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ABSTRACT
In Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, Nora Flood sees Robin Vote by way of deflection, looking away from the beloved to better see her. This article will discuss the conditions of perception in Nightwood: how the act of seeing, as a product of knowledge (rather than a means of knowing the world), is forsaken for an alternative modality of seeing that moves away from identification and brings the less visible into view. The narrative of the sexual deviant is rearranged to resist straight reading practices. By developing a lens of negative perception, this article argues that seeing the world in perpetual negativity, at a slant, and as bent bodies in Nightwood is a queer response to the experience of being excluded from the positive, heteronormative narrative and yet still enduring and existing within it.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Carissa Foo is a lecturer of Humanities (Literature and Writing) at YaleNUS College, Singapore. She received her Ph.D. from Durham University (UK) where she worked on women’s experiences of place in modernist writing. Her field of research is early twentieth-century writing and its dialogues with continental philosophy, gender and queer studies.
Notes
1 These destinations tend to direct the individual towards ‘futurity’ in the way of ‘birth, childhood, adolescence, marriage, reproduction, death’, all of which preclude the queer (Citation2006, 21).
2 In The Promise of Happiness, Ahmed discusses how happiness is measured in order to understand its distribution. One way of measuring happiness is to correlate happiness levels and social indicators, resulting in ‘happiness indicators’ that reveal ‘which kinds of people have more happiness’ (Citation2010, 6). Marriage is an indicator of the good life.
3 Although Nightwood presents a society of others, Robin’s asociality can be attributed to her escapist disposition that inhibits relationships: she is ‘fundamentally estranged from love itself’ (Kern Citation2011, 22).
4 Oxford Reference Online: ‘perceive’.
5 Oxford Reference Online: ‘negative’.
6 Oxford Reference Online: ‘negation’.
7 In his analysis of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Bell discusses how Jack’s glass eye serves as a metaphorical blindness, ‘an unseeing gaze’ that offers him an ‘ideological scope that divides the world into object of immediate utility or frivolous waste’ (Citation2007, 190). What he terms the ‘the false eye of I-identity’ produces ‘the smooth, plastic evenness of unity’ so as to solve the ‘chaotic anxiety of subjectivity’, effectively flattening out the multiplicity and conflicts of the self (191).
8 In The Modernist Novel, Stephen Kern describes master narratives as narratives that ‘make sense of experience for large numbers of people’ (Citation2003, 9).
9 Excerpts from Barnes’s letters and comments to Emily Holmes Coleman are published in Cheryl J. Plumb’s Citation1995 critical edition of Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts.
10 José Muñoz describes queerness as ‘that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing’ (Citation2009, 1). Accordingly, Nightwood’s emphasis on the night can be read as ‘an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world’ (1).
11 It is useful to remember Caselli’s recent caution that ‘Queer cannot work as a label or a category’, for the novel throws into question the very premise of what is, since ‘neither perversion nor normativity are in their proper place in the novel’ (Citation2019, 151). Caselli is right to remind us that queer is not simply a category but a means to make ambivalent and uncertain one’s sense of good and bad, light and dark, outside and inside. For a more detailed reading of ‘the aesthetics of uncertainty’, see ‘“If Some Strong Woman”: Djuna Barnes’s Great Capacity for All Things Uncertain’ (Citation2019).
12 Warren suggests that Robin’s description is a manifestation of the perceiver’s desire, which aims to ultimately ‘seduce’ the reader. She does not name the seductive power of the projected scene, though it is implied that ‘the idea of the woman’ is attractive to the unnamed perceiver (Citation2008, 128).
13 I will use the term ‘bent’ throughout my discussion in an attempt to recuperate the criminal ‘bent’. Terms like ‘crooked’ and ‘invert’ were once camp talk, coded words used by queers without the presence of heterosexuals (Norton Citation1997, 45). The term ‘queer’ is a recent recuperation; only in the last few decades have we witnessed the prevalent use in critical scholarship, normalising what used to be disparaging slurs. It is important for my discussion on queer existence and lesbian love to use the term ‘bent’ for if queers do not use queer-terms, and critical works on queer do not use them, these words will continue to be misread as derogatory and negations of heteronormativity.
14 For a detailed reading of the posture of bowing down and how it relates to shame, see Taylor’s Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism (Citation2012).
15 Potter’s argument on Barnesian humanism hinges on her analysis of the ‘beast-human boundary’ as a figurative blurring of social, temporal, and narrative lines (Citation2019, 63). Even though she writes specifically on animal imageries, her ideas of belonging and ‘the shared humanity of outsiders’ help to illuminate the conflicted relationship between Jenny and Nora (Citation2019, 65).
16 For a detailed reading of negative affect, see Wendy Brown’s ‘Wounded Attachments’ (Citation1993) and Judith Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power (Citation1997).
17 Barnes to Coleman, 23 June 1935. See correspondence in Cheryl J. Plumb’s edition of Nightwood.