Nightwood
by Djuna Barnes
Review byThe Plaid Adder
Comments:plaidder@mindspring.com
Actually, sort of one and a half. What I liked about it was two things: the sense of humor, and the almost complete absence of all that "oh my God, I'm an invert, how can I stand myself" stuff that makes The Well of Loneliness such a horrible experience. The main lesbian relationship is as naturalized as anything ever gets in this book, and the description of their life together and how Nora gradually starts to lose her hold on Robin was, I thought, affecting and very beautiful. There's a scene in which Nora walks in on Dr. Matthew O'Connor as he's lying there in his filthy apartment wearing a wig, makeup, and a woman's nightgown, and Nora just sits down and starts talking to him without skipping a beat. O'Connor's own monologues range so far and wide over every possible aspect of everything that by the time he starts talking about how when he's cruising the outhouses of Paris looking for men he can always tell what district his new interest is from by the size and shape of his family jewels, you don't even notice it happening.
That's the thing I like best about the book--that by getting away from the traditional psychological-depth naturalistic mode of storytelling, Barnes is able to get away from the pathologizing and perverting view of homosexuality, and revel in all the things that cause Radclyffe Hall so much angst. "I have a narrative," says the doctor at one point, "but you will be put to it to find it." And because you have to work so hard to find the narrative, Barnes didn't have to worry about what the censors would be thinking. They changed some things and removed some particularly hot-button phrases and words for the censors; but as to what's really going on in this story, well, a censor could only have been totally baffled. So she's able to write these relationships which are, if not exactly positive, at least given the same dignity and significance as a het romance would be; and when these relationships fail, they fail because of the ephemerality of human happiness and the impossibility of true love and a load of other philosophical and existential problems, and not because the invert is a curious and highly unstable creature.
What gave everyone the most trouble about the book was actually not the form so much as the content, and specifically Barnes's treatment of Felix Volkbein, Robin's Jewish husband. Liza reacted violently to his portrayal as being blatantly anti-Semitic, to the point where it made it hard for her to get anything out of the rest of the book. My position was that after seeing the kind of anti-Semitism demonstrated by some of Barnes's modernist colleagues-- Ezra Pound being the lead runner here--Felix in some ways is a breath of fresh air; he's the most fully developed character in the novel, in a lot of ways, and although he is essentially being used as the butt of an extended joke about the absurdity of heredity and bloodlines and family histories, by the end of the novel his relationship with his son and his friendship with the doctor have given him a kind of compassion and dignity that most of the other characters don't have. Still, it is undeniable that Barnes harps on Felix's Jewishness to an unnecessary extent, and that she appears to accept and exploit the idea of a Jewish "racial personality" in her treatment of him.
Anyway, for the people who were willing to just let go and be confused, I think Nightwood was very liberating. Liza initially hated it, but once I read her the "Watchman, what of the Night?" chapter--which is essentially just a monologue delivered by the doctor in a nightgown--in the car on the way to Chicago, she warmed up to it a little bit. I enjoyed it, but could more or less take it or leave it.
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