Nightwood by Djuna Barnes

First published: 1936

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Psychological surrealism

Time of plot: 1920’s

Locale: Paris and Vienna

Principal characters

• Felix Volkbein, a spurious baron
• Dr. Matthew O’Connor, an aging medical student
• Nora Flood, a publicist with a circus
• Robin Vote, Felix’s wife and Nora’s paramour
• Jenny Petherbridge, a wealthy multiple widow
• Guido Volkbein, Felix and Robin’s son

The Story:

Felix Volkbein is no sooner born in Vienna in 1880 than his mother, Hedvig, dies. His father, Guido, a descendant of Italian Jews who had tried to overcome the burden of what he took to be an ignoble past by pretending to be of noble birth, died six months earlier. The orphaned Felix is left with a rather substantial upper-middle-class household and the fictitious title of Baron Volkbein.

About thirty years later, Felix, a nominal Christian, owns little more than his spurious title and two “family portraits” that are in fact paintings of long-forgotten actors procured by Guido in his effort to create an aristocratic past for his family line. By 1920, Felix is making a living in international banking in Paris. Here he indulges in his real obsession, the nobility, aristocracy, and royalty of Old Europe. Without legitimate claims to noble blood, he envies the nobility from a discreet distance. To exercise his propensity for make-believe, he becomes a habitué of the night world of the circus and theater. Among these “night people,” many of whom are also “titled,” Felix meets Dr. Matthew O’Connor, an Irishman from San Francisco, and Nora Flood, an American who is in Europe as a publicist for a circus.

O’Connor is a lively and talkative eccentric with an opinion or observation to make on everything and everyone. He and Felix meet again in Paris a few weeks later. The doctor is called to assist a young woman who had fainted, and Felix is on hand when O’Connor brings her around. She is Robin Vote, mistress of this world of the night, and in her half-awakened state a beast turning human.

It is in that half-awakened state that she agrees to marry Felix when, in rather short order, he proposes to her to produce an heir to continue the Volkbein line. Felix moves Robin to Vienna, where she sleepwalks through her pregnancy, coming to, as it were, upon the birth of the child. She abandons Felix and the boy, a sickly baby, and ends up in the company of Nora Flood.

Robin is with a circus in New York in 1923 when she first meets Nora, and the two become constant companions. Although Robin is incapable of forming lasting attachments, Nora falls tragically under her spell, rearranging her life to suit Robin’s needs and eventually returning with Robin to Europe, where they settle in an apartment in Paris. By 1927, however, the acquisitive Jenny Petherbridge comes into their lives and, much to Nora’s mental and emotional pain, steals Robin away from her.

Jenny is a collector of everyone else’s lost dreams and possessions. For a while she makes the most of her new catch, but then she too succumbs to the insane jealousy that Robin’s insouciant promiscuity and casual animal magnetism inspire in others. During a mad, late-night carriage ride through the streets of Paris, while O’Connor talks about the pains of love, Jenny is distracted by the fear that a young Englishwoman might find Robin attractive, or vice versa. A short time later, Jenny and Robin leave Paris for America. For consolation, the heartbroken Nora ventures to O’Connor’s apartment at 3 a.m. to find him in bed in a woman’s wig, makeup, and nightgown. Nevertheless, she stays to hear his monologue about the night that is our darkness, our degradation, and our death.

The baron, meanwhile, had been raising his and Robin’s son, Guido. By 1931, the boy is grown into a religious “idiot” of sorts, though O’Connor sees hope in his desire to become a Catholic, whereby he will escape the history that imprisons Felix. Felix despairs of that possibility but makes plans nevertheless to move with the boy to Vienna, where he might be among his own people.

Jenny shows up at his Paris apartment one day, ostensibly to buy a painting but really in search of information about Robin, suggesting that, like Felix and Nora before her, Jenny too had lost Robin to someone else. O’Connor pays another visit to Nora, during which they again discuss, largely through his monologues, the pain of degradation and loss that humans are born for, which for Nora and other characters in the novel is embodied in Robin. Although his ability to articulate the absurd is a source of strength to others, O’Connor is driven to despair when Nora tells him the details of her relationship with Robin. O’Connor ends up a broken man, damning all those who come to him to learn of degradation and the night.

Jenny and Robin return to New York. Robin, who had become Catholic during her marriage to Felix, still frequents churches, and her devotion, real or feigned, is yet another source of jealousy for Jenny. Robin ends up wandering northward toward Nora’s country home. Nora arrives at a chapel near her home in the middle of the night with her dog to find Robin carrying on a quasi-religious ritual, as if to lure her to the spot. Then, in front of the stunned and confused Nora, Robin has sex with the dog, simultaneously fulfilling the animal nature she embodies and inflicting further emotional pain on both herself and one of her lovers. The cycle of degradation that flourishes at night promises to continue, nurtured by these kinds of symbiotic relationships between the spirit that is the human and the beast that is also the human.

Bibliography

Broe, Mary Lynn, ed. Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. An invaluable collection of essays on Barnes and her work, many of which are written from a feminist perspective. Includes many reproductions of Barnes’s artwork. A bibliography and extensive notes are included.

Eliot, T. S. “Introduction” to Nightwood, by Djuna Barnes. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1936. Eliot’s encomium in his introduction to the first edition of Nightwood secured the novel the recognition it deserved but might otherwise never have attained. Brief and to the point, Eliot singles out that one feature of Barnes’s prose style—its poetry—that continues to make the novel a classic of modernist technique.

Field, Andrew. Djuna: The Formidable Miss Barnes. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985. A corrected and revised edition of the biography that first appeared in 1983, frustrating in its lack of notes but highly inventive in form and approach—an ideal match of biographer and subject. Provides extensive information on the composition and background of Nightwood. Includes illustrations, including some reproductions of Barnes’s artwork, and an extensive list of sources.

Frank, Joseph. The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963. Contains Frank’s influential essay “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” which originally appeared in 1945 and which discusses Nightwood along with works by Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce.

Kannenstine, Louis F. The Art of Djuna Barnes: Duality and Damnation. New York: New York University Press, 1977. This scholarly and critically ambitious work on Barnes concludes that Barnes is a transitional writer, difficult to classify and therefore missing the attention her art and work deserve. Defines Nightwood, her masterpiece, as a study of mixed being and of the estrangement that results from confused identity.

Kennedy, J. Gerald. Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993. Examines the importance of expatriation in twentieth century American literature—a highly important theme in Barnes’s writing. Kennedy discusses Nightwood and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender Is the Night in the chapter “Modernism as Exile: Fitzgerald, Barnes, and the Unreal City.”

Parsons, Deborah L. Djuna Barnes. Tavistock, England: Northcote House/British Council, 2003. Nightwood and Barnes’s other writings are analyzed in this study of the psychological and stylistic aspects of her work. Parsons places Barnes’s work within the social and cultural context of the modernist period.

Plumb, Cheryl J. Fancy’s Craft: Art and Identity in the Early Works of Djuna Barnes. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 1986. Points out that Barnes deliberately rebelled against naturalist techniques in her writing, borrowing instead from methods of narrative exposition developed out of symbolist poetry. Nightwood, her greatest achievement, presents difficulties for scholars and readers alike precisely because it is the purest realization of these goals.

Rupprecht, Caroline. Subject to Delusions: Narcissism, Modernism, Gender. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2006. Rupprecht describes narcissism as a relation between the self and the other that is mediated by a mirror or by reflection. She analyzes how this definition of narcissism is an important component in understanding the “other” in Nightwood.

Scott, James B. Djuna Barnes. Boston: Twayne, 1976. A good introduction to Barnes. Points out that the writer as she matured sought to mix and then fuse genres and styles. Nightwood, Barnes’s one attempt at a “popular” novel, succeeds by fusing elements of a lurid realism with an engagingly poetic style.

Warren, Diane. Djuna Barnes’ Consuming Fictions. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2008. Warren demonstrates how Barnes’s concepts of gender and aesthetics were significant in her time and remain relevant in the early twenty-first century. She defines Nightwood as a “pivotal” text that raises questions about an individual’s ability to subvert cultural boundaries.