Geceyi Anlat Bana By Djuna Barnes
4.999...9/5
It is wise of me to mention that from here on out, I have no idea what I'm talking about. Which, admittedly, is the usual truth of the matter concerning these reviews, but this book in particular makes me give a damn about how much knowledge did not or has not yet trickled down and damned up in my mind. Not enough to get mad over, or perhaps rather not the right type. No, this is a shaft of light breaking into countless beams that my eye has populated itself with multitudes in hopes of catching only a few, a strain of music too high and soft for my bumbling ears to quiver along with, all the sensory inputs that my body has not yet found the means of registering, fine-tuning, appreciating. However, it must be said that the evolution of the reader is far faster than that of physical form. And what does come through, despite all that, is an aurora borealis.
Books like these utterly spoil me. For example, after finishing up another section somewhere in the middle, I attempted to read through summaries of future tomes that I had not yet decided to set my sights on. Horrors. The words were simply there, jettisoning their meaning this way and that without care of interpretation or context, screaming out simplicity! Get your simple definitions, your clear cut cultures of conciseness, your straight-to-the-point and no-nonsense daily dose of saying what you mean and meaning what you say! No, I said, and spent the next twenty minutes huddled over my coffee and staring at nothing in particular. I don't want boxes of commercial goods. I want to fly.
For that is the talent trapped within these pages, and if you forced me at gunpoint to encompass it with a single word, I would say metaphor. If you shot a single bullet past my head and brought the red-hot funnel agonizingly close to my forehead and demanded that I do better, I would say Pynchonian. Fortunately for all, there is no gunperson of staggering menace, and I can afford to not commit the crime that I decried early on, that of lazy linguistics. For Pynchonian is easy, easy easy easy, and more likely to get omnipresent nods of approval than any sort of comprehension.
It would be better to say that Pynchon is in fact Barnesian, although I do like the feel of Djunian better despite all calls for lexiographical order, so I will most likely stick with it until someone manages to convince me otherwise without resorting to offended spittles. I cannot stand offended spittles. Regardless, I suppose we should return to Pynchon, who if he had lived a little earlier and gone into liberal arts rather than the sciences and did some amount of experimenting, he may have come quite close to the lady of whom he is most certainly a bastard child through some sort of decrepit lineage that invested heavily in the idea of said lineage. Or rather, history, society, ideology, and the rest of that decaying mass circling around our craniums and swooping in every so often for a quick bite, shit, and piss.
The worst of it is the words that we think we know and therefore treat as fact when really, metaphor. Linguistic joy, convivence between the reality and the abstract at its finest, the very structure of our civilized existence that has fossilized meaning into packages anyone can use but not everyone can utilize. For it takes a boundless amount of seductive metaphor to draw us in and keep us there until we can come out into the sun and see that in the place of the old crumbling same old same old, there is something else. A little fragile, perhaps, a little heartbreaking in the effort it makes to grip the wisps of its self together, with all the world and its ponderous assumptions of the truth against it. But oh, so beautiful.
The monotone of sexuality, the binary of gender, and the question of love and its many, many sorrows. That's all that I will say on it, for Djuna does much, much better, and I'd rather you went and saw for yourself the wonder. Don't trust the summary. It tells the story as well as a web of diaphanous rainbow copes with bricks thrown through its core.
Djuna is the writer, the doctor is her character, and we are her audience. Djuna is the god, the doctor is her prophet, and we are at the base of Mount Sinai in defiance of the morals to be decreed and the history of persecution to come. That is a lie in respect to the culture with a true hold on the story I have made use of, but it is also a metaphor, and I use it with full respect. For we are prophesied to by the doctor from Djuna in ways strange and unfamiliar, for the meaning is too large for simple statement. Or rather, it is too small, and would be quickly overwhelmed with biases and prejudices that fuel the tragedy felt along the lines of script, amongst the pages of lines. If Djuna let it be so. But she doesn't, and so the doctor rants and raves his saving and his solutions, for everyone ill comes to him but not everyone knows the extent of their illness.
Self? Society? Yes, but no, more. Night in all its unconscious yearnings unbound in full? Day that must carry the night and keep the skeleton of it bound within its paper skin? Yes, but no. Closer. Life and all its disparate yearnings on the backs of all these unfed nights, all these costumed days? Death and the end of every need for a word to explain the life to itself, and to others?
Perhaps. Remember, I have no idea what I'm talking about. I do know, though, that I'm talking. Paperback Many of the reviews of Nightwood on this website seem to reflect the same sentiment, 'how do I even review this?' I often think this is a bit of a cop-out review but in the case of Djuna Barnes' Modernist novel from 1936, utter disorientation seems to be the most fitting response.
A novel generally follows a basic plot with some semblance of a structure and often has one main character. Nightwood begins the birth of Baron Felix. We learn about his false patronage and we follow him in his attempt to produce an heir. Then we move on. The book forgets about him and Robin Vote becomes the main character. Then Doctor Matthew becomes the main character. Then Nora becomes the main character. Then it ends. Also over half of this book isn't even narrative. It's just the transsexual Irish gynaecologist Doctor Matthew O'Connor talking about essentially nothing. There is no plot. There is no structure. There is no one main character. And yet, Nightwood is totally immersive and highly readable.
Within the genre of Modernist literature, Nightwood is a relatively easy read. Barnes doesn't resort to the stream-of-conciousness style that many of her fellow Modernists adopted. Instead she relies on transgression. This novel was one of the first in Western literature to portray a lesbian relationship. Also our pseudo-narrator Dr. Matthew is openly transsexual. But these were the days before WWII, when the Weimar era was flourishing in Germany and the rest of Europe was following suit. This novel is set in bohemian Paris during the rein of Gertrude Stein. It presents an almost unbelievable oasis of decadence and liberality that genuinely did exist before Nazism ended it all. That is the bittersweetness of reading the flamboyant novels of this era, we have the foresight of history and we know how it's all going to end eventually.
Nightwood is a fabulous little novel. It is not hard to believe why Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot and William S. Burroughs all believed it to be one of the greatest novels ever written. It also recently appeared on the list of Greta Gerwig's ten favourite books, which was the catalyst for my reading it as I bow down at the heels of Gerwig. I would also suggest that this book would be a good starting place for those of you who want to dip your toes into the world of Modernist literature. Believe me, it's a lot safer than my tragic attempt to read Woolf's The Waves unassisted. Paperback I am a fan of experimental literature since first experiencing the fun rides I got from Postmodernist novels of Barth, Vonnegut, and Pynchon in my college days in the early 70s. I recently set out to give myself a dose of ten radical novels ranging from Woolf’s first exploration of Modernist forms in “The Voyage Out” (1915) to a recent example of the “new weird”, Nell Zink’s “The Wallcreeper” (2014). Among the set I chose, the most challenging to read and digest in my soul was the one on my plate here.
Barnes’ short novel, published in 1936, precedes by a few years the work of Flan O’Brien which many scholars credit as a clear precursor to Postmodernism. According to the fascinating Wikipedia entry on the subject, the boundary with Modernism involves a recognition by writers that the failure of reality to conform to rational, orderly principles is not a subject for existential crisis, but a doorway to the freeing of imagination and play. From this perspective, Barne’s dark and brooding novel is still Modernist. However, the ways her characters minds work is so freakish in their twisted flight between the gutters and the clouds, I was totally blown away and made ready to believe in an alternate reality invisible to me up to now.
Our anti-hero is this American bird Robin who is so alluring she makes a series of people do the Icarus dance. First in line is the Austrian businessman Felix Volkbein, a closet Jew and fake Baron, whom she marries and bears a son by in Paris. The free spirit he loves cannot be caged in domesticity, and he cannot deny her need to wander away to frolic with others. Nora Flood, a bohemian socialite (and former circus performer) is the next to be swept away by Robin. The happy household they form in free-spirited Paris of the 20s does not last as soon the greedy and homely American Jenny Petherbridge, rich from a sinister line of four dead husbands, gets Robin in her talons and sweeps her off the U.S. We spend a lot of time commiserating with Felix and Nora in the wreckage left behind. As a chorus in this tragedy, we also spend a good chunk of the book in the company of a friend of them both, one Matthew O’Conner, a cynical, cross-dressing ex-pat from the U.S. living as a fake obstetrician. He has the last say in everything. You never know if anything he says is true, but he is the closest to wisdom we can find in this cockeyed tale.
That is only the skeleton of this book. The divine ferment of its living flesh lies in the polarities that garland almost every thought and every sentence in the narrative. What do I mean by polarity? You know, like those maxims such as pleasure always being relative to pain, life forever embodying death and decay, or rewards being proportional to risk. Songs can often capture paradoxes that ring true, such as “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” The richness and textures of the polarities in the book often soar close enough to the sun to melt the wax of my wings or to remind me as Leonard Cohen sang “even damnation was poisoned by rainbows.” Nothing I’ve said is enough to tempt a prospective reader of the brilliance to be found here without some adequate examples.
When Felix first encounters Robin as a patient of the doctor, he is drawn to how her eyes remind him of a wild animal. Get this as a strange place for the mind to travel:
Sometimes one meets a woman who is beast turning human. Such a person’s every movement will reduce to an image of a forgotten experience; a mirage of an eternal wedding cast on the racial memory; as insupportable a joy as would be the vision of an eland coming down an aisle of trees, chapleted with orange blossoms and bridal veil;, a hoof raised in the economy of fear, stepping in the trepidation of flesh that will become myth; as the unicorn is neither man nor beast deprived, but human hunger pressing its breast to its prey.
Such a woman is the infected carrier of the past: before her the structure of our head and jaws ache—we feel we could eat her, she who is eaten death returning, for only then do we put our face close to the blood on the lips of our forefathers.
In another scene Nora shares with the doctor how her lost love for Robin is driving her mad:
”Everything we can’t bear in the world, someday we find in one person, and love it all at once. A strong sense of identity gives a man the idea he can do no wrong; too little accomplishes the same. …There’s something evil in me that loves evil and degradation—purity’s black backside! That loves honesty with a horrid love; or why have I always gone seeking it at the liar’s door?”
…
“Suppose your heart were five feet across in my place, would you break it for a heart no bigger than a mouse’s mute? Would you hurl yourself into any body of water, in the size you are now, for any woman you had to look for with a magnifying glass, or any boy if he was the height of the Eiffel Tower or did droppings like a fly? No, we love in all sizes, yet we all cry out in tiny voices to the great booming God, the older we get.” …
“Man,” she said, her eyelids quivering, “conditioning himself to fear, made God; as the prehistoric, conditioning itself to hope, made man—the cooling of the earth, the receding of the sea. And I, who want power, chose a girl who resembles a boy.”
Obviously, real people don’t talk like this. But realism is not the goal. It feels more like the poetry of the figures stuck in Dante’s Limbo due to their indecisiveness about God. People who don’t even make it to Hades or get a chance to travel with Virgil beyond to Purgatory on ascend to Paradise. A brilliant and disturbing read that will remain etched on my consciousness.
Despite an early presentation of a bisexual character, there is little in this version that really delves into substantive issues of gender and sexuality. Robin is a cipher no matter what. I read that there was much in this novel that was taken out to make it acceptable for publication and that an edition of the Dalkey Archive Press contains as much as possible the version Barnes intended. Paperback Djuna Barnes was quite obviously a tremendous person and lived a fairly spectacular life – born in a log cabin on a mountain (!) – father was a polygamist and lived with two women and produced many children – four of her brothers were named Thurn, Zendon, Saxon and Shangar so Djuna fit right in there – she hardly got any education at all but in her 20s moved from upstate to NYC and very swiftly broke into journalism and THEN became the hot-shot reporter/feature writer – she interviewed James Joyce for example (Writing about a conversation with James Joyce, she admitted to missing part of what he said because her attention had wandered). After ten years in NYC she did ten years in gay Paree and after a lot of high living she hopped over to England in 1932-3 and wrote Nightwood, a profoundly weird novel.
I am gonna read a biography of Djuna Barnes, she sounds like Rebecca West’s fascinating gay sister. She sounds like a total scream. Alas then that Nightwood nearly made me scream. As I read it I could feel parts of my mind shutting down, like when they switch the lights off section by section in a large auditorium. Sentence by sentence the conviction grew upon me that I couldn’t understand more than ten percent of every page. For instance – some guy says :
Those who love everything are despised by everything, as those who love a city, in its profoundest sense, become the shame of that city, the détraqués, the paupers; their good is incommunicable, outwitted, being the rudiment of a life that has developed, as in man’s body are found evidences of lost needs.
What even does that mean? Those who love a city become the shame of that city? Huh?
The narrator and the characters are fond of head-scratching aphorisms such as
A Jew’s undoing is never his own, it is God’s; his rehabilitation is never his own, it is a Christian’s.
Finally I’m way too dim-witted for this book. I can tell Djuna Barnes has a grand style and we would hope she probably knew what she meant at the time of writing, but maybe you had to be there. Try this single sentence – if you like it, you could be the next Djuna Barnes fan :
As the altar of a church would present but a barren stylization but for the uncalculated offerings of the confused and humble; as the corsage of a woman is made suddenly martial and sorrowful by the rose thrust among the more decorous blooms by the hand of a lover suffering the violence of the overlapping of the permission to bestow a last embrace, and its withdrawal: making a vanishing and infinitesimal bull’s eye of that which had a moment before been a buoyant and showy bosom, by dragging time out of his bowels (for a lover knows two times, that which he is given, and that which he must make)—so Felix was astonished to find that the most touching flowers laid on the altar he had raised to his imagination were placed there by the people of the underworld, and that the reddest was to be the rose of the doctor. Paperback Passing in Paris
To Pass; verb, intransitive: to be accepted as being something that you are not, esp. something better or more attractive:
Marion looks so young she could pass for 30
Do this jacket and skirt match well enough to pass as a suit?.
- Cambridge English Dictionary
“Love, that terrible thing!,” says one of Barnes’s characters. Terrible because the demand of love is the voluntary loss of oneself. To make oneself lovable it is necessary to strive toward some other identity. Maintaining the identity of the beloved is always hard work. But the task is made harder when the love itself must be kept secret.
Thus it is with Felix, the pseudo-Baron, who loves what he takes to be European culture; he must deny his lineage from ‘that race which has the sanction of the Lord and the disapproval of the people.” So that “He became for a little while a part of their splendid and reeking falsification.” He passes, well sometimes.
And also with his young wife, Robin, a somewhat needy person who cannot understand the bargain that love is even when it is laid out plainly to her. Felix is bemused because “though he said it calmly, ‘I am deceiving you!’ And he wondered what he meant, and why she did not hear.” She passes, briefly, as wife and, even more briefly, as mother.
The Irish-American Catholic doctor is yet another. He knows how love often works with hate, especially between Christians and Jews. As he says to Felix, ignorant of his heritage, “The Christian traffic in retribution has made the Jew’s history a commodity; it is the medium through which he receives, at the necessary moment, the serum of his own past that he may offer it again as his blood.” Of course, the doctor is not licensed to practice; he is an abortionist; and a transvestite. But he also passes - as a counselor to the love-lorn as well as a bombast.
Then there is Nora, by temperament “an early Christian; she believed the word.” She falls in love desperately with Robin, who understands less about love with women than with men. Nora, however knows the drill: “She defiled the very meaning of personality in her passion to be a person.” She exists only to the extent that she exists for Robin. Poor dear. Until she sees the doc’s penchant for feminine attire and then she realizes that “He dresses to lie beside himself, who is so constructed that love, for him, can be only something special.” Changing identity to love oneself is a novel but rational solution. Nora passes, but it is unclear as what.
And Jenny, she who steals the affection of Robin from Nora (without much effort). Jenny has an identity which depends only on context: “Jenny with the burning interest of a person who is led to believe herself a part of the harmony of a concert to which she is listening, appropriating in some measure its identity, emitted short exclamatory ejaculations.” What she passes as is somewhat variable; but she passes - as lesbian, as paedophile, as “beast turning human.”
These love-sick protagonists are supplemented by a cast of various actors, artists, poets and assorted hangers-on in the Europe of the 20’s, all of whom are sacrificing whatever identity remaining to them in the search for love, or at least temporary, if unsatisfactory, affection. It is Parisian Bohemia on the make (and not for employment).
The doctor is the sage who tries to advise on the reality of love’s demands. “The reason the doctor knows everything is because he’s been everywhere at the wrong time and has now become anonymous,” he contends to Nora. Not having an identity to sacrifice is the philosophy of his transvestism. “I have divorced myself,” he says. But even this is not a solution. The secrecy, other people’s as well as his own, is debilitating: “I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.”
Love in any form is a bargain with the devil. He writes the contract and we who sign it have no idea about its arcane clauses. Barnes had it figured rather eloquently. All these people “are our answer to what our grandmothers were told love was, and what it never came to be; they, the living lie of our centuries.” The devil also passes... as God. Paperback

read ↠ eBook or Kindle ePUB É Djuna Barnes
Geceyi Anlat Bana, okuru kendine has rayihasıyla sarhoş eder, ıstırabın derinlerinden bir inci çıkarır. Jeanette Winterson’ın “içinde bir incinin eridiği kadehten şarap içmek gibi” sözleriyle nitelediği okuma eylemi bir esrimeye dönüşür. Düşkünlerin, fahişelerin, müptelaların, hayal ve gerçek arasında salınırken ruhu arafta kalıp acı çekenlerin, gecenin mahremiyetine sığınanların hikayesini belleklere kazıyan bu lirik metin, dönemin bohem hayatının atmosferini yansıtma kabiliyetiyle tarihten sisli bir kesit sunuyor.
Döneminin şair, yazar ve eleştirmenleri tarafından modernist edebiyatın mihenk taşları arasında gösterilen Geceyi Anlat Bana, T.S. Eliot ve Winterson’ın sunuşuyla...
“Okuru büyük bir üslup başarısı, olağanüstü güzel cümleler, göz alıcı bir kişileştirme ve mizah, Elizabeth dönemi trajedilerine çok benzeyen bir dehşet ve yazgı duygusu ile karşılaşmaya hazır olmaya çağırıyorum.”
- T.S. Eliot Geceyi Anlat Bana
”’You know what man really desires?’ inquired the doctor, grinning into the immobile face of the Baron. ‘One of two things: to find someone who is so stupid that he can lie to her, or to love someone so much that she can lie to him.’”
Baron Felix is a man of pretenses. He is not really a baron at all, but his father had perpetrated the deception his whole life so Felix’s filial legacy is to carry on the social duplicity. ”He kept a valet and a cook; the one because he looked like Louis the Fourteenth and the other because she resembled Queen Victoria, Victoria in another cheaper material, cut to the poor man’s purse.” Notice there is no mention about how good a valet he is or how good a cook she is. It is all about how they look and, when looked upon, what value they convey to the people whom the “Baron” needs to impress.
I am left wondering if his Victoria is the young Victoria, more in the vein of Jenna Coleman from Masterpiece, or the older Victoria, as portrayed by Judi Dench in Mrs. Brown. Louis the Fourteenth, we can only hope, looks as dashing as George Blagden from the Ovation show Versailles.
The theatrical production of the Baron’s life is maintained by his own performances, but also by the supporting cast with which he chooses to surround himself.
Baron Felix becomes enamored with a beautiful American named Robin Vote. It is best that, if your life is a sham, you do not allow yourself the indulgence of love, exploitation yes, but love...never.
If Felix were observing more carefully and not blinded by the aurora borealis of infatuation, he may have noticed that Robin is not really interested in anything but having a good time. Raising children, being a supportive wife, or being faithful to a husband are, by definition, selfless acts, and she is incapable of performing any of those roles with any level of believability. Felix needs to make a new casting call.
Robin bounces from Felix’s bed into the arms of Nora Flood, who wants to take care of Robin, but Robin wants the world collectively to take care of Robin. Jenny Petherbridge, a woman incapable of creating her own happiness, has made a life of looting other’s happiness. She soon has Robin, at least temporarily, under her control.
Robin leaves in her wake not a satisfied audience, no tears brimming at the corners of their eyes, fond memories, or even brilliant soliloquies to explain her behavior. She follows the brightest star until it dims in comparison to another.
We could generalize that everyone in this novel is horrid to everyone else. Jenny stealing Robin from Nora could be seen as inducing unhappiness in another, but frankly can any of us steal someone from someone else? Doesn’t a foot, an elbow, quite possibly a heart already have to be out the door before a lover can be absconded with? Baron Felix is a charlatan who makes a living out of contrived theatrics. It is hard to feel sympathy for him, but at the same time he is left nearly shattered by Robin leaving him. It isn’t even so much that Robin leaves, but she just seems to drift away.
Robin is the truly destructive force in the novel, whose beauty is a ”sort of fluid blue under skin, as if the hide of time had been stripped from her, and with it, all transactions with knowledge.” She could be a stand in for any of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. That might be a job she could stick with.
And who is there to pick up the pieces of each of these fractured relationships? The doctor, Matthew O’Connor, a man uncomfortable in his own skin, but who seems to somehow induce trust in those around him. ”Why do they all tell me everything then expect it to lie hushed in me, like a rabbit gone home to die?”
One character refers to the doctor as a ”valuable liar,” but he does seem to be the most honest with himself of anyone in the novel. He has desires he can only indulge in private, but he doesn’t deny any revelations about himself. He is, almost universally, the most liked person in the novel. Even T. S. Eliot, in the forward, feels the novel drags until the appearance of the doctor. I admit there is no tale of any relevance without the doctor, but there are some fascinating passages in the early pages that, despite how discombobulated I felt with the plot, are still rife with intricate sentences I enjoyed reading and reading again.
Djuna Barnes has a discerning eye and a flair for bold sentences. Some critics have said that only poets can truly enjoy Nightwood. I think that what is required of the reader is some patience. If you are confused, it might be that Barnes has you right where she wants you. Read on; do not let her scare you away. You will experience some descriptions or thoughts that you have never read before. Do not indulge in cannabis or go beyond a two drink minimum while reading this book. You will need your wits about you; maybe this book is better served with a cuppa and a piece of dark comforting chocolate.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visithttp://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten Paperback The novel that almost ended my book club.
We'd previously read work by Robert Coover, Anne Carson, and Ben Marcus. Cormac McCarthy's Suttree and The Story of O. But it was Nightwood that most of the usually intrepid group didn't bother to finish, a few unwilling to even venture past the first chapter. Bitter complaints of overly baroque language, old fashioned concerns with ancestry, and a story where nothing happened. Folks were pissed.
To be honest, I'm still mystified. While it took me far longer to read this 180 page novel than I'd anticipated - the prose demanded an attentive slowness as key moments often passed within a short phrase - I felt rewarded every time I stopped to parse out a particularly knotty section or unpack an ambiguous aphorism. There's a level of psychological insight into the characters here that's astounding - coupled with Barnes setting an almost unknowable anti-heroine at the dead center of the story, serving as a sort of swirling black hole.
While at first the book seems to play like a series of portraits, the cohesive structure slowly reveals itself. This is a book that's reticent to shine a light on its secrets. Even the very last scene seems to suggest a new meaning for everything that came before. It forces you to reconsider where you've been placing the dramatic emphasis - and empathy.
It's a story where little might happen on the surface, but there's simultaneously too much to take in on one reading. The doctor's monologues ricochet around the page like indoor fireworks and it's hard to know whether to enjoy the explosions or duck for cover. Under the restrained veneer of the descriptions, Barnes documents a world of transexuals, cruising, defrocked priests, drunken mothers who abandon their infants, feral encounters with animals, etc. It's often incredibly debauched without being the least bit judgmental of its characters. And of course it's a love story. It's about a love for oblivion, that oblivion you can sometimes find in other people.
Paperback LO STUPORE DELLA NOTTE
Foto di Maurice Brange: Solita Solano and Djuna Barnes a Paris, 1922.
Come ha fatto Djuna Barnes, che si autodefinì “la più celebre sconosciuta al mondo”, ad attraversare il secolo breve quasi per intero, vivendo fino a novant’anni (1892 – 20 giugno 1982), subendo uno stupro a 16 anni, forse da parte dello stesso padre o forse invece da parte di un vicino, e poi l’anno dopo con il consenso del padre, teorico praticante della poligamia, il quale la diede “in comodato”, a Percy Faulkner, cinquantaduenne fratello della sua seconda moglie?
Probabilmente con questa semplice ricetta che lei stessa descrive:
Le sole armi che mi concedo di usare: il silenzio, l’esilio e l’astuzia.
Foto di Berenice Abbott: Djuna Barnes.
Io non ho conflitti; sono estranea alla vita, sono perduta in un’acqua ferma.
Appare molto bella nel celebre ritratto fotografico che realizzò Berenice Abbott, sua amante. Tra le tante. Uomini e donne, ma soprattutto donne, furono donne i suoi grandi amori, le sue passioni.
Trascorse vent’anni a Parigi tra le due guerre, anni frenetici e densi sia per quella città che per lei: conobbe tutti, amica di tanti, amante di molti, fu ammirata. Gli ultimi quarant’anni della sua vita furono invece completo isolamento, scelta quasi da stilita.
Disse:
Essere una leggenda è infinitamente più facile che vivere quello che è necessario per diventarlo.
All’inizio della sua attività Djuna Barnes fu giornalista, per così dire, d’assalto, che sperimentava in prima persona le storie che raccontava: eccola sottoporsi a nutrizione forzata per l’articolo “How It Feels To Be Forcibly Fed” uscito il 6 settembre 1914 sul New York World Magazine.
L’edizione Adelphi descrive così la trama di questo libro:
Al centro della Foresta della Notte dorme la Bella Schizofrenica, in un letto dell’Hôtel Récamier. È Robin. Intorno a lei vediamo disporsi gli altri personaggi del romanzo: Nora, che cela nel suo cuore «il fossile di Robin», quasi una memoria ancestrale; la rapace Jenny; il falso Barone Volkbein, pateticamente devoto a una nobiltà fantomatica. Ma su tutti torreggia il dottor Matthew O’Connor, ciarlatano mistico, Guardiano della Notte, il cui sontuoso e corrusco blaterare si contrappone alle rare e monche parole di Robin. Il dottor O’Connor ci viene incontro come un cliente pittoresco del Café de la Mairie du VI° e sentiamo, per così dire, la sua voce echeggiare da tutti i bar perduti degli Anni Venti. Ma nella sua apparizione riconosciamo anche una voce perenne, penetrante, ossessiva, che continuerà a parlare «finché la furia della notte non avrà fatto marcire fino in fondo il proprio fuoco». È una figura indelebile, un dottore non della malattia, piuttosto del «male universale»: quel male che non guarisce, ma vuole disperatamente chiamarsi per nome – e quel nome è la letteratura.
Ed ecco qui la Barnes che si fa “salvare” da un pompiere (per la terza volta) esperienza diretta per scrivere l’articolo poi pubblicato col titolo “My Adventures Being Rescued”.
Elémire Zolla, invece, la riassume così:
Una giovane ebete con possibile sospetto di possessione diabolica viene contesa tra donne allucinate che paiono tutte guidate insensibilmente da un orrido, obeso, cinguettante, saggio, ermafroditico medico irlandese il quale annega ogni avvenimento nella sua eloquenza da personaggio shakespeariano, nel suo appello costante a entrare nella foresta della notte.
Il personaggio in questione, il dottor O’Connor credo sia il primo transgender della letteratura, impegnato a far nascere e far abortire, che si lancia in interminabili monologhi da ubriaco molesto.
Peggy Guggenheim (1898 – 1979) fu grande amica della Barnes e la sostenne economicamente con generosità negli ultimi quarant’anni di vita ritirata e solitaria della scrittrice.
Quanto precede mi pare evidenzi quanto poco conti la trama di quest’opera, sorella dell’Ulysses joyciano (peraltro, ottimo amico della Barnes). Intreccio evanescente al limite dell’inconsistenza, che se davvero esiste, non racconta nulla. O, se qualcosa racconta, io me la sono persa.
A dire il vero, mi sono proprio perso fra queste pagine. Sono rimasto sommerso da domande, perso in una foresta di punti interrogativi, di giorno e di notte. Leggerle è stata un’esperienza. Come per me è spesso leggere la poesia: non capire, e godere, non sapere che dice, ma sentire una musica che mi parla, o forse anche meno di una musica, puro suono, un flusso sonoro.
Gertrude Stein tenta di sfruttare tutti gli effetti della ripetizione, nella forma in cui si trova di frequente nella parlata comune, Cerca di sottolinearne la qualità ipnotica e di pervenire per suo tramite a effetti surrealistici e astratti. Musica pura.
Il suono dà l’idea di buio notturno, di veleno, e di notte e di foresta, ed è duro, nel senso di corposo, semplice eppure singolare: così definiva la scelta del titolo la Barnes in una lettera a un’amica amante.
Poi, certo, se si vuole è anche un manifesto LGBT, è uno dei romanzi più sperimentali della storia, o uno dei primi. Leggerlo è come arrampicarsi su una corda sospesa nel buio, le parole scorticano le mani di chi le pronuncia. Ogni personaggio parla a sé per sé, i dialoghi si sovrappongono, nessuno ascolta, tutti cercano amore e identità…
La scultrice americana Thelma Wood (1901 – 1970), un grande amore della Barnes. Paperback Nightwood is the sound of hearts breaking, written on the page, spread out for all to see, five lives, five people eviscerated and eviscerating each other. These people fucking kill me, they are so sad and so full of nonsense and so determined to live in their own personal little boxes, striving for epiphanies that they barely even understand, trying to be a certain idea of What a Person Is. Is that what I'm like? Maybe that's what everyone is like. Barnes lays out these characters' lives like beads on a string, one after the other. Baron Felix, that whole fake heritage made by his father that he now lives out as if it were real. I can't help but identify a little bit with the Baron, his bullshit, his need to please, to be calm and careful as a way to prop himself up. His stiffness. Not really sure how Barnes feels about him - she spends a lot of time with him, such an elaborate backstory, so that's something (although I hate all the derogatory Jew crap, 'Jews are like this, Jews always think this way' - bogus, and the only thing that is boring in Nightwood). She creates this hollow man and then she fills him up with life and sadness and a rigid sort of sweetness towards his son, I see myself in him, and other people I know, my dad especially. Barnes seems more interested in the Robin-Nora-Jenny triangle. Makes sense; I'm more interested in them too. Robin Vote. That name! Is it supposed to mean something? She is like something out of a Duras novel, a hollow vessel, an intellectual kind of id, a sick need to define herself by rejecting those who want her, rejecting those who want to define her. I see a lot of myself in Robin, that fucked up need to keep people at a distance, no real connection means no proprietary relationship, let's just be friends, friends are easy, I love my friends. Except Robin has no real love in her, just a blind, mindless need... for what? Something. When we first meet her she is passed out, insensible; Barnes describes her as La Somnambule, a sleepwalker in life - except sleepwalkers don't destroy. She is more like an exterminating angel, a sleepy one. In the end, confronting a dog, she is transformed into a kind of dog herself. I think that's unfair to dogs. My sympathies are mainly with Nora Flood, a tough dyke of the old school, a listener, a person people gravitate towards, to tell their stories, to be listened to and so given a kind of identity by that listening, being made human by being seen as human by another human. I see a lot of myself in Nora. There is a remoteness to her, different than the alien quality of Robin's hollow vessel, more like a stillness, a need to stay still and understand and truly see the world around her. And then when she's hurt, when she is filled with longing and damage and pain, it is so debilitating and yet filled with such sad fury, a painful howling fury, I've felt that, it just takes over and you don't want to feel anything but pain, your mind is just blank with it, all bright and dark hues of hot angry red. Poor Nora. Why does her life become defined by her pursuit of Robin? That's not even a life. But it is a better life than Jenny Petheridge's life, the third part of this strange, sorrowful triangle. Triangle? Why do I keep saying that? If you include Baron Felix, it is more of a square. But he barely counts in their lives, his poor sad son becomes his life, a son who is all need and reaching towards some kind of meaning, something to define him. I felt such empathy for that son, like I was that son. I am that son. But back to Jenny. Djuna Barnes must have based Jenny on someone she hates. There is so much detail about her craziness. And a lot of it is so funny, a terrible kind of funny, laughing at someone who is a rich basket case, at a person who is basically a straw man - woman - for the author's hate. She is all gruesome softness and blind stabby moments, crying hysterics and desperate neediness, such intensity and so little affect, defining herself by creating these fake worlds to live in, this dramatic love affair with an empty vessel, not caring who she hurts - shoving, scratching her emotions right into, onto a person's face, literally. And those who love her die - her history of dead husbands, leaving her better off and with more of nothing. I can't help but identify with Jenny, with her weakness, her desperate yearning. I remember when my heart was broken, except I was the one who did the breaking, broke two hearts, another person's heart isn't enough, let's break mine too, like Jenny with her insensible angry intrusive neediness, her boring self-abnegating self-flagellating, I hate all that. How can a person like Jenny compete with a person like Nora, how can Robin choose possession over true understanding? Well, that happens all the time I suppose. And Robin doesn't really even choose her, she chooses herself, again and again. I get Robin, I see her in the mirror; she's coming and going from and to nowhere.
And then the renegade doctor, the berserk socialite, Dr. Matthew O'Connor, railing against form and tradition, gentle and strong and angry and petty, a drunkard, a man who loves life, a transvestite living in his little squalid apartment, a man full of warmth and kindness and vitriol, a man who secretly defines himself by helping others, spitting out monologues about life and death and appearance and sanctity and desire. He delivered Nora Flood into the world and is her sounding-board, his long rants are not just violent flows of sound and fury and pathos, they are not merely self-absorbed, they are trying to speak to her by speaking of himself, he is trying to break through to her by breaking himself down in front of her, shaking her back to life, away from insensibility and morbid obsession, until the rant turns on the ranter and he in turn is broken down, seeing himself and the world around him for what he and it truly is, is becoming, is falling back into. His delirious rants are like the novel itself, discretely separated into chapters, separated by character and incident, and yet the parts are flowing into each other, the language flows into reality and out of it, the narrative folds up into itself until it becomes unrecognizable as a narrative, like a flower all mashed up so that the pulp is barely recognizable as the original flower, just little parts here and there, you pull a piece out and it is still a flower but what connection does it have to the original thing? It turns in on itself, it becomes something different and it stays essentially the same. I see a lot of myself in Matthew O'Connor, him most of all, most of all, I Am Matthew O'Connor, I live and breathe him, I read about these breaking hearts and they are all my heart too, all of it, none of it, it all comes together, it's all the same, each separate one of them, right?
...Is this a mobius strip, of sorts?:
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UPDATE
looking back on this a few weeks later, i see that in my desperate attempt to write this review as a kind of stylistic homage to my favorite reviewer MARIEL, i neglected key things that i usually like to put in my reviews.
okay, here goes...
the writing itself: beautiful! hypnotic. excessive. idiosyncratic. modernist (duh). drily amusing. rich with off-kilter nuance. flows like a bad dream.
the characterization: despite the experimental nature of the novel and a regular use of caricature, these are some amazingly three-dimensional characters. i got to understand them on a really human level, and not just as quirky conceits on a page.
the narrative: broken, unstable, constantly challenging - and often very annoying as well. annoying like sand in an oyster's shell! Nightwood: a pearl. Paperback Rating: 1.75* of five, rounded down because I feel unclean every time I run across this book in my memories
WATCH THIS BOOKTUBE PIECE: Nightwood as Gothic: Hauntings of Love and Death
I'VE OWNED THIS BOOK SEVERAL TIMES. I ALWAYS END UP GIVING IT TO SOMEONE ELSE.
My Review: Serial adultress and all-around malcontent Robin leaves her too, too unendurable husband Baron Felix after presenting him with the desired heir...only the child is crippled...and takes up with Nora, a whiny dishrag of a nothing-much who represents Robin's desire for dreary domesticity. Needless to say, Robin can't stand too much of that and leaves Nora at home so she can cavort and disport herself with all and sundry. While so doing, Robin meets Jenny, a serial widow (why does no one wonder how this dry, juiceless woman LOST FOUR HUSBANDS?!) and a sociopath whose sole pleasure in life is making others unhappy. Bye bye Nora, hello Jenny, and ultimately Robin seeks the help of Dr. O'Connor, a male transvestite and fraudulent medico, with predictable results. The ending of the book is one of the weirdest I've ever read, involving Nora, Robin, a dog, and a truly weird accident in a church.
Queer Ulysses. Famous for raunchy sex descriptions,most of which would not raise a Baptist preacher's eyebrows in this day and time. Dreadful, sesquipedalian sentences recounting unpleasant peoples' doings in endlessly recursive and curiously directionless arabesques.
Do not read this after the age of twenty-four. It will cause your nose hairs to ignite and your T-zone to break out in painful cysts. Seriously...don't. Paperback