socio-historical events driving them. What their works reveal is the complexity and ambiguity of nomadism as a discursive and artistic practice— the making and remaking of identities, boundaries, and borders, but also the re-siting of the (in)ethical in aesthetics. While they embrace mobility, they also emphasize its various localities and immobilities. Their works show that movement creates its own stasis while art strives to actualize that which escapes it. The very act of naming, or formal manifesting, is an act of circumscription and border-making. One of Barnes’s most known characters, Dr O’Connor, echoes this sentiment in Nightwood when he says, “Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself” (129). The works of Barnes and Bowles do not tell, but suggest. Their literary representations of the nomadic figure thwart binaries: their characters are neither liberated nor entirely restricted by their travels. Their characters are, however, “educated” in their own ignorance when it comes to confronting not only their deepest fears and anxieties, but also their socio-cultural assumptions. Such lessons are not something that happens in complete solitude or in the company of others. It happens on the frontier—in the space in-between. Through this experience the characters debunk the emancipatory discourses

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of nomadism, revealing that nomadic subjectivity is not only gendered and racialized, but also persistently re-produced and, to again borrow Trinh T. Minh-ha’s terms “re-sited” (9). Thus Barnes’s and Bowles’s characters not only renegotiate the very meaning of travel and dwelling, but also emphasize that our experiences are, to some extent, artistic formalizations—composite translations of encounters that we cannot fully grasp or comprehend, whose renegade quality dematerializes what it strives to bring forth in name and in image. Barnes’s and Bowles’s nomadic aesthetics speak to the ways in which travel defines modernism while uncovering their own American, transcultural versions, versions that attest to how regionalism and cosmopolitanism were frequently at odds with each other, connoting the utopian/dystopian tensions between pastoralism and urbanism, but also pointing to the intertwined ­nature of exile and diaspora. As their works show, nomadism, like exile, produces its own diasporic politics. While nomadism and exile are frequently viewed as distinct categories of displacement—exile being an involuntary event and nomadism being a matter of free choice (and, as the texts discussed in this book show, cultural privilege), Barnes and Bowles suggest that such rigorous divisions and definitions are not only illusory, but also problematic, especially when viewed in the context of the non-normative performance of gender, race, and sexuality. Their representations of nomadism reveal that familiar locales can be sites of both exile and dwelling, whether imaginary or physical. Similarly, they emphasize that there is no nomadic travel—aesthetic or physical—without some form of diasporic dimension. As James Clifford cautions, diasporic journeys are not always bounded by a nostalgia for return or a need to recreate home elsewhere. Rather, “diaspora discourse articulates, or bends together, both roots and routes” (Clifford 251). In other words, nomadism produces its own articulations of diasporic longing for a sense of locality outside the preconceived notions of what it means to be at home or abroad. Consequently, the works of Barnes and Bowles not only serve as important mirrors of their times, they also provide insights into the rich varieties of modernism. Their American conceptualization of modernist experimentation probes the regional and transcultural tensions that underpin the American identity. However, they also demonstrate that America’s colonial history continues to haunt America’s (post)modernity. While the nomad might be the ultimate staple of American literature (from its colonial beginnings to its postmodern iterations), the rebels in Barnes’s and Bowles’s works skirt the frontier only to find themselves constrained by the very freedoms they advocate and lust after. As Bowles emphasizes in Two Serious Ladies, compulsive displacement is not without its challenges and political implications. Bowles`s concern

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is best exemplified in Mr Copperfield’s letter to his wife, Mrs Copperfield, in which he writes: “Be careful that you do not, through your own wiliness, end up always in the same position” (Bowles, Two Serious 99). Both Barnes and Bowles were desperate to remove themselves from the same position—be it through their writing or their self-imposed exile. What do their journeys have in common? What connects their unique forms of nomadic modernisms? What is it about these two very serious ladies that escapes critics? As this book has argued, while their physical trajectories had at times intertwined, their artistic genius flourished irrespective of their shared interests in artistic experimentation and literary Bohemia. Each represents a different era in America’s literary expatriation. Each paints her own picture of what it means to be a Bohemian expatriate. While Barnes locates her nomads in nature, exploring their pastoral ideographies, Bowles challenges the western notion of civilization by exposing western travel as a colonizing force. Although Bowles’s work does not reflect the kind of aesthetic versatility and generic intermediality characteristic of Barnes’s work, both writers share an ­almost obsessive preoccupation with the desire to find a way to translate nomadic lifestyle into a form cum border, a kind of formalized territory, an imaginary diaspora of sorts. This imaginary diaspora, however, is not a poetic dwelling in the Heideggerian sense nor is it Rushdie’s “imaginary homeland.”1 Rather, like Clifford’s notion of location, it is an “itinerary rather than a bounded site—a series of encounters and translations” (11). While the temptation to read their works comparatively haunted the initial inception of this book, Barnes’s and Bowles’s works charted their own trajectory, suggesting a different kind of encounter with the texts, a different rendering of their life’s works. Neither Bowles nor Barnes wanted to be compared to, or be read through, the lens of other women writers’ works. Barnes loathed any such comparisons and berated critics who dared to suggest any potential similarities. When D ­ ouglas Messerli asked her during an interview whether she ever read Eudora Welty, she sniped back: “I do not like women writers” (“Barnes,” n. pag.). ­Similarly, Bowles refused to find inspiration in other women’s works. While Barnes was good friends with her husband, Paul Bowles, Bowles wanted no such affiliation. As Paul Bowles noted in his interview with Jeffrey Bailey for The Paris Review, “She refused to read Djuna Barnes. She never read Nightwood. She felt great hostility towards American women writers. Usually she refused even to look at their books” (qtd. in Caponi 125). And yet, their works have many common 1 See Martin Heidegger’s essay, “…Poetically Man Dwells…,” in which he suggests that homes are always imaginary since the “poetic is the basic capacity for human dwelling” (226). Cf. Salman Rushdie’s essay, “Imaginary Homelands.”

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parallels. However, instead of exploring these parallels through a biographical lens, the aim of this book has been to examine their works as literary and socio-cultural commentaries on two different eras and two different expatriate movements that shaped the first half of twentieth-century America. The ­following sections briefly summarize some of the main parallels that pervaded their works, without necessarily or painstakingly striving to draw explicit connections among the thematic similarities that some of their works share.

From Nomadic Aesthetics to Nomadic Politics: Nightwood and Two Serious Ladies

When Nightwood was finally published in 1939, Djuna Barnes’s expatriate years were over. Forced to make an exile’s return, she left England for the United States in October 1933. At the time, Jane Bowles was seventeen years old and undergoing treatment for the tuberculosis of the knee in Switzerland. While Barnes’s Nightwood was about to become a cult novel of the century, Bowles was dreaming of her own writing career. By the time Bowles published her first novel in 1943, Barnes had been living at 5 Patchin Place, in Greenwich Village, New York, for quite some time. Recovering from alcoholism and depression, Barnes avoided crowds and became a well-known recluse of Patchin Place. Bowles, on the other hand, eventually became New York City’s socialite who married Paul Bowles. In 1939, they rented a house at 1116 Woodrow Road in Staten Island, a place that inspired Bowles’s novel, Two Serious Ladies (­Dillon, Original Sin 73). In the early 1940s when Bowles was still working on the manuscript of Two Serious Ladies, the Bowleses also moved to Patchin Place, where writers and artists like Djuna Barnes, e.e. cummings, Shane Miller, and Theodor Dreiser lived. They also stayed in Brooklyn and at the Chelsea Hotel, frequently attending the Askew Salon, which was run by Kirk and Constance Askew, where artists like Virgil Thomson, Marcel Duchamp, Salvator Dali, Van ­Vecten, Florine Stettheimer, Muriel Draper, Aaron Copland, and others ­gathered.2 Although Bowles loved socializing, she was also famous for her independent streak. As her biographer, Millicent Dillon, emphasizes, she was not comfortable with the Askew group and spent time with her own friends. Both Barnes’s Nightwood and Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies are works that comment on the 2 For more, see Thomas Bender, The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Area. Bender here describes the culture of the Askew Salon as an interesting blend of politics and aesthetics, but also as an attempt to “sustai[n] the movement of literary modernism during the Cold War era” (135).

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nomadic lifestyle adopted by many American artists who, like Barnes, spent the 1920s in Paris, or like Bowles, joined the 1940s expatriate group to South America and Northern Africa in order to give free rein to creativity. Barnes’s Nightwood taps into the high times of the 1920s American literary expatriation in Europe, beginning with the momentous fall of the Habsburg Empire. The novel explores America’s rise to power through the nomadic character, Robin Vote, the “American” with whom, as Felix Volkbein believes, “anything can be done” (Barnes, Nighwood 39). Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies examines a later era when, disillusioned with America’s Cold War politics, many artists decided to live in exile, like the Bowleses themselves who travelled to Central and South America and who later formed their own literary diaspora in Tangier.3 While Nightwood can be described as a poetic rhapsody for fin de siècle Europe, but also for the disappearing pastoral “America” of the woods, Two Serious Ladies focuses on the complex (post)colonial ideographies of the nomadic ethic underpinning American culture (and America’s past). Both works study how the question of otherness not only pervades American identity and its transcultural underpinnings, but also shapes its relationship to the landscape. While Barnes aligns the American nomad with renegade politics, examining how much race, gender, and sexuality play a part in defining the individual’s space and place of belonging and non-belonging, Bowles emphasizes that the western and non-western forms of travel not only differ, but also collide. The power asymmetries generated by the characters’ ethnic, sexual, and racial differences, but also by their performances, delineate the politics and ethics or lack thereof driving nomadic aesthetics. For instance, Barnes’s representation of Felix Volkbein’s ambiguous past and his Jewish identity becomes a means of exploring how otherness is calibrated, but also performed, mobilized, and re-affirmed. Similarly, her portrayal of the nomadic Robin Vote ­provides space for a unique examination of America’s frontier politics by evoking the literary tradition of the stranger as a marginalized outcast, an outlaw skirting the frontier who re-inscribes the oppressive norms but also queers them by ­refusing to be circumscribed by any particular place or space. S­ imilarly, Bowles’s portrayal of characters like Miss Goering and Mrs Copperfield ­examines the 3 Paul Bowles settled permanently in Tangier, Morocco, in 1947, joining the company of other expatriates like William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Alfred Chester, to name a few. Jane Bowles moved to Tangier in 1948, but lived mainly in hotels and continued shuttling between Morocco, Europe, and the United States. For more details, see Michael K. Walonen, Writing Tangier in the Postcolonial Transition: Space and Power in Expatriate and North African Literature (Surrey: Ashgate, 2011).

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(post)colonial situation by deploying travel as a moving feast where different subjects eat or, metaphorically speaking, get “eaten,” allowing for a cultural analysis of non-linear and asymmetrical, western and non-western, vectors of commodification and discrimination. Both writers complicate the nomadic ethic by emphasizing its (in)humanist aspect, exposing the fine line between freedom and oppression, pleasure and pain, and compassion and cruelty that are born out of displacement and non-belonging. However, one of the most interesting “lessons” garnered from Barnes’s Nightwood and Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies is the debunking of nomadic politics as being intricately bound up in, if not immobilized by, the characters’ specific socio-cultural, racial, and gender, but also geographic, positioning. As Barnes and Bowles show, no matter how involuntary, exile is also a form of travel and discovery. Of course, how, when, and with whom one travels matters. Both writers remain sensitive to the colonial underpinnings of travel as a western and primarily (white) male privilege. The question that pervades their works though is not just whether western men and women travel differently, but also how their individual and/or collective performances of travel complicate and implicate relationships with non-western subjects, as well as how they shape and inspire aesthetic experimentation. In both Barnes’s and Bowles’s novels, nomadism thus functions not only as a theme, but also as an important aesthetic and political device. The pictorial and musical undertones of Nightwood, for example, speak to the inability of language to capture the very nuances of the characters’ individual histories and the various forms of exilic positions they self-create and occupy. Similarly, Bowles’s juxtaposition of western and non-western characters, and western and non-western s­ paces, challenges the realist form by depicting the various realities of individual ­characters not only as social constructs, but also as gendered and racialized markers of power. Last but not least, both writers challenge the myth of the expatriate as being forever on the move, spending much time talking to other artists and wining and dining in restaurants. As Djuna Barnes bemoaned, “[i]t is a mistake to think of expatriates as sitting always and forever at the Dome or Le Sélect, tied hand and foot…. You can’t dinner [sic] forever at Styx” (Herring and Stutman 244). Bowles expresses similar concerns in her letters when she writes about her difficulty to stay put while simultaneously needing to “return.”4 One of the ironies of nomadic politics, as both writers affirm, is the impossibility, but also undesirability, of incessant mobility. They revoke the emancipatory tenor of nomadism by suggesting that no matter how oblivious of destinations and 4 See Jane Bowles’s Letter to Paul Bowles (November 1948) in Out in the World (118).

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origins, nomads expose the very “self-consciousness about positionality” that lies at the heart of transcultural travel (Doyle and Winkiel 3). Although speaking to two different expatriate movements, Nightwood ­commenting on the 1920s literary exodus to Europe and Two Serious Ladies exploring the 1940s experience of the postwar generation of American writers and artists, both novels explore the familiar through estrangement. Their characters frequently seek familiarity in this estrangement, but they also struggle with bouts of nostalgia: the need to feel grounded somewhere. Characters like Felix Volkbein, Nora Wood, Robin Vote, or Dr O’Connor represent different aspects of nomadism: they wander and err in their “holy woods,” but they all search for some kind of a “pissing port” as Dr O’Connor cynically puts it (Barnes, Nightwood 90). Similarly, Bowles’s two serious ladies venture out into the world only to find themselves wanting, needing, and yearning for a connection that brings them “happiness” but also a “certain amount of daring” (Bowles, Two Serious 178). These connections and escapades are fraught with tensions and power asymmetries. By exposing them, however, both Barnes and Bowles speak to the anxieties that pervade the nomadic impulse of American modernism, revealing that nomadism and diasporic politics are, in many ways, linked, if not intertwined. Through their characters, Barnes and Bowles emphasize that there is no travel that is not socio-culturally defined or predetermined, but that there is also no nomadic subject who is not, in one way or another, space- and place-bound. As mentioned previously, the very politics of nomadism generates its own experimental aesthetic that translates mobility into formal crossings and ­frontiers. Barnes’s generic versatility and her ability to synthesize pictorial, ­musical, theatrical, and poetic form into one experience best exemplify the ways in which the nomadic ethic promotes a kind of formal travel but also ­mobilizes abstraction. If Barnes’s work reflects the modernist emphasis on “­total art” (i.e., synthesis of all art forms), Bowles’s engagement with nomadic politics produces its own aesthetic nuances. While Barnes’s renegade aesthetics rely mainly on the poetic, Bowles’s representation of the nomad figure draws connections between politics and aesthetics. In contrast to Barnes’s ­emphasis on decomposition and abstraction, Bowles’s work brings to life the very dualisms and binaries that inform western discourses. What they share however is an emphasis on “experiment as character,” to use Millicent Dillon’s words (“­Experiment” 142). Both writers experiment with means to figure and disfigure through an act of composition that is simultaneously a form of decomposition, a kind of breaking apart of elements in order to make them “new.” The kind of breaking of the narrative, the constant retelling and beginning again that Dillon associates with Bowles’s work, also permeates Barnes’s ­oeuvre. Undeniably, Barnes and Bowles can be called masters of outlaw

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politics: most of their characters are nomadic, but also, in many ways, vanishing subjects. They search so as not to find, not to get lost, or not to disappear in what Barnes refers to in Ladies Almanack as “loneliness estranged” (58). Their short story characters are tableaux vivants of nomadism: they are the embodiment of the paralyzing aspects of mobility, as well as its liberating potentiality. For example, the Trenchards in Barnes’s story, “A Night in the Woods,” are as desperate to find total freedom in the woods as they are eager to embrace the paralysis that they experience when staring at the stars while waiting for their dog to discover them. Similarly, Bowles’s story, “Going to Massachusetts,” ­suggests that nomadism not only stifles the characters’ ability to move, but also provides them with the opportunity to reflect on what lies behind their nomadic drive. Stylistically, their short stories resemble tableaux vivants, telling through suggestion rather than description and progression. Thus, both Barnes and Bowles part with narrative teleology; instead, their stories reflect their characters’ compulsive returns and departures through the persistent narrative circling around the subject of mobility: its pros and cons. Both demolish the idea of emancipatory nomadism by questioning, queering, and exposing the various asymmetries produced by travel.

From the Cruel Gardens of Domesticity to Diasporic Home as Exile: The Antiphon and In the Summer House

The nomadic aesthetic of Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles is inevitably a transcultural aesthetic in which gender, race, and sexuality, but also geography and space play an important part in dissecting and demolishing western socio-­ cultural norms and expectations through stylistic and formal experimentation. As Dr O’Connor says in Nightwood, “the demolishing of a great ruin is always a fine spectacle” (Barnes, Nightwood 142–143). One of the unique strengths of Barnes’s and Bowles’s works is their ability to contain the spectacle by simultaneously dramatizing the twentieth-century re-conceptualization of space that challenged social expectations of gender, race, and sexuality. While known primarily for their novels, Barnes and Bowles also made great contributions to twentieth-century American drama. While their works in general raise questions about socio-cultural calibrations of their characters’ gender, race, and sexuality, their plays become important platforms for questioning the relationship between identity performance and intimacy, the public and the private, and, last but not least, between state and family politics. Barnes’s one-act plays written during the heyday of the Provincetown P ­ layers are an interesting combination of experimental drama and political commentary. Their dialogic mode of expression taps into the twentieth-century

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anabasis that Alain Badiou aligns with an “arduous construction of novelty” and an “exiled experience of beginning,” but also with a “principle of lostness” associated primarily with the “sex in crisis” (The Century 81–82; 80). Of equal importance, however, are Barnes’s The Antiphon (1958) and Bowles’s In the Summer House (1951, 53). These two plays serve as an intriguing cultural study of gender norms, specifically, how they inform the exiled experience but also intensify the principle of lostness described by Badiou as “the root of [any] anabasis” (The Century 82). While most of Barnes’s and Bowles’s works are ­concerned with dismantling gender norms, their two main (and last) plays can be viewed as a reflection on gender in crisis: particularly because both f­ocus on examining exile and its relationship to what this book calls “cruel pastoralism” through complex mother-daughter relationships. In both plays, the mother-daughter relationship becomes an extension of a larger, socio-cultural stage, connoting the challenges of America’s 1950s Cold War conservatism and ­continued politics of containment, but also showing that love for others is inevitably tied up with what Sara Ahmed calls “being-for-the nation” or state politics (The Cultural 123). How the identification with a love-object complicates and reveals the gendering and policing of intimacy is one of the main questions the two plays strive to tackle. In both The Antiphon and In the Summer House, mothers become not only symbols of the state, but also of America’s (post)colonial history. Augusta in Barnes’s The Antiphon is a woman of many faces who dreams of being recognized for her hidden talents. Gertrude and Mrs Constable in Bowles’s In the Summer House represent two alternative positions of motherhood and mothering: Gertrude, like Augusta, is desperate to “normalize” her daughter while Mrs Constable realizes that her daughter, Vivienne, is simply uncontrollable, where Vivienne calls herself a “daredevil” who loves “excitement” and “freedom” (Bowles, In the Summer 231). Both plays foster the kind of “double optic” that Elin Diamond associates with modern drama (11). As Diamond notes, the double optic inscribes modernism’s anti-humanist thrust and it also exposes postmodern preoccupation with “irreconcilable realities” while simultaneously striving to transgress “modernity’s [grand] historical project” (11). Both Barnes and Bowles rely on this optic in order to critique the claustrophobic and oppressive return to domesticity in postwar America. Challenging the postwar domestic cult, they align the domestic idyll with the pastoral drive behind American culture while pointing to its inherent cruelty. Barnes’s The Antiphon in particular challenges the postwar, domestic claustrophobia of 1950s America. Through Augusta’s Cinderella dreams and her rejection of her expatriate daughter, Miranda, Barnes debunks the 1950s nostalgia for the “mythical substrate of America” (Caputi 2). Similarly, Bowles’s

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In the Summer House represents the pastoral and (post)colonial cruelty of the American idealization of the garden as an idyllic space of symbiosis through Gertrude’s tendency to treat her daughter, Molly, as an extension of herself. Both plays rely on spatial juxtaposition to enhance the liminality of the e­ xilic experience. In addition to the juxtaposition between private and public spaces (Burley Hall and the outside), The Antiphon relies on rhetorical counterpoint to delineate the relationship between space and the psychopathology of the characters’ neurotic states of being. In the Summer House similarly juxtaposes private and public spaces in order to depict the “garden” as the liminal point that divides the characters into those who curb their enthusiasm and fit the mold, and those who seek escape from the mundane. Consequently, like Barnes, Bowles is concerned with the politics that shape inside and private spaces. In both plays, love drives the economy of exiled experience. Whereas ­Miranda is exiled by her mother for having spent years as an expatriate in Europe, Molly is persistently “policed” by her mother’s tendency to turn her daughter into a garden ornament and thus affirm her own sense of dominance. In Bowles’s play, this ornamentalization is particularly vexed as Molly’s ­American-Hispanic identity is mentioned briefly, but never quite acknowledged. Both plays showcase the complex power inequities generated by the characters’ intimacy and lack thereof as extensions of larger public events. Whether it is the conservative politics of postwar America or its increasing cultural imperialism as reflected in Bowles’s attention to America’s political ties to Spain and South America, for example, these plays perform what Badiou refers to as the “figurative reknotting of politics,” revealing the intrinsic connection between aesthetics and politics, theatre and spectacle (Badiou, Rhapsody 13). However, in their exploration of the role that theatre plays in family and state politics, The Antiphon and In the Summer House are also interesting stylistically. Both deploy theatre as a total art form, but also as a “material, corporeal, machinic assemblage” (Badiou, Rhapsody 6). Barnes’s generic versatility and her ability to wed pictorial and musical forms together turn The Antiphon play into a “fine spectacle,” a spectacle that represents the kind of “demolishing of a great ruin” that is described by Dr O’Connor in Nightwood. ­Destruction and decomposition drive Barnes’s play. The emphasis on material stylization only further mirrors the decorporealized nature of the puppet theatre to which the mother-daughter conflict and the whole Hobbs family are reduced. Likewise, Bowles’s use of advertising figure puppets in In the Summer House ­exemplifies modernism’s anti-humanist thrust, but it also addresses (post) modernism’s anxieties about cross-cultural intimacies as commodification. Gertrude marries Mr Solarez solely for money while Molly accepts Lionel’s

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marriage proposal to get out of her mother’s “garden.” In both plays, characters are consumed by their choices. The act of consumption is stylized as a fine line between intimacy and commodification. The characters’ consuming politics however become an intriguing reflection on modernism’s aesthetics, specifically on the economy of nomadic ethic as bound up in different ways and in different forms of consumption and destruction. Lastly, both plays investigate the degree to which the state abuses the ­narrative of love to institutionalize sameness as a means to revoke difference. Neither Barnes nor Bowles accepts love as a “sign of respectable femininity” or as being of “maternal qualities,” to use Ahmed’s words (The Cultural 124). By contrast, both writers challenge heterosexual love as “an obligation to the nation” (Ahmed, The Cultural 124). Such obligation is thus forcefully rejected. Barnes’s Titus character is a despot whose understanding of “love” depends on his need to exercise sovereignty. Bowles’s Lionel by contrast, is no Titus, but he too suffers from a dominance complex. He marries Molly because she only “half hear[s] him” and because “there’s something very familiar” about her (Bowles, In the Summer 234). Similarly, neither play idolizes the motherdaughter relationship. Refusing to replace one power asymmetry with another, both of these plays attempt to queer gender and cultural, as well as generic, expectations for their audiences. Barnes’s use of the archaic blank verse and the puppet theatre and Bowles’s use of advertising as puppet theatre pushes the dramatic form to its limits by exploiting its hypermedial quality. While experimenting with different art forms, their plays map how the transposition of one medium into another participates in the process of figurative consumption—one form giving into, and consuming, another. They evoke Artaud’s principle of theatre as cruelty. As he writes in his 1933 essay, “Theatre and Cruelty,” the aim of good theatre should be to “rebuild itself on a concept of this drastic action pushed to the limit” (Theatre 121). As previously mentioned, after seeing In the Summer House, ­Tennessee Williams described Bowles’s play as “one of those very rare plays which are not tested by the theater but by which the theater is tested” (qtd. in Dillon, Original Sin 227). Critics described Barnes’s The Antiphon as a difficult, challenging play. Both plays strove to test the limits of theatre by challenging politics through experimental aesthetics. An attempt to push and test limits best describes Barnes’s and Bowles’s contributions to twentieth-century American literature. Their works queer normative boundaries—whether those boundaries pertain to gender, race, culture, genre, or aesthetics. By queering, however, they do not necessarily attempt to create another norm; their works are cautious about reductive binary-making. More interestingly, their writing suggests that norms also are not necessarily

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stable: they travel just like nomadic subjects and their cultures. Thus, both Barnes and Bowles probe into the complex facets of the nomadic by highlighting its constructive and destructive drives, emphasizing that the pastoral gardens their characters yearn for or occupy are as messy as they are suffocating. Consequently, both Barnes’s and Bowles’s works provide new insights into the nomadic ethic pervading twentieth-century America. They debunk some of its clichés by striving to capture rather than glamorize its intricate, and at times cruel, economy. Their works attend to the hurt and cruelty of mobility that abolishes the old while driving and at times immobilizing the new. While acknowledging the liberating potential of the nomadic ethic, Barnes’s and Bowles’s works tap into complex socio-cultural, gender, and racial topographies, providing the reader with a “tangible laceration,” to use Artaud’s words (Theatre 121), a laceration that serves as a much needed reminder of humanity’s many inhumanities. In capturing these lacerating complexities, both Barnes and Bowles embodied Schiller’s dictum by becoming the kind of writers and artists who lived with their century, but refused to be its creature. While each might have purposely ignored what their century praised, they ­certainly gave their century what it needed: a serious reconsideration of its cultural and ­aesthetic travels.

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Index (db) and (jb) are used to indicate the identity and authorship of Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles respectively. abandonment 75, 128, 130, 134, 157, 159 Abernethy, Arthur T. 74 abstraction, formalist 87 aesthetic equipoise 12 aesthetic gnosis 12 aesthetics feminist 2 of frontier 53 nomadic 2, 4, 6, 23, 26, 81, 83, 203, 206–209 pastoral 5 renegade 35–37, 46, 47, 63, 66, 76, 79, 101, 208 Agamben, Giorgio 9, 21–23, 46, 56, 76, 79 agrarians, proselytizing 57 Ahmed, Sara 23, 124, 146, 173, 174 alienation 9, 12, 27, 40–41, 66–68, 200–201 allegory 66, 76 “Aller et Retour” (db) 46, 47 almanacs 62. See also Ladies Almanack (db) alterity 25, 26, 33, 69, 70, 72, 186, 206 America history of pioneers 53–54, 76, 173 and modernism 8–9, 16–17, 23–26, 31–32, 36–37, 39–40, 46–47, 66–68, 121–124, 208–212 and pioneer tradition 77, 158, 166 American Dream 44, 132, 137, 147, 158, 167, 172, 180, 188. See also happy wife and family and consumerism 19, 172, 180, 188 corruption of 66, 135, 188 and cruelty 160 failure of 172 frontier myth of 3, 5, 25, 167 idyll of 127, 131, 186 and modernist aesthetic 27 and women 147 American identity duality of 40

examination of 34 and forests 43, 69, 77 landscape 17, 18, 39, 77 and mobility 8, 26, 34, 43 shifts in 54, 57 and woods 69, 77, 206 anabasis 81, 210 angels 142 Antiphon, The (db) 11, 103–117, 172, 176, 178, 190, 210–212 antiphony 96, 111, 114, 150, 171, 173, 177, 178, 193 Arcadia 20, 131, 139, 172, 173. See also utopia and ruralism 132 Aristotle 23, 58 art commodification of 63, 192, 201 and detachment 46 as superdance 83, 101 synthesis of 13, 16, 82–84, 86 artist as rider 56 Askew, Kirk and Constance 205 atheology 36, 37, 40, 58, 61, 80, 142 Atkinson, Brooke 190 At the Jumping Bean (jb) 171–172, 191–195, 196 Auer, Claire (jb’s mother) 10 Auer, Jane (Jane Bowles) 10 Auer, Sidney Isaah (jb’s father) 10, 121 Austin, Gale 181 autobiographies, coded 52, 104 Badiou, Alain 35, 37, 61–64, 78, 81–84, 90, 94, 105, 107, 117, 210, 211 Bailey, Jeffrey 196, 204 Bailey, Liberty Hyde 57 Baker, Josephine 14 Barber, Benjamin R. 192, 193 Barnes, Djuna alcoholism and depression 9, 205 biographies about 10, 11, 48, 105

Index coded autobiographies 52, 104 critical success of 212 drafts 11, 104, 116, 123 (See also rewriting) early life 10, 39 education 61 genres 5, 6, 9, 31, 37, 39, 50, 80 (See also poetry writing) in Greenwich Village 98 (See also Patchin Place) illustrations accompanying writing  61, 87, 89, 90, 100, 101 journalism 10, 39, 86–87 literary obsession with death 92, 93 personal struggles 9–10 poetry writing 88–92 (See also Barnes, Djuna, genres) on relationship to land 51 return to America 9, 11, 39, 92, 105–106, 140, 201, 205 rewriting of work 11, 12, 88, 92, 103, 116, 123, 200 (See also drafts) travels of 206 works of “Aller et Retour,” 46, 47 Antiphon, The 11, 103–117, 172, 176, 178, 190, 210–212 Book of Repulsive Women: 8 Rhythms and 5 Drawings, The (db) 61, 87 “Doctors, The” 45 "Duel without Seconds, A” 48 "Earth, The” 42, 162 "Farewell Paris," 105 Five Thousand Miles 94, 95, 97 “From Fifth Avenue Up” 89 “From Third Avenue On” 89 “Grande Malade, The” 47 “In General” 91 “In Particular” 89 “Irish Triangle, An” 100 “Kurzy of the Sea” 100 Ladies Almanack 5, 6, 60–64, 209 Little Drops of Rain 7, 94, 97 “Madame Grows Older: A Journal at the Dangerous Age” 45, 46–47 “Maggie of the Saints” 101 “Night Among Horses, A” 44 “Night in the Woods, A” 24 Nightwood 6, 24–26, 31, 36, 64–81, 130, 202–209, 211

233 “Rabbit, The” 44 “Robin's House, The” 45 Ryder 5, 6, 24, 36, 52–64, 104, 108 “Saturnalia” 49, 50, 200, 201 “Sprinkle of Comedy, A” 4, 41 “Three From the Earth” 100 “To a Cabaret Dancer,” 89–90 “Vantage Point” 105 “Way of Life, A” 105 Barnes, Elizabeth (db’s mother) 10 Barnes, Wald (db’s father) 10 Barnes, Zadel (db’s grandmother) 10 Barnes’s and Bowles’s writing. See Bowles, Jane, works of; titles under Barnes, Djuna, works of autobiographical elements 26, 53, 60, 88, 196, 202 comparisons 5, 6, 10–12, 121–126, 196, 199, 211 contrasts 9, 145 differences in approach to writing 9, 18 home or abroad, notions of 203 legacies, compared and contrasted  201–213 literary aesthetic of 9, 12 normativity challenged in 146, 202–203, 209, 210, 212 and opinions of other women writers  204 (See also women, writers) themes in 1, 4, 5, 8, 9, 22, 24, 27, 41, 50, 79, 107, 115, 138, 145 Bass, Eric 114 Baudrillard, Jean 4 Bauman, Zygmunt 8 Beardsley, Aubrey 61 Beats 20, 107, 172 bell, use and significance of 105, 111, 112, 116, 178, 190 belonging and non-belonging 9, 24, 34, 54, 65, 69, 79, 147, 174, 196–197, 206 Benjamin, Walter 17, 142 Benstock, Shari 15, 21 Bible, The 60 Black, Cheryl 98 blank verse 103, 114, 212 bodies, of women 58–59, 72–73, 84, 89, 101, 128–134, 137, 155 Book of Repulsive Women: 8 Rhythms and 5 Drawings, The (db) 61, 87, 88–91

234 borders. See also frontier exploration of 48, 149 fluidity of 34, 35, 147 geopolitical 3, 5, 6, 8, 20, 126 in illustrations 89 and mythography 25 and nomadism 33, 66, 202, 204 as reformalization of space 2, 4 stylistic 62 boundaries. See also frontier and American frontier 21 between animals and humans 42 destruction of 82 of foreignness 5, 60, 168 geophysical 172 and mobility 35 and nomadic aesthetics 5, 23, 35, 63, 81 normative 57, 66, 74, 81, 131, 146, 202, 212 personal 128, 133, 149 socio-cultural 124, 134, 147, 168 in travel narratives 168 Bowles, Jane alcoholism and depression 11, 200 ambivalence about America 145–146 autobiographical writing 125, 167, 196 biographies about 121 critical success of 141, 181 death of 141 drafts 197, 198 early life 10, 121 education 121 formerly Jane Auer 10 genres 5, 123 husband 10 medical problems 121, 200, 205 in New York 121, 205 personal struggles 10 return to America 10, 12, 145 rewriting of work 12, 121, 123, 149, 196–198, 200 as second-generation American modernist 122 self-doubt about writing 197 self-imposed exile 122, 145, 197, 204 socialite 122, 123, 205 sole manuscript lost 10 travels of 10, 11, 12

Index works of “Camp Cataract, The” 148, 151–161, 176, 192 “Everything is Nice” 162, 163, 167–170, 184 “Going to Massachusetts” 148, 162–163, 179, 195, 209 “Iron Table, The” 4, 24, 166–167, 170, 193–194 At the Jumping Bean 171–172, 191–195, 196 “Looking for Lane” 148, 161–162 Out in the World 196–197 Phaéton Hypocrite, Le 10 “Plain Pleasures” 146, 148–149, 150 Quarreling Pair, A 171, 173, 175, 178–181, 195–196 Two Serious Ladies 6, 24–25, 122–139, 171–172, 203–208 Bowles, Paul (jb’s husband) 11, 122, 140, 151, 162, 166, 176, 197, 204–205 Boym, Svetlana 47–48 Bradbury, Malcolm 15 Braidotti, Rosi 23, 124, 126, 153, 155 Brecht, Bertolt 12, 22 Brinton, Daniel G. 74 Broadway 98, 107, 181, 189 Broe, Marilyn 31 Bruno, Guido 82 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine 142, 144 Burroughs, William (jb’s friend) 140, 145, 185 Cameron, Margaret 177 “Camp Cataract, The” (jb) 148, 151–161, 176, 192 Capote, Truman 166, 171, 185 Casey, Janet Galligani 15, 54 Casseli, Daniela 32, 35, 74, 80, 104 Cather, Willa 158 characters’ sense of location 37, 40 Chase, Stuart 20 Chaucer, Geoffrey 60 Chester, Alfred 145 childishness 192–193, 194 Chodorow, Nancy 154 chorus, in Greek drama 114 Chow, Rey 184 cinema and television, impact of 106, 189

235

Index circus expatriate populace of 74 and mobility 72 and narratives 73, 74 space of 71, 72–78 claustrophobia of domesticity 176, 178, 187, 210 cliff as frontier 179 Clifford, James 38, 203, 204 coded autobiographies 52, 104 Cold War era 20, 122 politics 124, 145, 163, 166, 185, 187, 200, 206, 210 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 7 colonialism 3–4, 26, 32, 39, 63, 203. See also postcolonial hybridity; white privilege and culture 35, 44, 50, 206 and western privilege 124, 143, 182, 183 commercialism 19, 20 commodification of art 63, 192, 201 communism 105–107, 109, 122, 149, 201 consumerism 180, 183, 187, 192, 201 and the American Dream 19, 172 and culture 92 embodiment 124, 191 and infantilism 192 and mobility 188 and nomadism 187–191 paradox of 85 politics of 174, 195 as spectacle 89 urban 54 consumer nomadism 142 conversions (duped versions) 127, 137, 138, 144 Cook, George Cram (alias “Jig” Cook) 99 Copland, Aaron 185, 205 corporeality 3, 8 Barnes on 89, 91, 94, 96, 101, 113, 115, 117 Bowles on 128–129, 131, 162, 211 and humanity 94, 96 of puppet theatre 176, 180 of theatre 176, 211 and transcendence 113 corpus dei 128 Cowley, Malcolm 3, 34, 54 Craig, Gordon 23, 113 creativity and human nature 46 cruel pastoralism 210, 211

cruelty 116, 160, 167, 186, 210, 213 abortive, of pastoralism 195 and displacement 207 garden as site of 185, 211 of pastoral idyll 171, 181, 185 in theatre 115, 212 and victimhood 115 cult of rural virility 57 cultural sovereignty 183 cultures of exile 20, 107, 172 cummings, e.e. 205 Curti, Lidia 123, 140, 141 Dahinden, Janine 196 Dali, Salvador 205 dance. See also superdance and constraint to space 85 as formalized abstraction 84 as form of poetry 86 and masking of performers' bodies 84 philosophy of 86 Danforth, Samuel 60 Danté 60 death, literary obsession with 92, 93 decomposition 81, 83, 86, 211. See also destruction Deleuze, Gilles 2, 5, 17, 21–23, 32, 37 Delsarte System of Expression 83, 84, 86, 99 de Man, Paul 198 Democritus 7 de Saint-Point, Valentine 13–14, 82, 83–85, 88, 92 desire and love 66–68, 79, 174–175, 177, 187 destruction 105, 107–108, 124, 139, 140, 142, 211. See also decomposition deterritorialization 22, 23 Diamond, Elin 185 diaspora 9, 36, 49, 117, 123, 196, 209. See also displacement; exile; nomadism artistic 19, 48, 124, 206 and asymmetries 8, 18, 149, 169 and consciousness 32, 34, 35, 38, 164 emotional 79 formal 8, 16, 204 and idealization of space 68, 150 imaginary 34, 35, 123, 204 and intimacy 48 as journey 38, 200, 203 and landscape 8, 38, 40, 68

236 diaspora (cont.) and longing 9, 71, 75, 203 and modernism 8, 18, 32, 33, 60, 142 and nomadism 32, 124, 203 and pastoralism 4, 71, 77, 141 politics of 8–9, 18, 40, 68, 196, 203, 208 socio-cultural 70, 148, 164 and terra exotica 145 Dillon, Millicent, biographer of Bowles 121, 141, 151, 165, 205 displacement 8, 21–22, 26, 34, 54, 79, 130, 138, 154. See also diaspora; exile; nomadism and alienation 27, 71, 123, 145, 170 Barnes and Bowles on 11, 21 consequences of 141, 152, 157, 160, 167, 207 cruelty of 207 and mobility 12, 18 and nature 40, 41 and nomadism 48, 133, 157, 167, 198, 203 political 33, 70, 75, 203 trajectories of 131, 143 vs. travel 141, 143, 144 and white privilege 33, 127, 160 “Doctors, The” (db) 45 domestic claustrophobia 176, 178, 187, 210 Doolittle, Hilda (“H.D.”) 1, 75 double optic 172, 178, 210 Doyle, Laura 18 drafts 11, 12, 88, 92, 103, 116, 121, 123, 149, 196–198, 200 drama. See also tableaux vivants; theatre; individual names of plays American 92, 209 and dance 83 and dialogue 94, 96 early twentieth century 94, 100 and experimental forms 93, 99, 106, 209, 212 Greek influences on 93–99, 101, 109, 111, 114, 150, 151 making of “native” American 98–99 modernist 171, 210 and monologue 93, 94, 150 and music 75, 79 realist 172, 189, 194 surrealist 176, 177 and transmediality 100

Index drama of ideas 113, 151 Draper, Muriel 205 drawings, ink 87. See also illustrations, accompanying writing dream, pastoral 192 Dreiser, Theodor 205 duality of human nature 42 Duchamp, Marcel 205 Duchartre, Pierre Louis 61 ducking of origins 4 “Duel without Seconds, A” (db) 48 Duncan, Isadora 14, 83, 85, 98 dysfunctionality, in families 10, 104, 107–110, 190–191 “Earth, The” (db) 42, 162 Eckleburg, T.J. 188 Edmunds, Susan 52, 53 Edwards, Jonathan 46 ekphrasis 5, 67, 79, 101 Eliot, T.S. 46, 83–84, 89, 163 emancipatory modernism 131–132 embodiment, of liminality 72, 137, 144, 181 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 16, 23, 46, 158 emigration, from Europe 39 emotional diaspora 79 empowerment, of women 48, 114, 125, 169, 170, 198. See also power, asymmetries enfleshment, poetic 88, 89, 90 ennui 4, 48 epistemological uncertainty 172 equipoise, aesthetic 12 errancy Barnes on 32, 35, 36, 47, 63, 66, 67, 69–73, 76, 78 Bowles on 147, 208 “Errant Walker” (Thoreau) 57, 59 erring 66 estrangement 46, 47, 208, 209 être-ange-té 142 “Everything is Nice” (jb) 162, 163, 167–170, 184 exile 24–27. See also diaspora; displacement; nomadism Barnes on 33, 48, 59, 65, 68 Bowles on 141, 146, 154–155, 166, 199 as diasporic home 209 ethics of 6, 8, 9, 138, 206 as form of dwelling 8, 9, 10, 12, 18, 21, 22

Index as form of travel and discovery 207 liminality of 211 and modernism 20 role of 15, 20–21 vs. sense of home 71, 74–75 exiled bodies 69, 72 exiles 65 exilic experience 210, 211 exilic positioning 37, 79 exodus, to Connecticut 54 expatriation in early twentieth century 3, 4, 5, 18, 20 movement 3, 23, 24, 25, 71, 124, 205, 208 narratives of 21 Faist, Thomas 196 family dysfunction 10, 104, 107–108, 109, 110, 190–191 “Farewell Paris” (db) 105 farmer as symbol 54, 56–57 Faulkner, William 158 feminist aesthetic 2 feminist nomadism 154, 198 Fenimore Cooper, James 153, 158 fetishization of motherhood 185 of the west 164, 165, 166 Field, Andrew, biographer of Barnes  48, 105 figurative nomad 155 Fitzgerald, F.S. 15, 21, 22, 66, 67, 188 Five Thousand Miles (db) 94, 95, 97 foils, in modernism 54, 151 food, meaning of 175, 184 foreignness 24, 60, 69, 142–143, 168 and boundaries 5, 60, 168 forests. See also woods and American identity 43, 69, 77 and pastoralism 3, 34, 69, 76, 126 as symbol of alienation 66, 68 formalist abstraction 87 Formalists, Russian 22 Francis, Penny 189 Franklin, Benjamin 60 Freud, Sigmund 17 Friedan, Betty 147 Friedman, Ellen G. 1, 31 “From Fifth Avenue Up” (db) 89 “From Third Avenue On” (db) 89

237 frontier aesthetics of 53 and boundaries 21 of cliff 179 and liberty 44 liminality of 188 mythology of 4, 53, 68, 69, 124, 158, 166 politics of 172, 206 Fuch, Miriam 1, 31 Galligani Casey, Janet 15, 54 garden green, myth of 18, 34, 65, 66, 69 liminality of 211 as site of cruelty 185, 211 symbolism of 211–213 as symbol of suffocation 182–186, 188–191, 194 Garner, Stanton B. 172 gender and politics 202 and power inequities 42, 211 (See also power, asymmetries) Gikandi, Simon 127 Ginsberg, Allen 149 gnosis 7 aesthetic 12 “Going to Massachusetts” (jb) 148, 162–163, 179, 195, 209 golah 141 Goldhill, Simon 109 Goody, Alex 2, 15, 21, 31 “Grande Malade, The” (db) 47 Grant, Madison 19 Greek drama and philosophy 93–99, 101, 109, 111, 114 Green, Michelle 166 green garden myth 18, 34, 65, 66, 69 Greenwich Village 98. See also Patchin Place Guattari, Félix 2, 5, 17, 21, 22, 23, 32, 37 Guggenheim, Peggy 31, 201 Gysin, Brion 145 happy wife and family 106, 109–110, 114, 115, 187. See also American Dream; American identity; consumerism Harlem Renaissance 50 Hartley, Marsden 14, 16, 18, 75, 76, 77, 78 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 158

238

Index

Hazard, Lucy 8 H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) 1, 75 Heidegger, Martin 21, 46, 204 Hemingway, Ernest 21, 31, 67, 75 Herring, Phillip, biographer of Barnes  10, 11, 105 historiographic nomafictions 25, 25n 26, 90, 139 Hobbes, Thomas 108 Hobsbawm, Eric 163 Hollywood 106, 133 homelessness 27, 33, 67, 74, 177. See also diaspora; displacement; exile; nomadism Homer 7 homo sacer (sacred man) 56 Hurston, Zora 158 hybridity, postcolonial 133, 164, 165

iron table, symbolism of 166, 170, 194 “Iron Table, The” (jb) 4, 24, 163, 166–167 Irving, Washington 153

idealism, in the 1950s 106, 109–110, 114, 115, 178, 187 idealization of countryside 56 of space 68, 150 ideographies, pastoral 204 ideologies, of state 172–174, 179, 185 idyllic diaspora 141, 146 illustrations, accompanying writing 61, 87, 89, 90, 100, 101 and borders on 89 imagery 42, 52, 63 Immigration and Neutrality Act (1924)  60, 106 immigration to America 39, 63, 71, 106 inaesthetic 35, 61, 63 incorporeality 180 Indians 131, 155, 159–160 in-ethic 35, 76, 79 infantilism 192–193, 195 and consumerism 192 “In General” (db) 91 ink drawings 87 “In Particular” (db) 91 intermediality 33, 61–62, 63, 67, 90, 202, 204 intertextuality 33, 34, 53, 60–61, 67, 70, 80, 103 In the Summer House (jb) 121, 171–174, 181–191, 195–196 “Irish Triangle, An” (db) 100

Kandinsky, Wassily 6, 13, 16, 63, 67, 83, 88, 90, 101 Kaplan, Caren 20, 21, 23 Kennedy, Charles Rann 85, 86 Kennedy, Gerald J. 21 Kennedy, J.F. 163 Khrushchev, Nikita 163 Kime Scott, Bonnie 42, 52 Klee, Paul 22, 142 knights errant 65, 69 Kocks, Dorothee 15, 34 Kolocotroni, Goldman and Taxidou 18 Kraft, James 147 “Kurzy of the Sea” (db) 100

Jarry, Alfred 13, 23 “Jig” Cook (George Cram Crook) 99 journalism 10, 39, 86–87 journeys. See also errancy; nomadism; travel abroad 131 in art 201 diasporic 124, 200, 203 and frontier myth 159 and identity 140, 198 and nomadic idyll 125, 159 and pursuit of exile 141 of self-discovery 152 spiritual 146, 173 Joyce, James 15

Ladies Almanack (db) 5, 6, 60–64, 209 Lakritz, Andrew 139 l'amour 177 landscape and American identity 17, 18, 39, 77 and diaspora 8, 38, 40, 68 as form of atheology 45 importance of 32, 41 and relationship to art 46 and religion of space 70 rhetoric of 58 role of 6 and ruralism 37 le bonheur 134, 137 Le Corbusier 14

Index Lee, Josephine 180 Lee, Regina 164 legal sovereignty 110–111 leitmotifs 12, 14, 122 le mur 177 Le Phaéton Hypocrite (jb) 10 l’étrange 142 l’être ange 142 liberty and frontier 44 liminality embodied 72, 137, 144, 181 of exile 211 of frontier 188 of gardens 211 of spaces 71, 108, 110, 175–176, 180, 183 Little Drops of Rain (db) 7, 94, 97 Locke, John 58 Loncraine, Rebecca 2 “Looking for Lane” (jb) 148, 161–162 lostness 81 Lougy, Robert 148 love and desire 66–68, 79, 174, 175, 177, 187 love politics 173 machine age 2, 14, 15, 32, 80 Machor, James L. 17, 25, 26, 37, 39, 186 “Madame Grows Older: A Journal at the Dangerous Age” (db) 45, 46–47 Maeterlinck, Maurice 112, 181 “Maggie of the Saints” (db) 101 Maier, John 168, 170 Mallarmé, Stéphane 7, 112 manuscript lost 10 Marc, Franc 6, 13, 16, 63, 88, 90, 101 marginalization 72, 79, 206 Marranca, Bonnie 189, 194 Martyniuk, Irene 60 Marx, Karl 17, 18 Marx, Leo 34 masking of performers 84, 110 Matthiessen, F.O. 8 Maver, Igor 9 McCarthyism 106, 109, 185 McFarland, James 15 McGuinness, Patrick 112 melodrama 191 Melville, Herman 73, 77 memory 47, 65 Mencken, H.L. 3

239 Messerli, Douglas 61, 87, 200, 204 métachorie 13–14, 81–85, 88, 101 defined 13, 83 migration, from rural to urban America 39, 54, 56 milk, as symbol 175, 178, 179 Miller, Arthur 185 Miller, Shane 205 Minh-ha, Trinh T. 124, 147, 151, 164, 168–169 mobility 2, 5–10, 12–13, 16–20, 96, 129–131, 134, 179, 184, 188, 195–196, 202, 207–209, 213. See also movement; nomadism and American identity 8 of boundaries 35 circus as space of 72 and consumerism 188 cruelty of 213 cultural 5 and immobility 13, 19, 24, 26, 34, 51, 127, 195, 202 negatives of 179, 207, 209, 213 and nomadographies 27, 208 vs. stasis 108 symbols for 184 upward 136, 144 and women 89 and women’s empowerment 2 modern art development of 13–16 holistic nature of 16 modalities of 13–14 modernism 12, 15, 18, 20, 62–63, 75, 80, 126, 203 abstract concepts of 32 aesthetics of 9, 27, 32, 71, 77, 106, 128, 211 agenda of 34, 162 American 2–3, 8–9, 16–17, 23–26, 31–32, 36–40, 46–47, 66–68, 121–124, 201, 208 and anti-humanism 162, 210, 211 in the arts 13–15, 33, 61, 67, 83, 90, 122, 163, 171, 208 defined 15 and diaspora 8, 18, 32, 33, 60, 142 and drama 171, 210 and emancipation 1, 131–132 and exile 20 and experimentation 6, 188, 203 and lack of American literary tradition  67–68 mantra of 105

240 modernism (cont.) and mobility 5, 12, 17 mortician of 92, 117 nomadic 5, 7, 15, 33, 204 as quality of characters 6 themes of 12, 67, 172 thesis of 113 transatlantic 2 urban vs. pastoral aspects of 15 and utopias 130 and women 21, 129, 134, 140 and women writers 1 modernity, nature of 8 Morris, Christopher 8 mortician of modernism 92, 117 motherhood and American identity 147, 153–154, 174, 185, 210 fetishization of 185, 210 and Nature 57, 59 and relationships 58, 173, 182–183, 186, 190–191, 210, 212 representing the motherland 39, 65, 105, 108, 111–112, 114, 153 motifs of nature 41, 42, 43, 44 movement. See also mobility; nomadism literary associations with 7, 8 motivations of 47 movements, early twentieth century 9, 16, 18–20, 39, 49, 63 Murphy, Gerald 3, 14 music aesthetic of 6, 13, 61, 67, 68, 79 and drama 75, 79 musica ficta 75 mythographies 4, 5, 22, 26, 32, 76, 126, 129 and borders 25 mythology, of frontier 4, 53, 68, 69, 124, 158, 166 Nancy, Jean-Luc 90, 91, 92, 101 narratives and circus 73, 74 diasporic 34 of expatriation 21 historical 63 modernist 132, 135 parody in 53, 57 in third person 26

Index trans-local and transnational 9, 126, 196 of women writers 21 Native Americans 167. See also Indians nativism, and racism 15, 19, 54, 57, 60, 106, 149, 164, 166, 184–185 Neutrality Act (1939) 106 Nicholls, Peter 15 “Night Among Horses, A” (db) 44 “Night in the Woods, A” (db) 24, 37, 44 Nightwood (db) 6, 24–26 nomadic aesthetics 2, 4, 6, 23, 26, 81, 83, 203, 206–209 nomadic and exilic politics 38 nomadic consciousness 66, 170 nomadic encounters 147, 148 nomadic ethic 195, 206, 207, 213 nomadic modernism 5, 7, 9, 15–16, 21–23 nomadic pastoralism 25, 33 nomadic politics 124, 162–165, 173, 196, 207–208 nomadic sensibility 5, 21, 22, 23, 166, 173 nomadic utopias 24, 139, 181, 186 nomadic war machine 17, 21, 32 nomadism 8, 22. See also displacement; exile; movement and borders 33, 60, 202, 204 and consumerism 187–191 and diaspora 32, 124, 203 emancipatory 124, 127, 131, 132, 207, 209 feminist 154, 198 figurative 155 and modernism 5, 7, 15, 33, 204 pastoral 159, 167, 170, 181 tree house 152, 156, 157, 158–159, 160, 181 as vehicle of emancipation 22 nomadographies 8, 27, 126 of characters 143 cultural 3, 12, 25, 27, 126 and mobility 27, 208 and modernism 3, 126 and pastoral aesthetic 5 regional 8 nomadology, theory of 17, 21, 22 nomads, feared 157–158 nomafictions 22, 25, 25n19, 26, 90 nomos 21–23, 45, 58–59, 108, 111 treatment of 37

Index normativity and boundaries 57, 66, 74, 81, 131, 146, 202, 212 written challenges to 66, 146–148, 167, 172–174, 178–180, 191, 199, 206 nostalgia 48, 49 for American rurality 15, 39, 50, 62, 126, 208 object-puppets 189, 194 O’Connor, Flannery 158 Olauson, Judith 185 O’Neal, Hank 116 O’Neill, Eugene 106, 185 otherness 25–26, 33, 69–72, 186, 206 Out in the World (jb) 196–197 Paes de Barros, Deborah 148 Paine, Thomas 153 Panama 131, 132–138 Panama Dream 132, 136 Pan-American Dream 138 Paris stories (1920–1938) 45–48 parody in narratives 53, 57 Parsons, Deborah 15 pastoral aesthetic 5 pastoral cruelty 171, 181, 185. See also cruelty theatre of 196 pastoral dream 192 pastoral ideographies 204 pastoral idyll 4, 56, 72, 77, 187 fictions of 74, 80, 186 pursuit of 126, 132 and sameness 174, 180 as utopian space 71, 75, 181 pastoralism as American mythology 3, 72, 76 and diaspora 4, 71, 77, 141 and nativism 54 nomadic 25, 33 vs. urbanism 14–15 utopian 18, 25, 95 pastoral nomadism 159, 167, 170, 181 pastoral space 193 pastoral turn 3–4, 9, 24, 32, 50, 56 Patchin Place 39, 116, 200, 205. See also Greenwich Village patriarchy, undermined 52

241 Pells, Richard 183 performers, masking of 84, 110 persona, and reputation 31 physis 58 Pindar 58, 106 pioneers 42, 56, 152, 155, 156 in American history 53–54, 76, 173 American tradition of 77, 158, 166 mockument of 53 restlessness in 158 “Plain Pleasures” (jb) 146, 148–149, 150 poetics of space 32, 36, 66 poetic transformation 47, 79 poetry writing 88–92. See also Barnes, Djuna, genres politics of consumerism 174, 195 of diasporas 8–9, 18, 40, 68, 196, 203, 208 (See also diaspora) of frontier 172, 206 of the heart 68 of mis-seeing 147 of nomadism 124, 162–165, 173, 196, 207–208 polygamy 10, 53, 59 postcolonial hybridity 133, 164, 165 postmodernism 18, 122, 124, 172, 203 Post-Paris stories (1938–1980) 48–50 Pound, Ezra 75 power asymmetries 124, 146–147, 150, 164, 168–169, 206, 208, 212 inequities and gender 42, 211 Prague Linguistic Circle 22 Pratt Institute 61 Pre-Paris stories (1914–1920) 40–45 privilege western and colonialism 4, 124, 143, 182–183, 207 white 33, 36, 165, 207 Promised Land (America) 19, 33, 70, 71, 73, 76, 77 proselytizing agrarians 57 prostitutes 131, 134, 135. See also sex workers; streetwalkers psychodrama 58, 178, 189 puppetry, use of 6, 26, 112–114, 171–181, 188–189, 194–195, 211–212 Puritan errand 54, 59, 60

242 Quarreling Pair, A (jb) 171, 173, 175, 178–181, 195–196 queerness 59, 66, 70, 146, 174–175, 180, 206, 212 “Rabbit, The” (db) 44 race, and ethnicity 42, 50, 51 racial sovereignty 58, 74 realism, in drama 172, 189, 194 rebels 35, 184, 203. See also renegades reclusion 39, 92, 123, 140, 205 re-creation 57 reformalization of space 2–3 and borders 2, 4 regionalism, of American identity 32 renegade aesthetics 35–37, 46, 47, 63, 66, 76, 79, 101, 208 of music 75, 82 renegades 6, 35–36, 41, 51, 76, 78, 85, 93. See also rebels in art 103, 107 defined 35, 37 and ethics 37, 46, 62, 77, 79, 80 as knights errant 69 as nomads 35 and politics 47, 70, 206 qualities of 52, 59, 71, 79–80, 90, 101, 203 sensibilities of 40, 94 re-siting 168–170, 202, 203 restlessness 2, 8, 25, 69, 78, 121–123, 163, 199 in pioneering 158 return to America 9, 11, 39, 92, 105–106, 140, 201, 205 of expatriates 48, 49 rewriting 9, 11–12, 88, 92, 103, 116, 121, 123, 149, 196–198, 200 Rhys, Jean 1, 15 rider artist 56 Ripley, William Z. 74 “Robin’s House, The” (db) 45 roles, of women 55 Romantics, French and German 7 Roosevelt, F.D., notion of rurality 54, 58, 60 Roosevelt New Deal era (1935–1938)  17, 50, 106 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 7 ruralism of Arcadia 132

Index fiction of 15 ideographies of 39 idyllic environment 34, 54 and landscape 39 vs. metropolitanism 139 and modernism 15, 16, 54, 56 myth of 56 and women 55 Rushdie, Salman 204 rus in urbe 17 Russell, Thaddeus 74 Russian Formalists 22 Ryder (db) 5, 6, 24, 36, 52–64, 104, 108 as coded autobiography 52, 60 as parody 53, 60 Ryder, Albert P. 61 sacred man (homo sacer) 56 sacred places 58, 78 sacred space 16, 69, 77 Said, Edward 164 Sajed, Alina 9 Samuels, Shirley 153, 155 sanctum sanctorum 58 “Saturnalia” (db) 49, 50, 200, 201 Saulnier, René 61 Scandura, Jani 19, 60 Schachter, Allison 18 Schedler, Christopher 149 Schiller, Friedrich 7, 12 Schloss, Carol 152 Schopenhauer, Arthur 7 scission 91 Seligmann, Kurt 176 sex workers 132, 134, 135, 136. See also prostitutes; streetwalkers Shakespeare, William 108 Shohat, Ella 23, 34, 124 Sillitoe, Alan 121 Simmel, Georg 17 Skerl, Jeannie 139 Smith, Oliver 166, 171, 181 sovereignty cultural 183 legal 110–111 of power 110–111, 212 racial 58, 74 space and borders 2, 4

Index circus 71–78 and dance 85 liminal 71, 108, 110, 175–176, 180, 188 pastoral 193 sacred 16, 69, 77 “Sprinkle of Comedy, A” (db) 4, 41 Stam, Robert 23, 34 state ideologies 172–174, 179, 185 Stearns, Harold 3 Stein, Clarence and Wright Radburn, Henry  17 Stein, Gertrude 1, 21, 85 Stephens, Wallace 89 Stettheimer, Florine 205 Stevenson, Sheryl 52 storytelling, and travel 81, 148 Strasberg, Lee 172 streetwalkers 89, 134. See also prostitutes; sex workers “Suicide” 90 superdance 83, 101 surrealist drama 176, 177 symbolism 14, 36 of the body 72–73 for mobility 184 of nature 36, 52, 59, 66 synthesis. See métachorie synthesis, of art 13, 16, 82–84, 86 tableaux vivants 82, 83, 92, 98, 113, 133, 209 Taylor, Judith 104 techné, 22, 90 terra aesthetica 9 terra exotica 145 terra incognita 75 theatre. See also drama; puppetry, use of corporeal nature of 176, 211 as cruelty 115, 212 of images 194 limits of 212 of pastoral cruelty 196 theatricality 87, 94, 98, 111–112, 115, 116, 208 third-person narration 26 Thompson, Virgil 149, 205 Thoreau, Henry David 6, 16, 23, 46, 57–59, 158 “Three From the Earth” (db) 100 threshold 76. See also liminality Thurston, Michael 19, 60

243 “To a Cabaret Dancer” (db) 89–90 Toklas, Alice 190 Toles, George 139 transatlantic modernism 2 transcendentalism 2, 16, 18, 23, 33, 46, 158 parody of 53 transcultural elements 25, 26, 36, 69, 70, 72–74, 77, 126, 131–134, 137, 146, 165, 168, 184, 202–203, 206, 208–209 transformation, poetic 47, 79 translocality 9 transmediality 100, 116 travel as colonizing force 204 narratives and boundaries 168 and storytelling 81, 148 tree house nomadism 152, 156, 157, 158–159, 160, 181 Trinh T. Minh-ha 124, 147, 151, 164, 168, 169, 202 Troup, Cynthia 177 Truman era 122, 149 turn, pastoral 3–4, 9, 24, 32, 50, 56 Turner, Frederic J. 8 Two Serious Ladies (jb) 6, 24–25, 122–139, 171–172, 203–208 Tythacott, Louise 176 urbanism and consumerism 54 vs. pastoralism 14–15, 17, 203 and American identity 54 urban-pastoral dialectic 24 urban-pastoral ideographies 37, 39, 40, 186 urban pastoralism, and industry 16 urban space, and negative effects 45 utopia 76, 130, 138, 149, 183, 195, 203. See also Arcadia collapse of 71 of dramatic music 75 dreams of 24, 25, 34, 46, 75, 79 ecological 34 elements of 51, 75, 127, 130 elsewhere 15, 16, 143 female 154 hybridized 33 in Mexico 20 and modernism 130 mythographies of 126, 170

244 utopia (cont.) nomadic 24, 127, 139, 181, 186 and pastoral idyll 18, 25, 71, 75, 95, 124, 129 postcolonial 4 subtext of 128 utopos 126, 129 “Vantage Point” (db) 105 Vecten, Van 205 via negativa 112 Vietnam 163 Vizenor, Gerald 159, 168 walls, symbolism of 169, 170 Walonen, Michael K. 140, 166, 168, 169, 170 war machine 17, 21, 22–23 Warren, Diane 2 “Way of Life, A” (db) 105 Weinreich, Regina 176, 177 Welty, Eudora 204 western fetishization 164, 165, 166 western privilege and colonialism 4, 124, 143, 182, 183, 207 Westley, Helen 7 white privilege 33, 36, 165, 207 Whitman, Walt 7, 16, 23, 33 Williams, Tennessee 121, 171, 181, 185 Winkiel, Laura 18 Wolf, Werner 61 women and the American Dream 147

Index bodies of 58–59, 72–73, 84, 89, 101, 128–134, 137, 155 empowerment of 48, 114, 125, 169, 170, 198 and mobility 2, 89 and modernism 21, 129, 134, 140 roles of 55 and ruralism 55 writers 1, 21, 148 Barnes’s and Bowles’s opinions of  204 Wood, Thelma (db's lover) 52, 60 woods. See also forests and American identity 69, 77, 206 freedom in 24, 43–44, 53, 130, 178–180, 209 mythology of 36, 50, 56, 69, 193 as symbol 66, 208 Woolf, Virginia 13, 15 Wordsworth, William 7 works of Barnes and Bowles. See under Barnes, Djuna, works of; Bowles, Jane, works of writing blocks 9–12, 123, 195 and illustration 87, 89, 98, 100, 101 with poetic rhythm 86 on social shifts 56, 105 by women 1, 21, 148, 204 yearning for idyllic places 8, 9, 50, 65, 95, 141, 144, 193, 213. See also love and desire; pastoralism