Literary Modernism and Beyond by Lehan Richard;

Author:Lehan, Richard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2009-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

VI

Ford Madox Ford created a realism based on the reader not being able to connect the dots, stemming from the inability of the narrator to understand the story he is telling, and the inability of the last of the aristocrats to find meaning and understanding in a world that no longer shared their sense of values. Djuna Barnes takes this sense of misunderstanding one step further, and in Nightwood (1936) gives us realism based on the inability of the major characters to find reciprocity in others. Here Barnes took a limited number of characters and depicted them at spiritual odds with themselves and with each other. Her story unfolds like a rejoinder to Plato’s belief that individuals are incomplete until they find the complement to their soul. But instead of finding the mate who completes them, Barnes’s characters encounter the person who will most disrupt their lives.

The novel brings into being two worlds—one of day, the other of night. These realms have their analogue in historical time. The realm of night takes us back to the mysterious origins of humanity; the realm of day takes us through the transformations of civilization. This process, however, instead of securing historical stability, has led to historical dysfunction. We live in an evolutionary divide: human beings have lost their animal instinct but have not found a new source of emotional unity. The human species is thus out of sync with itself, and the individuals who make up the species have fragmented and mutated into radical forms of the self at the cost of not progressing toward a unified psyche.

The central character in Barnes’s narrative is Robin Vote. At the beginning of the novel she has apparently fainted. “Born somnambular,” she has fallen into a strange, comalike sleep. She lies on her bed seemingly arrested in the midstep of a dance. Her room, in the midst of the city, has taken on the vestiges of the jungle, complete with a variety of plants and singing birds. These details suggest her suspended state, both historical and personal. She seems caught between two evolutionary states, the jungle and the city, the primitive and the civilized; she is frozen in a physical moment of beauty, caught as if in a frieze.

Robin has married Felix Volkbein, who has coaxed her into having a child. But this has led to a crisis in her life: she lives aimlessly, wanders listlessly about the city, even as she converts to Catholicism. The nuns in whom she confides realize that she is living prehistorically: her mind is confined to an ancient realm that precedes the concept of sin and absolution; she is outside the boundaries of both modern history and religion, a mutant embodiment of a malfunctioned evolutionary process. She gives birth to a sickly son, takes to drink, resorts to more wandering, and becomes distracted beyond Felix’s means of communicating with her. Finally, she abandons both her child and Felix and leaves Paris for America.

In America, she takes up with Nora Flood, historically rooted in an ancestral family, working now as an advance agent for the Denckman Circus.

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