Nightwood as a way of life: queer aesthetics, capital, and sociality

ABSTRACT

This essay takes up the question of sociality in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. While the issue appears throughout the history of Barnes scholarship, a recurrent theme persists: Nightwood lacks a clear articulation of communal affiliation. While this lack of communal bonding was initially lamented when linked to certain feminist projects, it is now celebrated when linked to certain queer projects. Against the grain of both approaches, I focus on Barnes’s style and link it to Foucault’s project of an aesthetics of self. I detail the ways Barnes is a keen reader of the conditions of relatedness and the ways she emphasizes the aesthetic possibility to transform relationality, to provide a horizon of collective engagement with things and people that might otherwise express only the reification of commodity culture. To do so, I emphasize how Barnes specifies the range of historical demands on queer and gendered affiliation, demands that span literary and art-historical representation and the shaping forces of capital. Finally, by presenting Nightwood as a model for queer world-making and modernist literary possibility, I hope to show how Barnes importantly contributes to questions of historiography and sociality, and reshapes the relationship between feminism, queer commentary, and modernist literature.

KEYWORDS:

• Sociality
• capitalism
• queer

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Michael D. Schmidt is an adjunct faculty member in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at Wayne State University and an instructor at the College for Creative Studies. His previous work has appeared in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies and Studies in American Fiction.

Notes

1. Barnes, Nightwood, 104. Hereafter cited in text.

2. Eliot, “Introduction,” xx; Marcus, “Laughing at Leviticus,” 237; Harper, Framing the Margins, 74; and Herring, Queering the Underworld, 182.

3. For more on the “antisocial debate” in queer theory, see Robert L. Caserio, et al., “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory.”

4. Rodríguez, “Queer Sociality and other Sexual Fantasies,” 336.

5. Glavey, “Dazzling Estrangement” and Freeman, “Sacra/Mentality in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood.”

6. Foucault, “What is Enlightenment,” 42.

7. Ibid., 41.

8. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 369.

9. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 11.

10. For much more detailed work on ethnicity and race, see Marcus; Altman, “A Book of Repulsive Jews;” Trubowitz, “In search of ‘the Jew;’” Bombaci, Freaks in Modernist American Culture; and Pinckney, “Darryl Pickney on Djuna Barnes.”

11. Smith-Rosenberg, “Discourse of Sexuality and Subjectivity,” 277.

12. For a few examples of recent queer Marxist work, see Glick, Materializing Queer Desire; Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure; Rosenberg and Villarejo, ed., Queer Studies and Crises of Capitalism; Warner, ed., Fear of a Queer Planet; Gluckman and Reed, eds., Homo Economic; Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire; D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity;” and Tratner, Desire and Deficit.

13. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 17, 16.

14. Wesling, “Queer Value,” 107.

15. See for example, Ferguson; Trask, Cruising Modernism; and Chauncey, Gay New York.

16. Boone, Libidinal Currents, 234.

17. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 10. I would add capital to Marcus’s list of aspects haunting the novel “as a potent ‘political unconscious,’” 145.

18. Blyn, “Nightwood’s Freak Dandies,” 510

19. Ibid., 505.

20. Marx, Capital, 324.

21. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 169.

22. Floyd, The Reification of Desire, 7, 6.

23. I intend to evoke Foucault’s interview titled “Friendship as a Way of Life.”

24. Felski, The Gender of Modernity, 21.

25. Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” 67.

26. See Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire.”

27. Chisholm, “Obscene Modernism,” 184.

28. Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public,” 193.

29. Marx, Capital, 305.

30. Ibid., 321.

31. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 9.

32. In a newspaper article on E.O. Hoppé’s “personality dolls,” Barnes similarly explores the way social relations are mediated as relations between things.

33. Butler, Gender Trouble. As Butler argues, “the dispositions that Freud assumes to be primary or constitutive facts of sexual life [the incest taboo] are effects of a law which, internalized, produces and regulates discrete gender identity and heterosexuality,” 82.

34. Edelman, No Future. This “reproductive futurism,” the placing of a child as the outcome of this form of affiliation and the privileged symbol of futurity, Edelman argues, “preserv[es] in the process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable, by casting outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations,” 2.

35. Baudelaire, Baudelaire: The Complete Verse, 268. The original: “Lesbos, terre des nuits chaudes et langoureuses, / Qui font qu’à leurs miroirs, sterile volupté! / Les filles aux yeux creux, de leurs corps amoureuses, / Caressent les fruits mûrs de leur nubilité; / Lesbos, terre des nuits chaudes et langoureuses.”

36. Again, the original: “Laisse du vieux Platon se froncer l’œil austere; / Tu tires ton pardon de l’excès des baisers.”

37. The narrator indicates that Robin spoke much more (“Robin spoke of [Nora] in long, rambling, impassioned sentences”), though none of this is represented for the reader, 75.

38. Herring, Queering the Underworld, 183.

39. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 316.

40. Kaup, “The Neobaroque in Djuna Barnes,” 101.

41. Caselli, Improper Modernism, 165.

42. Gautier quoted in Antoine Schnapper, Jacques Louis David 1748–1825, 356–57.

43. Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter, 184.

44. Hope Mirrlees’s poem “Paris” similarly explores the influence of Récamier and Rousseau on women’s self-understanding and experiences of modern life. See Mirrlees.

45. Nancy’s whole formulation of sharing is key here: “The like-being bears the revelation of sharing: he or she does not resemble me as a portrait resembles an original. […] A like-being resembles me in that I myself ‘resemble’ him: we ‘resemble’ together, if you will,” 33.

46. Glavey, “Dazzling Estrangement,” 752.

47. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 26.

48. Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public,” 187.

49. Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” 310.

50. Singer, A Metaphorics of Fiction, 54, 67.

51. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens,” 459.