Djuna Barnes' Consuming Fictions

Diane Warren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351159661
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) was a pioneering female journalist, experimental novelist, playwright, and poet whose influence on literary modernism was profound and whose writings anticipated many of the preoccupations of poststructuralist and feminist thought. In her new book,the author argues that Barnes' writings made significant contributions to gender and aesthetic debates in their immediate early twentieth-century context, and that they continue to contribute to present-day debates on identity. In particular, Warren traces the works' close engagement with the effects of cultural boundaries on the individual, showing how the journalism, Ryder, Ladies Almanack, and the early chapters of Nightwood energetically and playfully subvert such boundaries. In this reading, Nightwood is contextualised as a pivotal text which poses questions about the limits of subversion, thereby positioning The Antiphon (1958) as an analysis of why such boundaries are sometimes necessary. Djuna Barnes' Consuming Fictions shows that from the irreverent and carnivalesque iconoclasm of Barnes' early works, to the bleak assessment that conflict lies at the root of culture, seen from the close of Nightwood, Barnes' oeuvre offers a profound analysis of the relationship between culture, the individual and textual expression.

Chapter 1
The Critical Context

‘No one will be much or little, except in someone else’s mind, so be careful of the minds you get into’ (Nightwood 334)

‘must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?’ (Nightwood 306)

Up to and including Nightwood (1936), Barnes’ texts were written and published in a cultural context where, through censorship in particular, the reader could be a very important force. As the opening quotations show, the texts are self-consciously aware of this, and the doctor’s argument that the individual’s (and by implication, the text’s) true worth lies in the minds of others, emphasises his awareness of the power of interpretation. The doctor’s warning to Nora to ‘be careful of the minds you get into’ resonates with his own anxiety that he should ‘guard [himself] against the conclusions of [his] readers’ and further emphasises the links between subjectivity, textuality, and the power of the reader. This anxiety over the consequences of interpretation reflects Barnes’ own awareness of readerly impact, borne out of the oeuvre’s publication and reception history. Most notably, after Ryder was censored in 1928, Barnes made sure that the censor’s excisions were marked in the text, thus providing testimony of the damaging effects of this early reader’s response. Later, as Nightwood was in production, T.S. Eliot removed a number of overt references to homosexuality, and provided a rather grave introduction, in an attempt to control the work’s reception, and presumably to forestall censorship. Later still, angered by Kenneth Burke’s reading of Nightwood, Barnes refused permission for his essay to use quotations from the novel; Burke retaliated by allowing his text to be printed without the quotations, making his essay a kind of ironic echo of Ryder, and further stressing the tense and contested relationship between work and reader.

Nightwood’s initial reviewers were also aware of the high stakes of interpretation, particularly in a publication context where, although the legal definition of obscenity remained vague and subjective, censorship was possible. The New Statesman’s anonymous review of Nightwood speaks to this tension, and implicitly acknowledges that it invests the reader with a great deal of power over the work’s status:

it is to be hoped that no puritanical busybody will take umbrage at its unconventional background and occasionally shocking references. The test of a book’s obscenity is said to be its power of corrupting those who are open to corruption; and, had I a daughter whose passion for mistresses and older girls were beginning to cause scandal and alarm, I should certainly insist that she read Night Wood [sic]. If, after observing the awful fate of Robin, Nora, and that particularly horrible woman, Jenny Petherbridge, she did not enter a religious retreat or immediately announce her engagement to some thoroughly eligible young man, I should realise that the time had come to say good-bye: that all I could do was to buy her a dinner jacket and turn her loose. (Marcus, ‘Mousemeat’ 198)

The complex moral tone of this review attests to many of the cultural tensions present in the 1930s context. While the reviewer is happy to mock those who consider that to discuss a topic is to endorse it, and hence to corrupt the innocent, by pointing out what a disastrous series of relationships lie at the core of the work, they also underscore the cultural marginality of lesbianism by commenting that, should the hypothetical daughter really be attracted to women, then there would ultimately be no alternative to ‘say[ing] good-bye’, effectively disowning her. Although it satirises any attempt to curtail Nightwood’s circulation, the review remains a rather double-edged revocation of moral panic, which nevertheless underlines the important role played by the critic in the publication life of a work, and to offer an implicit response to the doctor’s anxiety about the conclusions of his readers.

Although Barnes’ work has not been vulnerable to the threat of censorship for many years now, the complexity of her oeuvre requires high levels of readerly engagement, and generates widely differing responses, as the works continue to be extensively made and re-made in the ‘minds [they] get into’ (Nightwood 334). In order to provide a contextual backdrop for both my own readings, and for the oeuvre itself, I will trace some of the main currents in Barnes criticism in this chapter. I have not included a full survey of the works’ initial reviews, but publication reviews of Nightwood, at least, are accessible through Jane Marcus’ ‘Mousemeat’; my main focus has been on critical works from the 1940s onwards. Where the earliest of these reviews, influenced by New Criticism and T.S. Eliot, often focus on the gravity and difficulty of Barnes’ works, critics from the 1970s are more conscious of needing to explicate the texts, and attempt to locate them against a modernist backdrop. Feminist critics have worked hard to give fellow scholars access to information about the cultural contexts that Barnes worked in (on both sides of the Atlantic), as well as generating important and diverse readings. Two major biographies have also been issued. Many of these readings turn on similar conceptual and thematic issues: the relationship between the human and the animal, the extent to which the works trace a progress of degeneration, and the complexity of the textual surfaces themselves, have been recurrent focal points. It is, however, only since critics have been able to draw on both poststructuralist and feminist discourses that the works have been accessible to readings that acknowledge the interdependence of thematic and structural debates, rather than regarding either the content or the style as distraction from the main debate.

Early readers often focused predominantly on Barnes’ style, and the complexity of the works. Joseph Frank, for example, used Nightwood as a keynote text in his theory of spatial form in literature (1945), and, later on, Alan Singer drew on Nightwood to redefine critical approaches to the novel in The Metaphorics of Fiction (1983). James B. Scott and Louis Kannenstine produced important overviews of Barnes’ works in the late 1970s, but they concentrated on style at the expense of gender, thus neglecting an important aspect of the oeuvre. Empirical feminist criticism, manuscript study, and the reissue of many of Barnes’ early works made major contributions to 1980s and 1990s scholarship, by enabling their readers to have a much clearer sense of the conditions Barnes (and her female colleagues) worked in. More recent readings have engaged with poststructuralist feminism and queer theory, allowing them to address the ways in which the stylistic play of the texts intersects with many of their conceptual concerns: a combination which allows the productive ambivalence of Barnes’ oeuvre to be explored, despite the readerly anxiety this often generates. My own readings also draw on poststructuralist feminist thought and Bakhtinian theory, in particular, to explore the ways in which Barnes’ fiction both destabilises, and attempts to move beyond, binary cultural structures.

Many of Barnes’ readers have drawn on psychoanalytic theory, regardless of their other critical investments, and this study is no exception. It seems to me that the oeuvre’s engagement with psychoanalytic theory illustrates a characteristic ambivalence insofar as the works both draw on, and satirise, psychoanalysis. This type of dual manoeuvre often generates critical anxiety, and it will be apparent in the analyses that follow that critical concern over the texts’ allegiances remains. Whereas in the 1920s and 1930s anxiety tended to focus on the extent to which the texts might be obscene or pathological, more recent readings are concerned to determine the extent to which texts may be anti-Semitic, satirical towards lesbian culture, or complicit in the power structures that they critique. Critical-political investments have shifted, but Barnes’ subtle and ambivalent texts retain the ability to unsettle their readers’ ethical responses, and it is this, I would argue, that keeps the texts vibrant and engaging.

Biographical Criticism

Ironically perhaps, the complex textual surfaces of Barnes’ oeuvre have, I think, encouraged a surprisingly wide range of critics to draw on the biographical in shaping their readings. Full-scale Barnes biography begins with Andrew Field’s Djuna: The Life and Times of Djuna Barnes (1983), re-titled: Djuna: The Formidable Miss Barnes in 1985. The shift in title is indicative of Field’s focus on Barnes as a personality, and the work is characterised by a tendency to equate Barnes’ life and work. Field’s approach has influenced both feminist and non-feminist readings, including Phillip Herring’s 1995 biography. Herring’s work does provide a much more thorough reading of the historical evidence than Field’s work offers,¹ and Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes is a thoughtful and compendious study, which, in general, ably places its subject in the context of early twentieth-century culture. Even so, Herring makes the unprecedented claim of using Ryder (1928) as a source text for the biography. Herring argues that the decision is uniquely excusable in Barnes’ case, because she told James B. Scott that Ryder was ‘completely autobiographical’ (Herring, Djuna 313n). Herring’s biography is also conspicuous for omitting a discussion of recent feminist criticism of Barnes’ work: an omission which sparked a fierce critical debate, prompting the anger of Jane Marcus in particular, and foregrounding tensions within the criticism of modernist women’s prose.²

The third biographical text I want to mention is Hank O’Neal’s memoir Life is Painful, Nasty and Short…. O’Neal became Barnes’ friend and de facto personal assistant in the months leading up to her death, and his memoir provides a unique insight into her later life. Although O’Neal dispels one myth about Barnes’ life (he notes that she was not as poor as both she and critical commentators thought, and so did not need to live so frugally) he does otherwise seem to take her comments at face value. As a result, Barnes emerges out of the memoir as a rather homophobic, conservative, timorous old woman. This perception has nuanced even some of the most engaging recent criticism. For example, Nancy J. Levine remarks in ‘The Cinema Vamp and Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood’ that:

Friends of hers who cared for the aging author tell me that she liked to think of herself as a ‘proper Victorian lady.’ Barnes’ disapproval of loose living, expressed with some vigor in Repulsive Women, and even in Ladies Almanack did border on prudishness. But she always granted the unregenerate, cocky sexual miscreant special dispensation, especially if the vamp was adolescent as well as evil. (275–6)

Although Levine’s work is very engaging, she has nonetheless been influenced by anecdote. It is difficult to see how a sense of prudishness (marginal or otherwise) can be justified by a reading of Ladies Almanack: a work that closes with the playful narration of a kind of eternal flame of lesbian cunnilingus. It would appear then that, long after Field’s biography, and the development of feminist criticism of Barnes’ work, her image may still cast a reductive shadow over her work.

I would argue that, rather than read Barnes’ autobiographical statements as keys to decoding her texts, it is important to acknowledge that they are part of a textual field which demonstrates many of the same characteristics as the fiction. Thus, anti-lesbian comments can be read as destabilising strategies which undercut the development of Barnes’ reputation as a purely ‘lesbian’ writer. In this, Barnes’ comments stop the formation of binary counter-canonical identification, echoing the fiction’s refusal to simply swap hierarchical polarities, and complicating the question of verifiability. The interrelation between Barnes’ life and texts stresses the constructed nature of history far more vigorously than it suggests the mimetic nature of writing: a point accentuated by the heavily stylised theatrical interviews that Barnes produced in her early years as a journalist.

Style

Many critical readings of Barnes’ work focus on the question of style within the texts: a focus which put these analyses on a collision course with some feminist critics. Shari Benstock, for example, writing in Women of the Left Bank, considers that the early critical focus on modernist textuality evades engagement with the works’ content (242–3). Certainly, much of the early Nightwood criticism does not discuss the homosexual content of the work in a positive light. Kenneth Burke’s essay ‘Version, Con-, Per-, and In- (Thoughts on Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood)’ thoughtfully addresses the structural role played by rhetorical turns in the work, but only after dismissing much of the content of the novel. Burke remarks ‘it exploits sex: more specifically, homosex, [sic] particularly Lesbianism (for even the primary “male” voice of Dr. O’Connor suggests not so much a womanish man as a woman’s perverse idea of a womanish man, […])’ (242). However, despite his dismissive attitude to much of the work’s content, Burke’s close focus on the operation of rhetorical tropes does begin to offer the possibility of non-linear ways of reading Nightwood.

Although much of the early stylistic criticism of the work tends not to relate the work’s subversive mode of expression to its content, many of the other essays which interrogate the question of language are at least not dismissive of the content. Thus, Elizabeth Pochoda’s work on the question of the ‘hoaxing’ aspects of Nightwood’s style (1976); Alan Singer’s assessment of the role of metaphor within fiction (1983); and Lawrence Schehr’s essay on the ‘folds’ within Nightwood’s style (1985) may not address the feminist aspects of the content, but they all recognise that slippery and playful textual strategies are an integral part of the oeuvre, deserving serious consideration. This area of criticism then establishes Barnes’ reputation as a serious stylist whose expression is worth close consideration, rather than the writer of excessively inaccessible texts.

In ‘Style’s Hoax’ (1976) Elizabeth Pochoda offers a reading of Nightwood which closely interrelates style and content, ultimately suggesting that Barnes’ fiction culminates in its own disintegration. Pochoda implicitly places Nightwood as the close of the oeuvre, thereby neglecting the critical implications of The Antiphon. First she argues that Barnes’ ‘idea is that the conventions of realistic fiction are the familiar clothes which too easily conceal violence horror and impertinence’ (187). She then argues that the novel is underpinned by a paradoxical and self-annihilating strategy, commenting that:

Nightwood […] has gone so far in implicating its own beauties in the general malady that art cannot be said to arrest horror. […] its beauties are built on barbarities, and the only resolution must come from the breakdown of its beautiful style to wordlessness […] (190)

Pochoda’s critique has much in common with Louis Kannenstine’s reading of Barnes’ oeuvre, published a year later in 1977.³ Neither of them can see the movement beyond duality as a positive step. In this then they both implicitly position the works (and Nightwood in particular) as studies in decay and degeneration: to transgress is still to be outcast, rather than to challenge the assumptions on which the conceptual edifices of centrality and marginality are based.

Spatial Form and Modernist Positioning

Both Joseph Frank’s and Alan Singer’s work positions Nightwood as a key text in the theorising of twentieth-century literature, based on its downgrading of plot in favour of the spatial and metaphorical respectively. Frank’s work makes particularly strong claims for Nightwood. In ‘Spatial Form in Modern Literature’, (1945) Frank argues that Nightwood offers a literary form of cubism, and he elaborates the cubist point to suggest that Nightwood is more experimentally advanced and daring than the work of Proust, Flaubert and Joyce, whose writing he considers to be much more naturalistic than Nightwood (27–8). Frank was one of the earliest critics to argue that the novel proceeds to a point of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: ‘realism is no food for a child’
• 1 The Critical Context
• 2 Travels with the Pen Performer
• 3 ‘“Everything is true that is honoured”’
• 4 ‘gleanings from the shores of Mytilene’: Parody, Pastiche and the Almanack
• 5 Dying to be an Individual
• 6 ‘“Only the scorned and the ridiculous make good stories”’
• 7 ‘the fadged up ends of discontent’
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• Index