1. Series 1, Box 9, Djuna Barnes Collection, University of Maryland, College Park. [BACK]

2. Phillip Herring, Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes (New York: Viking, 1995), 233. [BACK]

3. T. S. Eliot, Introduction to Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (New York: New Directions, 1937), xi. I cite this edition only for Eliot's introduction. For all other references to Nightwood , I cite the new corrected edition: Djuna Barnes, Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts , ed. Cheryl J. Plumb (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995). References to this edition are noted in my text as N followed by the page number. [BACK]

4. Critics have had great difficulty in characterizing Barnes's work in literary historical terms. Louis Kannenstine, for example, describes it as "transitional": "As Miss Barnes's art can be seen as both related to its time and yet apart from it, it can be concluded that she is a transitional writer whose purpose was to get out of the mainstream and participate in a great tradition, and who now takes a place in her own time between the early innovators of this century and the later generations of experimental writers." Kannenstine, The Art of Djuna Barnes: Duality and Damnation (New York: New York University Press, 1977), xvii. Douglas Messerli takes Nightwood (along with Wyndham Lewis's The Apes of God , notably) as an exemplary instance of "non-modernist fiction." This term refers to works with an intrusive authorial voice that exceeds the boundaries of modernist personae and concerns itself more immediately with the reader. Messerli, "The Role of Voice in Non-Modernist Fiction," Contemporary Literature 25, no. 3 (1984): 281-304. Marilyn Reizbaum, following Jane Marcus, speaks of Barnes's ''modernism of marginality," which compels a reexamination of the central categories by which modernism has been described and its canon selected. Reizbaum, "A 'Modernism of Marginality': The Link between James Joyce and Djuna Barnes," in New Alliances in Joyce Studies , ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1988), 179-189. Most recently, Donna Gerstenberger describes Barnes as having a ''free-floating relation" to both modernism and postmodernism: "Barnes clearly shares time and space with those we call our British and American modernist writers, a definition that has been increasingly generalized with the circulation of descriptive notions of postmodernism. What Barnes does not share is a clear adherence to some central tenets of modernism, even given modernism's shifting critical constructions." Gerstenberger, "Modern (Post) Modern: Djuna Barnes among the Others," Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, no. 3 (1993): 33-40. [BACK]

5. I refer, of course, to Eliot's renowned essay of 1919, "Tradition and the Individual Talent." I cite freely from the text as printed in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot , ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 37-44. [BACK]

6. Paul Mann, The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 64. [BACK]

7. Craig Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Post-Modernism," in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation , ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 235. [BACK]

8. Owens, "Allegorical Impulse," 235. [BACK]

9. Djuna Barnes, Ladies Almanack (Elmwood Park, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1992), 55. Cited in text as LA. [BACK]

10. In a notebook jotting, probably from November 1917, Barnes writes: "Even God could not keep straight the things he had planned in a line—." Series 1, Box 1, Djuna Barnes Collection, University of Maryland, College Park. [BACK]

11. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel , trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), 40-41. [BACK]

12. "The face is what anglers catch in the daylight, but the sea is the night!" (N, 79). [BACK]

13. Elsewhere, to Felix, O'Connor speaks of "the almost fossilized state of our recollection" ( N , 100). [BACK]

14. Djuna Barnes, "When the Puppets Come to Town," Morning Telegraph , 8 July 1917. [BACK]

15. Dietmar Voss and Jochen C. Schütze argue that the family provides a privileged space for the bourgeois novel's presentation of individual fate as typical: "The novel is forced, according to its logic of form, to orient itself toward social spaces corresponding to the basic character of that familial space in which individual and class history were still mediated in a particular way." Voss and Schütze, "Postmodernism in Context: Perspectives of a Structural Change in Society, Literature, and Literary Criticism," New German Critique 47 (1989): 122. In the modernist novel, they argue, familial space is still crucial, but the link between class and individual becomes problematic, and subjective consciousness and memory take on a preponderant importance (122-123). Only with such "advanced montage novels'' as those of Alfred Döblin and John Dos Passos, they conclude, is the "image space" of the novel "emancipated from the horizon of the individually experienceable" (123), and thus logically also from its familial focus. [BACK]

16. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 446. [BACK]

17. Walter Benjamin, "Central Park," trans. Lloyd Spencer, New German Critique 34 (1985): 35. [BACK]

18. Gertrude Stein, "The Gradual Making of the Making of Americans," in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein , ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), 252. [BACK]

19. Djuna Barnes, Ryder [1928] (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990). Cited in text as R. [BACK]

20. Kannenstine, "The Art of Djuna Barnes," 36. [BACK]

21. For a discussion of filiation and affiliation in modern literature, see Edward Said, The Text, the World, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 16-17. [BACK]

22. See M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination , trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 172ff., for Rabelais's use of this technique. [BACK]

23. In her poem "The Ineffectual Marriage," Barnes's friend Mina Loy satirized the futurist writer Giovanni Papini in an analogous way. "Miovanni" pompously declares his visionary independence of time and space, including the mundane matter of the dinner "Gina" has cooked for him. The poem breaks off with an ironic note to the reader: "This narrative halted when I learned that the house which inspired it was the home of a mad woman?' Loy's poem appeared originally in Others: An Anthology of the New Verse , ed. Alfred Kreymborg (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1917). [BACK]

24. In returning to the settings and characters of Ryder in a tragic mood in her post-World War II play The Antiphon , Barnes will make this Noah analogy explicit. The father-polygamist in that play calls his house "Titus's Ark." [BACK]

25. Elsewhere Sophia offers the following portrait of the artist: "[Wendell] plays, he writes, he can do many things; he has, only imagine! operas to his credit, with full orchestral directions planned, and executed amid the din of hungry children, on a deal table, littered with nothing more than the never-out-of-sight-of-the-hungry-and-the-distressed, bread and water" (178). [BACK]

26. Barnes, like Beckett, at times saw the invention of speech—which for humanism differentiated humans from the animals—as a natural-historical disaster. In a film review, she once wrote of a mute character: "So exceedingly painful and poignant he makes silence, that I begin to wonder if we as a race have not made a great mistake in becoming articulate." Quoted in Kannenstine, "The Art of Djuna Barnes," 15. Wendell Ryder threatens to generalize this mistake to the whole of creation. [BACK]

27. In certain respects, this boy anticipates Felix's son Guido in Nightwood , who, in his feebleness and his desire to become a priest, destroys his father's vision of perpetuating the Volkbein lineage. [BACK]

28. Letter to Peter Heggie, 5 September 1970, Series 1, Box 1, Djuna Barnes Collection, University of Maryland, College Park. [BACK]

29. For discussion of the various figures to whom Ladies Almanack is "keyed," see the essays by Frances M. Doughty, Susan Sniader Lanser, Frann Michel, and Karla Jay in Silence and Power: A Reevluation of Djuna Barnes , ed. Mary Lynn Broe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 137-193. [BACK]

30. Though not funded by Natalie Barney, as Bridget Elliott and Jo-Ann Wallace claim in Women Artists and Writers: Modernist (im) positionings (New York: Routledge, 1994), 154. According to Phillip Herring, "Barney had nothing to do with its publication." It was paid for by Robert McAlmon, with Barnes herself footing the bill for reproduction of the drawings and William Bird supplying some production help. See Herring, Djuna , 149-153. [BACK]

31. Karla Jay, for example, argues that on both social and economic grounds Barnes had to be careful about identifying herself as a lesbian. Jay, "The Outsider Among the Expatriates: Djuna Barnes' Satire on the Ladies of the Almahack, " in Broe, Silence and Power , 193. [BACK]

32. Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life," in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays , trans. Jonathan Mayne (New York: Da Capo, 1964), 12. [BACK]

33. Guillaume Apollinaire, The Poet Assassinated and Other Stories , trans. Ron Padgett (London: Grafton Books, 1985), 46-47. [BACK]

34. The OED gives as variant spellings of the word almanac : "almenak, almanch(e), amminick, almanacke, and almanack." [BACK]

35. See Herring, Djuna , 112-116, for Barnes and yon Freytag-Loringhoven. [BACK]

36. Steven Watson, Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991), 270. [BACK]

37. Walter Benjamin, "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia," in Reflections , ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 192. [BACK]

38. Theodor W. Adorno, "Looking Back on Surrealism," in Notes to Literature , vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicolsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 88. [BACK]

40. On this point, see Vincent P. Pecora, Self and Form in Modern Narrative (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 17. [BACK]

41. As Alan Wilde writes, "What we confront finally is a different kind of complexity: the heroism of consciousness making art of its own uncertainty and expressing in its very form, in the express rejection of an easy resolution, the difficult aesthetics of crisis." Wilde, Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Post-modernism, and the Ironic Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 27. [BACK]

42. Pecora, Self and Form in Modern Narrative , 30. In quite different terms, Leo Bersani has also criticized the redemptive appeal in modernism, as a devaluation of both art and historical experience: "The catastrophes of history matter much less if they are somehow compensated for in art, and art itself gets reduced to a kind of superior patching function, is enslaved to those very materials to which it presumably imparts value." The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 1. [BACK]

43. On this tradition, see Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). [BACK]

44. In Following Djuna: Women Lovers and the Erotics of Loss (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), Carolyn Allen offers a sophisticated discussion of the problematic of identification in lesbian fiction, including that of Djuna Barnes. She seeks to reveal the "erotics of reading" set in play by lesbian fictions. The reader, in her oscillation between surrender to the text and mastery of it, is seduced by it; the movements of desire shaped by the reading are integral to the meaning of the text, and, alternately, the formal and figural elements of the text evoke certain perturbations of desire. This kind of reading, in turn, has given rise to a tradition of lesbian writing, as in the case of Bertha Harris, who was "seduced" in this way by the example of Barnes and her Nightwood . Although she places ''identification" in scare quotes, and emphasizes "resemblance" over "sameness,'' Allen nonetheless envisages primarily identificatory ways of reading these texts, ways of reading in which the reader's erotic desire is directly engaged. Methodologically, she employs a homology between lived relations between women, representations of characters' relations with one another, and the relation of the reader to the lesbian text. My interpretation of Nightwood parts company with Allen's otherwise salutary focus on dynamics of reading at just this latter point. For in her treatment of the diegetic relations of characters in Nightwood , Allen treats them as empirically given and uses psychoanalytic concepts to analyze them. Her interest in the "exemplary" value of literary representations for questions of lesbian erotics as such overshadows a key aspect of the characters in Nightwood : they are, through and through, readers—obsessive producers, consumers, transmitters, interpreters, and advocates of texts. I would argue that through her handling of character-readers, Barnes puts obstacles in the way of her text's functioning as "exemplary." As I suggest in what follows, Barnes pushes this problem to the brink of a radical uncoupling of desire from the text, at the cost of its deconstruction as a meaningful narrative and the acceptance of its derisive loss of sense. [BACK]

45. Cf. the opening chapter of Ryder , "Jesus Mundane," in which an unidentified voice delivers a homily on the image, which, read against Felix's statement, seems a warning for his sort: "Reach not beyond the image. For these idols and these lambrequins and these fluted candles . . . and the altar, and the chancel, and the nave, and aisles, are not for thee in the spirit, but for thee only in the outward manifestation; nor are the Beasts for thee, with the eyes back and the eyes front, nor for thee the bleeding of the heart, with its fire and its ice" (3-4 ). [BACK]

46. In a striking letter of 1919 in which Barnes tells of a bedside vigil with a dying woman, she reveals her horrified fascination with the uncanny idea of life-in-death: "Mary has been given up by z nurses, z doctors and a score of others at least 10 days back, but she still breathes. . . . It looks as if I might be left alone with her in the last hours. . . . The last doctor said that he could not see how she still lived—She sleeps with open eyes and has to gasp for every breath and no longer gets any clots up neither do her bowels move and she has not eaten more than half a glass of milk a day for 5 days—She is delirious but knows it is delirium while she is going through it, and she suffers a great deal—and yesterday she about killed me by trying to put her arms around me saying 'You see the way it is with me' and then 'Can't you help me?' Of course the most terrible—is that she has lived beyond her own death." Letter to Courtenay Lemon, 1919, Series I, Box 9, Djuna Barnes Collection, University of Maryland, College Park. [BACK]

47. As Cheryl Plumb notes, this arrangement of chapters was not Barnes's original order but rather a suggestion of the editors: see pages xii-xiii of her introduction to Nightwood . Nonetheless, Barnes accepted this suggestion and never amended it in any later edition. Therefore, whatever the conditions of genesis of this particular ordering of the work, effects of the arrangement, such as I discuss here, must be seen as arising out of an objective situation of the text. [BACK]

48. Barnes's flirtation with Catholicism as an answer should be seen in the context of a neo-Catholic tendency within modernism advocating a "rappel à l'ordre": Cocteau, de Chirico, and Eliot, most prominently. Barnes's mother, interestingly, gave a cultic interpretation of Nightwood's significance for modern humanity: "Some day you will produce the almighty man or woman who will go down the ages as the typical character for man to emulate. And then you will have started a new religion, which we need more than ever since they—meaning mankind—has swept Christ into limbo."—Letter to Djuna Barnes, 3 November 1936, Series I, Box z, Djuna Barnes Collection, University of Maryland, College Park. [BACK]

49. Michel de Certeau, "The Arts of Dying: Celibatory Machines," in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other , trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 159. [BACK]

50. In a letter to her mother, Barnes expressed her view of life as something "monstrous" and "obscene," "with the most obscene track of the end." Letter of 19 February 1923, Series 1, Box 2, Djuna Barnes Collection, University of Maryland, College Park. More directly relevant here, however, is Barnes's strong resistance to T. S. Eliot's suggestion that she change her description of Robin's final fit of laughter as ''obscene" to ''unclean." Barnes glossed Eliot's page proof correction thus: "Sample of T.S.E.'s 'lack of imagination' (as he said)." Series II, Box 4, Djuna Barnes Collection, University of Maryland, College Park. [BACK]

51. Alan Singer, A Metaphorics of Fiction: Discontinuity and Discourse in the Modern Novel (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1983), 58. [BACK]

52. Georges Bataille, "The Practice of Joy Before Death," in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 , trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 235-239. [BACK]

53. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman , trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 198. [BACK]

54. This incoherence is especially manifest in the editions previous to the recent restored edition. A connecting anecdote was cut, which exacerbates the gap between Felix's question and O'Connor's answer. However, the difference between the editions is a matter of degree, not of essence. Shortly after the "horse that knew too much" anecdote, Barnes herself underscores the mono-logic nature of O'Connor's response, indicating that she intended his answers to seem inappropriate and incongruous: "The doctor, as he grew older, in answering a question seemed, as old people do, to be speaking more and more to himself" ( N , 101). [BACK]

55. In this respect, O'Connor's fallible mysticism could be seen to cast its shadow over the spiritual interpretation urged on Barnes by her friend Emily Coleman. Coleman felt that Nightwood , despite its evident genius, failed to realize the tragic potential in the love of Robin and Nora; Dr. O'Connor's storytelling and homilizing distracted, Coleman thought, from this "central" tragic node. Coleman even went so far as to edit out some of O'Connor's more ribald stories before submitting the manuscript to Eliot (putatively anticipating his response) and to offer Eliot her own views about which passages might be cut. Coleman, however, believed that Barnes was capable of achieving a genuinely religious pathos. Thus, in a letter of 1 August 1935, Coleman told Barnes: "Poetry changes life for me: it is moral. I can never be quite the same after reading your chapter on Night, and what you say in your book about evil." In another letter of 27 August 1935, Coleman tells Barnes explicitly: "Your writing is original mystic poetic writing." Barnes was considerably irritated over what she perceived as Coleman's meddling (despite Coleman's heroic efforts to get Nightwood published). I believe this irritation came not just from Barnes's legendary testiness and suspicion but also from Coleman's insistent failure to grasp the book's overall satiric design. (The correspondence with Coleman is in Series 1, Box 3; Coleman's essay, in Series 1, Box 4, Djuna Barnes Collection, University of Maryland, College Park.) [BACK]

56. Maurice Blanchot, "Literature and the Right to Death," in The Gaze of Orpheus , trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill, 1981), 39. [BACK]

57. With his machinic assemblages, the Swiss artist lean Tinguely explored a terrain analogous to Duchamp's. In mockery of claims made by modernist critics that abstract expressionist paintings gave access to the subconscious, archetypal depths of the painter's mind, Tinguely assembled a painting machine to produce huge numbers of technically perfect abstract paintings, each as "new" as the last. His ramshackle musical machines, in contrast, parodied modernist serial music in its appeal to a rational, mathematical ideality. In both cases, however, Tinguely's mechanical supplanting of the creative artist satirizes modernism's appeals to a transcendent source of meaning for the artwork, wherever that source might be situated. [BACK]

58. De Certeau, "The Arts of Dying," 161. For an insightful discussion of an author less equivocally committed to this mode than Barnes, see Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel , trans. Charles Ruas (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1986). [BACK]

59. Jean-François Lyotard, Duchamp's TRANS/formers , trans. Ian McLeod (Venice, Calif.: Lapis Press, 1990), 65, continued on 68. [BACK]

60. Lyotard defines a simple machine as a device of two or more parts that produce effects disjunctively distributed; that is, its parts move in opposed directions. Hence the most rudimentary possibility for making a machine is to erect a transparent partition, which both joins and disjoins the two halves. Duchamp's TRANS/formers , 41-47. [BACK]

61. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit trace the connection between violence and representation in Bersani and Dutoit, The Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art and Modern Culture (New York: Schocken Books, 1985). Bersani develops this perspective further in his provocative study, The Culture of Redemption . [BACK]