Nightwood--Djuna Barnes

N

nomadologist

Guest
Just going through my books today (Gavin, have you read this already? :)) and stumbled on Nightwood. Had forgotten how much I liked this.

Anyone else?

Discuss Nightwood here.
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
Ah ok then you'll have a chance to read it soon ;)

It's a very odd little book, Nightwood. Djuna Barnes was influenced by Aubrey Beardsley. Here's some autobiographical info from wiki:

Barnes was born in a log cabin on Storm King Mountain, near Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York. Her paternal grandmother, Zadel Turner Barnes, was a writer, journalist, and Women's Suffrage activist who had once hosted an influential literary salon. Her father, Wald Barnes,[1] was an unsuccessful composer, musician, and painter. An advocate of polygamy, he married Barnes's mother Elizabeth in 1889; his mistress Fanny Clark moved in with them in 1897, when Barnes was five. They had eight children, whom Wald made little effort to support financially. Zadel, who believed her son was a misunderstood artistic genius, struggled to provide for the entire family, supplementing her diminishing income by writing begging letters to friends and acquaintances.[2]
As the second oldest child, Barnes spent much of her childhood helping care for siblings and half-siblings. She received her early education at home, mostly from her father and grandmother, who taught her writing, art, and music but neglected subjects such as math and spelling.[3] She claimed to have had no formal schooling at all; some evidence suggests that she was enrolled in public school for a time after age ten, though her attendance was inconsistent.[4]
At the age of 16 she was raped, apparently by a neighbor with the knowledge and consent of her father, or possibly by her father himself. She referred to the rape obliquely in her first novel Ryder and more directly in her furious final play The Antiphon. Sexually explicit references in correspondence from her grandmother, with whom she shared a bed for years, suggest incest, but Zadel -- dead for forty years by the time the The Antiphon was written -- was left out of its indictments.[5] Shortly before her eighteenth birthday she reluctantly "married" Fanny Clark's brother Percy Faulkner in a private ceremony without benefit of clergy. He was fifty-two. The match had been strongly promoted by her father and grandmother, but she stayed with him for no more than two months.[6]

Barnes's chapbook The Book of Repulsive Women (1915) collects eight "rhythms" and five drawings. The poems show the strong influence of late nineteenth century Decadence, and the style of the illustrations resembles Aubrey Beardsley's. The setting is New York City, and the subjects are all women: a cabaret singer, a woman seen through an open window from the elevated train, and, in the last poem, the corpses of two suicides in the morgue. The book describes women's bodies and sexuality in terms that have indeed struck many readers as repulsive, but, as with much of Barnes's work, the author's stance is ambiguous. Some critics read the poems as exposing and satirizing cultural attitudes toward women.[45]
Barnes herself came to regard The Book of Repulsive Women as an embarrassment; she called the title "idiotic", left it out of her curriculum vitae, and even burned copies. But since the copyright had never been registered, she was unable to prevent it from being republished, and it became one of her most reprinted works.[46]

It's not as completely weird as these quotes might suggest, I think you may enjoy it...
 
Last edited:

STN

sou'wester
I thought it was just unbelievably weird (I don't think weird books are a bad thing, btw). Impenetrable, actually. I felt I was too stupid to glean anything from it and felt that there was quite a distance between me and the author on account of when it was written. It made quite an impression though and I'd like to read it again and see if it all falls into place.
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
Luckily I had a really brilliant professor helping me out with it, he did a great job presenting it and gave us lots of theory readings from the same era that sort of contextualized it.
 

STN

sou'wester
It has quite a dreamlike/hallucinatory quality to it*, I think. Not a million miles from Lautremont, but nicer, obviously.

I still have an extremely vivid mental image of one of the characters, which rarely happens to me. I don't know if that's down to the slow-build (as opposed to explicit description) style of writing.

I didn't study it; it seems like a book that you'd enjoy more if you'd studied it, with guidance from a clever and knowledgable person.

*edit: that'll be the Beardsley influence!
 

dHarry

Well-known member
Sounds interesting; never heard of it/her *googles* though the opening line should be in the great opening lines thread:

Early in 1880, in spite of a well-founded suspicion as to the advisability of perpetuating that race which has the sanction of the Lord and the disapproval of the people, Hedvig Volkbein, a Viennese woman of great strength and military beauty, lying upon a canopied bed, of a rich spectacular crimson, the valance stamped with the bifurcated wings of the House of Hapsburg, the feather coverlet an envelope of satin on which, in massive and tarnished gold threads, stood the Volkbein arms, - gave birth, at the age of forty-five, to an only child, a son, seven days after her physician predicted that she would be taken.
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
Yes, hallucinatory is a good word--the prose is really singular, I've never read anything like it.

That is an excellent first line!! I won't give any spoilers but there is a wonderful transvestite character in it. (Shh don't let Oprah hear, it'll be on her bookclub list in no time...)
 

STN

sou'wester
There's some kind of Eliot connection, is there not? Were they friends? Or is it simply that he was a fan?
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
There's some kind of Eliot connection, is there not? Were they friends? Or is it simply that he was a fan?

He wrote an introduction to the edition that I have...published by New Directions paperback.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
OK, got this now - started slowly but I'm really beginning to enjoy it now. Enjoying the massive rant from the doctor character when she goes to visit him late at night. I've only really been able to read it on the bus drunkenly coming back from the pub which increases the hallucinatory nature - not sure that's the best way to read books in general but when that's the only free time you've got then you've got no choice. Wish it were longer though, it's a tiny little book and it will be over almost as soon as it has begun.
 
Top