Nightwood

I am a casual reader and certainly no expert on literature, but `Nightwood' was recommended to me by someone who is, and I am very glad of that. So this review may seem a bit awkward, rubbing shoulders with more learned company, but perhaps there may be some worth in the perspective of someone who, in the normal course of events, would never have ventured into these waters. I will start by saying that `Nightwood' is a work of undoubted genius. Let me also say that I started by reading the reviews here, the Introduction by T. S. Eliot and the Preface by Jeanette Winterson, and -- especially in regard to the latter two -- I rather wish I hadn't. Eliot begins (and ends) by suggesting it might be better to refuse the license offered by being given the opportunity to introduce this work and, while I understand why he went ahead and did so, personally, I wish he'd followed his first inclination. Maybe he could have said, "Just read the book. You'll understand why when you're done," but it is not my place to put words in the great man's mouth. Winterson began by saying, "Certain texts work in homeopathic dilutions; that is, nano amounts effect significant change over long periods of time. Nightwood is a nano-text." I think Winterson is a very good author, but aside from finding that a dubious description of homeopathic dilutions, I can't figure out what it means in regards to `Nightwood', especially after reading it. Starting out feeling a bit lost, I wandered in the Preface a short while and gave up. The reviews were interesting and some were quite fun to read, but I'm glad I didn't have to base my decision to buy this book on them. That is not a slam against them, for this book is many things to many people, and on reading it again (as Eliot said) I may have (probably will) new opinions. So this is a review written before the first blush has faded. Due consideration can wait for another day. `Nightwood' has a reputation as a difficult book. I did not find it so. I fell in during the first two paragraphs and gratefully submerged myself to the end. Perhaps that is because I am shallow. But to me, the essential fact of the book is the language. The language is astounding. So much so that I will term `Nightwood' a tale told inside-out. By that I mean, in story telling as it is most often done, there are people, places, events, thoughts and feelings, and the author chooses her or his words and style to convey these to the reader. Here we have words; brilliantly arranged and sumptuously presented, in streams and sometimes in torrents, magnificently relentless. It is the words that engender the people, places and events in `Nightwood' because words need a referent to have resonance. Thus, the entities that populate the story are surreal, for they are born of language, not `reality', which must obey a different canon. The doctor is an amazing creation, but you will not meet him on this plane. The description of Jenny Petherbridge is a monumental achievement, and like a monument, it's hard not to get overwhelmed by it. Consider a few brief examples, minute beside the whole, but brilliant in their own right: `The words that fell from her mouth seemed to have been lent to her; had she been forced to invent a vocabulary for herself, it would have been a vocabulary of two words, "ah" and "oh."' `She was avid and disorderly in her heart. She defiled the very meaning of personality in her passion to be a person." And my favorite: `Only severed could any part of her be called "right."' No being that physics admits outside the imagination of a genius could merit such a description. It has been said that `Nightwood' is about `meaning' (a loose term) not information, and that is true, as far as it goes, but the degree is questionable. Considering that meaning, or perhaps more concretely, the thoughts that give that `meaning' meaning, some are not a thing of words, while in other cases, words can outrun the thoughts that inspired them. Which is the case in `Nightwood', I have no idea. The language is so dense, so rich, so layered and knotted, it has a life of its own, independent of its creator, as if it is no longer wholly the author's work, but shaped by other forces. Trying to root `meaning' out of it is truly difficult, perhaps impossible, if one's main concern is to ask: "What does `Nightwood' mean"? That is not to say the book is "meaningless." Taken as data, the reflections in `Nightwood' say some fascinating things about love, about loss, about the human condition. But so do many works. Such data are fairly commonplace (though true eloquence in expressing them is not). In this regard, `Nightwood' is not unique. Nor are these reflections the most profound I've ever read. Perhaps (indeed, most likely), on revisiting the book I will find more meaning. But that is not why I will revisit it. To me, `Nightwood' is first and foremost a sensual experience. I would not ask a sunrise what it means. A sunrise would never answer. I take `Nightwood' in the same spirit.

Interesting book. Wasn't sure what it was about.

*Nightwood* is a novel composed in poetic prose, as T.S. Eliot asserts in his preface, the kind of writing that "demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel-reader is not prepared to give." Most novels are not composed at such white-hot intensity, at a level of personal emergency such as Djuna Barnes has conveyed in *Nightwood.* This is a book that doesn't let you rest for a moment, the rare sort of novel that is all conflict and climax. It's a work that you don't doubt was torn living from the author's very being, less a "novel" per se, than an organic and all-but-impossible to dissect whole that loses more the more you attempt to analyze it. What Barnes records in *Nightwood* is the experiential agony, as opposed to merely the "story," of a love-lost. Robin Vote is a Sapphic femme fatal, an androgynous, alcoholic, nymphomaniac enigma who is beloved, successively, by three different characters, who she subsequently leaves an emotional wreck. Nora Flood, who stands in for the author, is the narrative center of *Nightwood* and the woman around whom the others orbit, with Robin, like a doomsday asteroid, orbiting them all. It is Nora who struggles and suffers and indeed understands Robin better than anyone, even if that only means understanding better the tragedy inherent in knowing her at all. Her utter despair at losing Robin is stunningly captured by Barnes who, it is said, based *Nightwood* closely on a real-life love catastrophe from which she never recovered. One can believe it reading *Nightwood.* A good deal of the novel's intensity comes from its unquestionable authenticity. In Robin Vote, Barnes has created the personification of the unsolvable mystery of every beloved who, as if by destiny, eludes, indeed must elude, our grasp. Much is made--and rightly so--of *Nightwood's* most famous character, Dr. Matthew O'Connor, an impoverished, drunken, charlatan with dubious medical credentials and a penchant for cross-dressing. A good deal of the novel is devoted to O'Connor's rambling monologues which vibrate between madness, comedy, and transcendent wisdom...sometimes all three together. But the transgendered O'Connor is only the most flamboyantly unconventional of *Nightwood's* inhabitants. All of Barnes's characters are misfits and outsiders, sexually and/or socially; interestingly it is the very displacement they feel within their own time and place that most enables the contemporary reader to sympathize with them. The sense of being out-of-step is, perhaps, timeless. But it's more than mere sexual and social deviance that connect the contemporary reader to these characters--it's a sense of the secret life of us all, the inherent "deviance" of our private lives from the "normal" daylight existence of moderated emotions, rational desires, and objective viewpoints we all pretend to share. "Nightwood" is the country we inhabit when the sun goes down, "society" dissolves, and the inexplicable, uncontrollable, and irrational in us emerges. I found the first chapter of *Nightwood* dull and dated and almost considered putting the book down. Don't do it. Hang in there until the second chapter...if Barnes doesn't catch your attention at that point, chances are she won't. This is a challenging text, elusively and elliptically written, ejaculatory, jumping from peak to peak, a shout from the soul of despair, a cry from the dark night. The characters don't so much interact with each other, but, as in real life, they are merely declaiming to themselves, using the declamations of others as cues to their own speeches. They affect, deflect, and "aggravate" each other in a sort of vacuum, forcing them to even greater degrees of solitude and despair. And yet, through all these characters, we hear one voice, one lament...the author's, ours, every lover's. As uniquely particular and personal *Nightwood* may be, as idiosyncratically composed, and as inimitable, it is nonetheless an emotional document as common and identifiably human as any kidney or pancreas. A rare thing, a "novel" that is also a work of art -*Nightwood* is a gnomic utterance of the apocalypse of love.

To start, I should say that I'm an eighteen year old with no higher education, and this was the first modernist novel I've ever read, so I'm sure I can't judge this book how an expert can. But I enjoyed Nightwood so much!! I actually read it twice in a short span of time, and the second time I think I understood it and liked it much more. It's not very plot focused; instead, you get complex descriptions of each of the characters, of settings and ideas, and a lot of, like, focused musings? The style and language used was quite difficult for me and at times I would just think to myself, "what is the doctor going on about now :/" but honestly, that was kind of the best part too. It was so stimulating to read! The writing is rich, dramatic, and very beautiful in many ways. I enjoyed Nora as a character the best and thought a lot of the things she said were really meaningful and true- maybe it's because the author based Nora off of herself, or at least that's what I heard. The doctor definitely said a lot and seemed to be a bit random sometimes, but he was funny too, and although he was essentially the narrator of the story, he was his own unique and interesting character. And those descriptions of Jenny?? I feel like the author knew someone like her or something because she just went into so much detail on how unlikable and despicable a person Jenny was... Robin was the only character I didn't feel like I could picture, and maybe that's the point, or maybe that was just me not being able to pick up details haha. But anyways, I could go on about this book because it was just so refreshing and interesting to read despite revolving around tragic people and situations, and it made me want to read more modernist literature. I would suggest that you read slowly and take breaks, and don't strain yourself trying to understand everything because that takes the enjoyment out of the experience. At least that's what I suggest to people my age or with my level of experience! I'm sure it's different for others. All in all, really recommend this book. It's really wonderful and I'm so grateful I got to read it.

A love triangle is common in film and literature, but the Djuna Barnes version is by far more complex and interesting due to the incredible richness of her language and literary style. After reading (one should say “studying” due to the concentration needed for its understanding) Nightwood the memory of each character will have a long decay time, and this will happen regardless of the gender or sexual preferences of those who decide to devote their time to it. It is one of the few novels of the twentieth century that was daring in its subject matter but still interesting and provocative without being excessively polemical. There is a lot in this story that one can form an intellectual intersection with, and just as much that is novel and will at first appear distant and hard to focus on, like a light source that has been blurred by a dirty lens. Readers may have to remove their prejudicial and conceptual bifocals in order to see just what the author has broadcast. This is the best feature of the story, namely that it requires a fair amount of cognitive perspiration for its appreciation. It cannot be understood with a mere surface reading, and is definitely not for the light-hearted or those who want rapid scene changes and simplistic dialog. The characters are not mere slogans, but ones who display traits that one can find comradeship with, and themes that also have moral force, with this force being directed on purpose, with high-powered literary artillery. One will encounter for example in (Baron) Felix Volkbein the uncritical adulation of authority, with this an expression of his adaptation as a Jew living in a foreign land, with foreign meaning both in tradition as well as in its prejudices. And Felix’s affection for Robin Vote is expected and natural. Robin is the delicate and vulnerable character in the novel, the one who journeys the most and is followed the most as the novel unfolds. Robin is to be contrasted with Nora Flood, the character who is by far the most different from men, a “deviation” that men may aspire to but is always out of reach. The romance between Robin and Nora is atypical and deep, but at the same time refreshing without being frivolous. And then there is Jenny Petherbridge, the character that is certain to demand attention and perhaps disgust from the reader. Jenny may be subjected to condemnation by many readers, but she adds weight to the third vertex of the triangle, and in a way that makes it non-isomorphic to other triangles that readers might discover in novels of this genre. By far the most interesting of the characters is Dr. Matthew O’Connor. Unlicensed to practice medicine but definitely deserving accolades for his ability to subject the reader to strong perturbations of verbal patterns, O’Connor nails Nightwood on a wooden plank as one of the best stories of the twentieth century. Whether it was the intent of the author or not, O’Connor is the “central figure”, most definitely so, and this is true despite his frequent cynicism and sometimes macabre attitude about love and life. Readers may find themselves in a kind of Hegelian opposition to him, an antithesis perhaps of all they stand for, but it is easy to delight in his frankness, and in the ease in which he can create strings of words that form patterns not matched before in literature.

nightwood? more like what the sigma am i reading!

Read this book for my university writing class. Very interesting and intellectually complex. There is no structured plot, you will be lost at times and not know what’s happening. In this book, what matters is the characters portrayal and pay attention to the Dr.!!

I've known about this book for so long, it's been on my list of early LGBT works to read for ages but I've had such bad luck with those. Many like Giovanni's Room or The City and the Pillar are bleak and depressing, they offer no hope or happiness or even humor. Part of that I know comes from what society would allow to be published and spoken at the time, but all the same it makes delving into early examples of LGBT lit less than fun. I had expected more of the same from Nightwood. Lesbians, 1920's, difficult, poetic...these were the vague impressions I had. What nobody mentions is how hilarious the book can be, which I find bizarre. My theory is that few read the book anymore, and students assigned it for classes (especially straight students,) are completely lost, busy trying to carve deep meaning out of Dr. Matthew's well-meaning but drunken monologues. Monologues which are full of references steeped in religion and lost to time. But for me, right from the start when it's clear that he's an alcoholic who likes to hold court, I realize I know this character. And it's not that what he says isn't important, but rather he is speaking his own language and it's clear that the people around him find him amusing and take what they can from his tirades. And the reader should do the same. This is clear from his interactions with Nora. She often responds to him as if he had clearly and succinctly answered her questions. She's letting him be himself and trying to recieve the comfort he's uniquely offering. Analyzing his every word however is beside the point. To me Matthew is a well-known type, every gay bar has a Dr. Matthew, sometimes several. Hilarious and confusing and fighting his own self-pity as hard as he can. It's the gay version of speaking in tongues. The poetry is there, the writing is beautiful, the significance of night in the book as code for queerness and otherness is vitally important. But so is the humor. The humor is what brought this book to life for me. The Count's abrupt dismissal, Robin sleepwalking through her marriage, Matthew waiting in his wig, his monologue about the choicest toilets, and the entire scene in the carriage between Jenny and Robin, all had me reading with a grin or a giggle. This book is the Gay 20's brought to life, and though it is rather miserable at times, it has vitality that many other early queer books don't. Even the ending, as bizarre and disturbing as it seems on the surface, offers more hope for love than most. I'm so glad to have finally read it and to find in it so much more than I was led to believe was there.

I read it three times within six months--dazzaling! A fantastic novel.

The book is awful but the seller is just great

The work requires something from you that most people give up on in the first instance. Fair enough, sometimes we want a page-turner, a flow of pleasure rather than exquisite pain. When I first read it I was baffled. I felt the vexation, the disorienting murmur of incomprehensibility. But I re-read it. I saw the power and thrust of Barnes's strange sentences. I stopped and read them over, and started to see shades of humour, of drollery previously hidden. I thought about the Semitic thread; I thought about the way it blocks black and white interpretation. I ached for Nora and felt compelled by the same strange love for Robin as the characters feel. I saw it conjuring a language yet to exist. I filled in blanks, then realised I was tampering. I went at it again, slower. I read her other works. All I can say is that with perseverance, Nightwood is a jewel lost in the ocean, and Djuna Barnes a genius.

Wonderful

Je suis troublée : ce livre est préfacé par TS Eliot, ce qui n'est pas rien... mais je le trouve illisible. Les phrases sont alambiquées, trop longues, comme si l'auteur avait essayé de produire un style littéraire élaboré et subtil.. mais sans succès. On me dit Djuna Barnes est connue, comment vous ne l'avez pas lue ? certaines scènes se passent à St Germain... je l'achète donc Je remet mon niveau d'anglais en cause, relisant les phrases plusieurs fois, cherchant le sens... et de guerre lasse le propose en lecture à une personne de confiance, américaine, journaliste. Il déteste et confirme : c'est long, verbeux et peu agréable à lire. Du reste, il ne la connait pas et elle n'a pas écrit d'autres livres important. Je m'accorde les droits du lecteur (cf D. Pennac) : je vais sauter des pages et aller directement aux passages qui m'intéressent : St Germain et ceux qui pourraient évoquer une position d'avant garde sur les femmes car DB était homosexuelle.