A broken heart have you! I have fallen arches, flying dandruff, a floating kidney, shattered nerves and a broken heart.
—Dr. Matthew Dante O’Connor, in Nightwood
Well before William Burroughs attempted to resolve the risks of decadent interiority with the cut-up, Djuna Barnes (of whom Burroughs was a great fan) attacked the problem in a similarly experimental fashion—although she was less interested in escaping decadence than in finding a new form for it, a special language all its own. In all her work and especially in Nightwood (1937), she would give the chaotic, threatening morass of decadent interiority shape and form through a poetic practice that granted uncanny autonomy to metaphor. And like Burroughs, Barnes understood decadent interiority as opposed to an ethos of continence, an opposition that emerges most clearly in her 1931 media interview with Coco Chanel. Barnes would go on to set herself up as the anti-Chanel: the two offer rival models for how to be a woman dandy in the age of modernism.
The fashion designer, a famously early riser, offers rather stern advice in her interview with Barnes:
You cannot maintain two destinies, that of the fool or the intemperate and that of the wise and the temperate. You cannot keep up a nightlife and amount to anything in the day. You cannot indulge in those foods and liquors that destroy the physique and still hope to have a physique that functions with the minimum of destruction to itself. A candle burnt at both ends may shed a brighter light, but the darkness that follows is for a longer time.1
Chanel’s insistence on clean living amounts to a repudiation of those habits of consumption associated with decadent dandyism. This is a particularly pointed rejection, insofar as Chanel herself was, as the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Valerie Steele puts it, “the first female dandy.”2 If, as I have been insisting, dandyism has been constituted all along by a certain tension between decadent interiority and cool, controlled surfaces, then Chanel, here, hopes polemically to identify herself with those controlled surfaces, to claim for herself a dandyism purged of all traces of decadence (as Lisa Chaney puts it, Chanel “concentrated on the silhouette, the structure and architecture of clothes”).3 Her aesthetic is attended by a homiletic moralism: “What have you heard after midnight that you count worth sitting up for?”4 This sounds less like Wilde than like Thoreau—“Have you knowledge of the morning? Are you abroad early, brushing the dews aside? . . . [I]f you are not acquainted with the morning star, what relation have you to wisdom and purity?”—but its dandiacal thrust, its thirst for control, cannot be missed.5 (Chanel was famous for her epigrammatic “maxims,” offered in fashion magazines and interviews.)6 She favored an androgynous style (“I hate breasts that show. . . . [Women] can have hips, that’s all right, but in the front and back, they should be flat like men”) achieved via the sartorial discipline of breast-binding garments.7 The suppression of secondary sex characteristics was part of a larger distaste for bodily expression tout court; as Linda Simon, one of her biographers, puts it, she had “a fetish for cleanliness that she would forever equate with virtue. . . . One of [her] highest compliments was that a woman hid her ‘personal odor’” successfully.8
Ideally—as her famous perfume Chanel No. 5 would demonstrate—one could hide one’s “personal odor” with a scent resembling something entirely inorganic. “Chanel did not want her perfume to be identified with any particular flower, but instead, she insisted, to be something completely artificial.”9 Chanel’s preoccupation with bodily control, and her distaste for the organic, made her notorious for barely eating.10 Simon writes that camellias were Chanel’s favorite flower, “no matter that in France the flower was associated with courtesans and dandies; in China, the camellia was a symbol of purity.”11 But this is to see a contradiction where none exists: the camellia was Chanel’s flower not despite its association with dandies but because Chanel’s variety of dandyism involved the relentless pursuit of bodily purification.
Barnes characterized Chanel’s “philosophy”—“the cause of her success and her fame”—as, in essence, a disciplined relationship to the appetites:
She believes in being natural, and when she uses the word “natural” she does not use it as it is customarily used, to denote things ugly, uncouth, untrained. To her that thing is natural which is the most complete and coordinated. If you say that your way of being natural is to sit up until dawn, drink everything in sight, dress so that you are conspicuous, eat so that you are gorged, she will say, “Very well, but what a bad nature you have!”12
The definitions of “natural” that Barnes attributes to Chanel are not entirely consistent. While at first it appears that the “natural” simply is that which is “complete and coordinated,” by the end of the passage completeness and coordination would appear to be the desirable traits of a good nature; a “bad nature” is, contrarily, that of a gluttonous, alcoholic, loudly dressed night owl. Such all-too-human messiness, like Burroughs’s portrayal of a Maugham whom it is “impossible to keep clean,” represents one avenue for denigrating decadence—for downgrading its subversive romanticism into mere sloppiness. Conversely, as Barnes implies, Chanel’s idiosyncratic use of the word “natural” as entailing “completeness and coordination” aligns the Chanelian dandy with the machine, and therefore with those terminal cases of macho modernism discussed in my introduction. (Indeed, Chanel is evidence that such a modernism can accommodate a variety of gender styles—femininity is no necessary bar to it.) As Burstein says, Chanel’s “bead necklaces made of metals like steel and platinum” are “representative of a mechanistic aesthetic”; her sartorial innovation “turns on a rendering of the human body as mechanized and reproducible.”13 “Natural”—at least when its valence is positive—is, for Chanel, paradoxically equivalent to the “mechanical”: efficient, functional, and without appetite.
That the “natural” as “complete and coordinated”—as “good”—is not Barnes’s ideal is suggested not only by her decadent fiction but by her 1920 Vanity Fair article “Against Nature,” in which she celebrates “intricacy, falsity, perfidy—anything that is a step removed from this eternal simplicity that everyone seems to like.”14 As the Huysmans nod in the title indicates, Barnes is interested in resisting “the natural” according to a rather different pattern than Chanel’s machine aesthetic. As Robin Blyn puts it of Nightwood’s “decadent and transgendered . . . freak dandies,” “their will to Aestheticism becomes the measure of their freakishness.”15 While Chanel (in Barnes’s paraphrase) rejects conspicuous dress, Barnes’s antinaturalism embraces “freakishness” in all its blatancy.
Chanel and Barnes, then, offer competing models for modernist female dandyism, although transvestism and androgyny are central to both. The dandy may be a member of that archetypically male family including the fop and the rake, but, as the trajectory of aestheticist androgyny running from Pater through Hemingway makes clear, dandyism’s gender is not a simple quantity. Chanel’s dandyism resonates with the surface-oriented machismo of Wyndham Lewis. (After all, the BLAST manifesto blesses “the hairdresser,” indicating Vorticism’s consonance with the arena of fashion in which Chanel operated.) Barnes’s dandyism, on the other hand, descends into the abysses of interiority I have throughout this book shown to be associated with “decadence,” and which, insofar as it is gendered, favors androgyny and hermaphroditism. To recur, as a thumbnail heuristic, to those binarisms sketched in my introduction, Chanel’s dandyism is “aestheticist” (or “cold” in Burstein’s phrase, or “classical” in Hulme’s), while Barnes’s is “decadent” (or “hot” or “romantic”).
But just as, in the case of Hemingway, such binarisms prove unstable or ultimately descriptively inadequate, the neat schematic I’ve offered—Chanel vs. Barnes—cannot hold. This is especially the case with respect to the gender affiliations of the female dandy, which are dizzyingly involved. If the dandy is a primarily male social type associated with effeminacy, the female dandy is at once parasitic on this type and, in her constitutive androgyny, somehow a more primary instance of it.16 While Barnes offers what Blyn calls “transgendered . . . freak dandies,” Chanel’s originality in the fashion world involved making women’s dress more like men’s, a transformation premised on personal experimentation. As Douglas Messerli recounts, Chanel “caused a small sensation” in the years before her career began by wearing bespoke jodhpurs and other conventionally male attire, some of it lent to her by her then lover Etienne Balsan. “The style she created over the next decades—more tailored and trimmer than the clothes women had worn for centuries—helped change the course of fashion.”17 In other words, Chanel’s fashion innovations—the particular brand of female dandyism she helped market and codify—depend for force and originality on cross-gendering.
Chanel’s dandyish cross-dressing inhabits a French tradition that stretches well back into the nineteenth century. We might start with George Sand, whose own penchant for male clothing, for which a contemporary referred to her as “the illustrious hermaphrodite,” began, like Chanel’s, with the ostensibly merely practical need for appropriate horseback riding attire.18 Similarly, the pioneering French artist Rosa Bonheur was granted a Permission de Travestissement, “for reasons of health.”19 Despite their allegedly practical motivations, such female transvestism would prove, as Daniel Cottom puts it, “an iconic image of bohemian provocation.”20 “Like Sand,” Cottom goes on to say, “the dandy was a kind of transvestite, an ‘Androgyne,’ as Barbey said, in his stereotypically feminine care for his appearance and exquisite behavior.”21 But there is a large cultural difference between a woman dressed as a man and the effeminate coding of a man’s attention to dress and display. This latter is the nexus of male dandyism’s originary androgyny, which much of the modernist dandiacal writing I have discussed so far has been concerned with transforming, sometimes even repudiating. In this tradition, dandiacal habits of outward display are indices of a complex androgynous psychic interior. With this in mind, we might see the dandyism Chanel expressed in her interview with Barnes as either a variety of modernist masculinity—like Lewis, Hemingway, or Chandler, her transvestism involves a fetishism of surfaces—or a specifically feminine version of the surface-oriented aesthetics associated most immediately with macho modernism.
For Chanel, as for Wyndham Lewis, valorized aesthetic experimentation is oriented toward the external and the inorganic. Barnes’s own model of female cross-gendering inverts and complements Chanel’s. For Barnes, the radical revelations made available by transvestism are decidedly organic—hence her (semiparodic but, as we will see, transformative) interest in degeneration theory. Michael Davidson insists that Barnes’s “non-sequiturs, baroque rhetoric, and elaborate hyperbole force attention on to the surface of language rather than elucidating some interior psychological state”; Nightwood is therefore “the antithesis of the modernist interior monologue that attempts to render some subterranean, unchanging bottom nature or core personality.”22 The reality is somewhat more complicated. It is true that Barnesian prose, in its elaborate artificiality and allusiveness, does something quite different from the various psychologisms associated most readily with the label “stream of consciousness.” But Barnes is in fact profoundly invested in laying bare the animal substrate of human sociality. At its most extreme, this investment reduces consciousness to a kind of muscle, sheer flesh: as Nightwood’s Doctor O’Connor says, “[I]f one gave birth to a heart on a plate, it would say ‘Love’ and twitch like the lopped leg of a frog.”23 While imagery like this eschews the modernist promise of rich interiority, its orientation is not exactly toward “the surface,” either. Rather, it proposes that psychological substrates are no more than the reflex actions of the viscera. What Davidson describes Barnes resisting is Burstein’s “hot” modernism, a modernism of interiority, psychology, and depth. But Barnes is not a cold modernist—she has not, like Lewis or Chanel, abandoned psychological interiority in favor of the shell or the machine. Rather, she has abandoned it for a conception of the human not as Pascal’s thinking reed but as a muscle that mutely feels. This is indeed an “elucidati[on of] some interior psychological state,” albeit by means crucially different than had been normalized by the stream of consciousness. It offers an antihumanism quite distinct from cold modernism’s, and a vision of interiority separate from the more familiar trajectory Davidson refers to under the sign of “stream of consciousness.” As we will see, Barnes’s antihumanism depends on two linked thematic focuses, transvestism and Darwinesque degeneration theory, which she yokes together and routes through parody.
The transvestite female dandy makes an early English appearance (the first, as far as I know) in Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1857), when the eponymous hero, Dick Feverel, is tempted away from lawful marriage by the seductions of one Mrs. Mount (Bella), whose “man-like conversation, which he took for honesty, was a refreshing change on fair lips.”24 In a kind of prevision of the enchanted androgynous dialogism that Hemingway would explore in Garden of Eden, Bella’s cross-dressing—she likes to dress as a man in “outrageous affectation of the supreme dandy”—will awaken hitherto unsuspected erotic possibilities for Dick: “He began to conceive romance in that sort of fun.” Bella and Dick christen Bella’s masculine alter ego—her “dandy’s attire”—“Sir Julius.”25 Bella/Sir Julius’s transformations, however comically presented, occupy some of the same uncanny, metamorphic territory explored earlier by Gautier and later by Hemingway. Dick’s tender flirting with Sir Julius even approaches the kind of identity melding fantasized about by David and Catherine in Garden of Eden. Dick tells Sir Julius that she “must grow more” (to be taller, to be more like a man) and then demonstrates how: “‘I’ll show you how,’ and he lifted Sir Julius lightly, and bore the fair gentleman to the looking-glass, holding him there exactly on a level with his head. ‘Will that do?’” As in those filmic dramas of identity merger from Persona to Mulholland Drive, the mirror offers a space in which the difference between people gets magically dissolved, however tentatively. From Mademoiselle de Maupin on, this fantasized resolution of difference as such is routed through the figure of the dandiacal androgyne. And, while Sir Julius’s dandyism is a mask, something assumed and cast off, certain core features of dandyism mark Bella in her uncostumed state as well. Specifically, Bella (Mrs. Mount) is master of the kind of verbal power possessed elsewhere in Meredith by The Egoist’s Mrs. Mounstuart, discussed in my second chapter. In Bella’s case, such power has, as the dandy’s always does, the disturbing capacity to dismantle the symbolic hold of the most cherished social institutions. She takes particular aim at the institution of marriage: “Imputations upon wives: horrible exultation at the universal peccancy of husbands. This lovely outcast almost made him think she had the right on her side, so keenly her Parthian arrows pierced the holy centres of society, and exposed its rottenness.”26
Decadent dandyism’s twinned fascination with and repulsion toward women provides the female decadent with, at best, a pointedly ambiguous model for imitation. The canonical representations of female decadence in the nineteenth century by a woman author are Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus (1884) and La Marquise de Sade (1887), both of which can only tolerate the contempt for women that is so large a part of decadence by reinscribing this contempt in a parodic key.27 As it happens, such reinscription is an especially available avenue for decadence, because decadence is already a discourse with a strong tendency toward the parodic. Decadence exploits transvestism’s formal affinity with parody. As Judith Butler has influentially put it, “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself.”28 Transvestism might be locally parodic insofar as it imitates (appreciatively or contemptuously as the case may be) the contemporaneous conventions by which gender is performed, but its parody always points toward a much broader destabilization of the sex/gender system. As early as Richard Feverel, such destabilizations offer, thrillingly or threateningly, to dissolve the very boundaries of selfhood.
In Nightwood, Djuna Barnes’s masterpiece, the central appearance of transvestism is male-to-female, although its dynamics are profoundly indebted to the possibilities of female-to-male cross-gendering offered by decadence from Gautier onward. In what Marjorie Garber calls “one of the most disquieting cross-dressing scenes in all of twentieth-century literature,”29 Nora comes across Dr. Matthew O’Connor, in bed, “in a woman’s flannel nightgown”:
The doctor’s head, with its over-large black eyes, its full gun-metal cheeks and chin, was framed in the golden semi-circle of a wig with long pendent curls that touched his shoulders, and falling back against the pillow, turned up the shadowy interior of their cylinders. He was heavily rouged and his lashes painted. It flashed into Nora’s head: “God, children know something they can’t tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!”30
What makes this scene so “disquieting” for Garber? She reads its culminating revelation as imbricated, formally and thematically, with the Freudian primal scene, particularly as developed in The Wolfman—a comparison enabled in part by Freud’s own discussion of “Little Red Riding Hood” in that case study.31 The implication seems to be that this “primal scene of cross-dressing” confronts Nora with the contingent enculturation of biological sex.32 If, as Butler says of drag, “part of the pleasure, the giddiness of the performance is in the recognition of a radical contingency in the relation between sex and gender,”33 Barnes’s “disquieting” scene proposes that the converse of such liberating giddiness is a frightening encounter with the biological raw material that culture transforms into social legibility, an encounter decadence stages over and over again.
In the doctor’s case, as in the sci-fi fantasias of H. G. Wells and William Burroughs discussed in the previous chapter, amorphous, decadent interiority is framed by the tools and symbols of the medical trade—in particular, the scalpel. Here’s the doctor’s room as perceived by Nora immediately before she discovers him in bed:
A pile of medical books, and volumes of miscellaneous order, reached almost to the ceiling. . . . Just above them was a very small barred window, the only ventilation. On a maple dresser, certainly not of European make, lay a rusty pair of forceps, a broken scalpel, half a dozen odd instruments that she could not place, a catheter, some twenty perfume bottles, almost empty, pomades, creams, rouges, powder, boxes and puffs.34
By enumerating surgical instruments alongside items of feminine beautification, Barnes proposes a troubling continuity between the body as an object of medical intervention on the one hand and of aestheticizing improvements on the other. This is a typically decadent assemblage, and it prepares the way for the revelation of the doctor’s transvestism in the following paragraph. If, following Garber, this is a “primal scene,” it can only become so because, by highlighting the cultural contingency of gendered costume, it brings forcefully to consciousness the unmarked flesh beneath all costume—not just the skin beneath the dress but the meat too, the Nietzschean “human being under the skin.” This is what it means for cross-dressing to be, as Garber says, “constitutive of culture”—the transvestite primal scene allegorizes the repressions and constructions of enculturation as such.35
Such primal scenes do not happen just anywhere, in modernist literature at least. They require the decadent atmosphere, the right sort of interior decorating. As Barnes goes on to describe Dr. O’Connor’s bedroom, “There was something appallingly degraded about the room, like the rooms in brothels, which give even the most innocent a sensation of having been accomplice.”36 Barnes’s evocation of this degraded interior partakes of some of the ambivalent moralizing with which decadent texts in the modernist period so often frame their queer figures of fascination.
Or, more accurately, it imitates such moralizing without, perhaps, really participating in it. Symptomatically, older feminist readings of Nightwood are unsure how to handle the “degradation” Barnes associates with transvestism, because they are not sufficiently sensitive to the dynamics of parody at work. Sandra Gilbert, for instance, wants to insist that unlike such representations of androgyny as The Waste Land’s Tiresias—a “fever dream of the hermaphrodite, the nightmare of gender disorder”—female modernists including Barnes offer a “kind of utopian ceremonial androgyny whose purpose is very different from the ritual transvestism” depicted by Joyce or Eliot.37 Susan Gubar, likewise, insists that “[u]nlike the grotesque transvestities [sic] in modernist literature by men, both of the inverts of Nightwood [Robin Vote and Dr. O’Connor] are closely identified with heroic attempts to get back to prehistory.”38 Leaving aside the question whether “male modernists” are quite as one-sidedly reactionary in their engagement with transvestism, androgyny, and hermaphroditism as these accounts suggest, I believe that such optimistic or politically positive readings miss the extreme ambivalence, the real horror at the materiality of the flesh, which Nightwood presents.39 This is not to suggest that Gubar and Gilbert are wrong to see in Nightwood celebrations of the queer, but to insist that such celebrations unfold in rhetorical complicity with, not in contradistinction to, discourses which find in decadence precisely the “Walpurgisnacht of misplaced sexuality” which Gilbert ascribes, pejoratively, to Eliot.40 As I hope will become clear in what follows, Barnes’s felicity with stylistic parody is the key to her ambivalent articulation of decadent interiority, an articulation that exploits above all the toxic tropes of degeneration theory.
With the exception of early Yeats, Djuna Barnes is probably the most overtly decadent of the high modernists. To be decadent, for Barnes, is to be haunted by the specter of biology. But while Barnes registers the symbolic power of decadent and degenerationist thinking, she is too much a parodist to take it quite seriously. If the female dandy has a privileged relationship to parody, Nightwood is a parody of decadence raised to a pitch of high modernist virtuosity. But Barnes doesn’t just parody decadence: she also suggests that modernism cannot break from it. More: like the parodies of Ulysses, Barnes’s decadent style both celebrates and undermines literary style as such.
Barnes’s career and its reception can therefore tell us something general about modernism’s ambivalence toward decadence and aestheticism. The story begins with her 1915 volume of poetry, The Book of Repulsive Women. With its Beardsleyesque illustrations and its lovingly evoked figures of decay (“Though her lips are vague as fancy/In her youth/They bloom vivid and repulsive/As the truth”), Barnes’s early volume of poems could seem a mere tissue of fin de siècle mannerisms, a last little gasp of the Yellow Nineties.41 Barnes herself tried to suppress a 1949 reprint of The Book of Repulsive Women and left it out of the vita she sent to Who’s Who.42 This unsuccessful suppression—the reprint went forward without her blessing—might stand as an emblem for the suppression of modernism’s debt to decadent style more generally.
In fact, all of Barnes’s work and especially Nightwood would remain signally indebted to the textures and themes of decadence, as the critical consensus of the last few years has come to reflect. Erin G. Carlston sums it up well when she writes that “all of the varied genres and styles Barnes explores exemplify the definition Arthur Symons formulated of decadence in 1897: ‘That learned corruption of language by which style ceases to be organic, and becomes, in the pursuit of some new expressiveness of beauty, deliberately abnormal’ [Symons 149].”43 David Weir’s inclusion of Barnes at the end of his survey of decadent culture in the United States handily enumerates the characteristically decadent aspects of her career and art, from her association with Guido Bruno (1884–1942), publisher of decadent texts including Repulsive Women, to her exploitation in Nightwood of such decadent topoi as the “‘fatal woman’ theme”—the canonical treatment of which is Wilde’s Salome—and degeneration theory.44 Furthermore, and crucial for our purposes, there are “the varieties of sexuality that can be called ‘decadent’ because they are at some remove from heterosexual ‘norms’”;45 as adumbrated above, Nightwood’s interest in transvestism taps into a decadent-dandiacal lineage whose ancestral locus classicus is Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), and which also includes Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus (1884).
Thematically, Nightwood partakes of decadence’s focus on elaborate artificiality, non-normative sexuality, and extremes of psychological investigation. Formally, it inherits decadence’s conflation of exceptional fineness with deliberate grotesquerie, a grotesquerie specifically, even obsessively, invested in discovering the bestial in the human. As early as Repulsive Women, Barnes had explored in “Twilight of the Illicit” an animalizing rhetoric soaked in decadent tropes; the accompanying illustration depicts a sort of hybrid lizard-woman, an icon of the degenerate paradoxically ascendant, triumphant. The poem itself describes a weariness entirely at odds with the erect posture of the figure in the illustration; between them, poem and illustration map out the dialectic of savage energy and world-weary exhaustion characteristic of decadence in general and of the discourse of degeneration theory in particular. An uncomplimentary verse portrait, “Twilight” begins, “You, with your long blank udders / And you calms / Your spotted linen and your / Slack’ning arms.” Prefiguring Doctor O’Connor’s sloppy bedroom in Nightwood, this interior tips over from decadent excess to mere messiness. Its aggressively unflattering portrait continues:
You, the twilight powder of
A fire-wet dawn;
You, the massive mother of
Illicit spawn:
While the others shrink in virtue
You have borne.46
Vincent Sherry has observed that Nightwood’s “aftermath imaginary” exploits images of “the puppet impersonating the human,” which he sees as characteristic of the “poetics of decadence.”47 But this early poem weds its aftermath imaginary—its “fire-wet dawn” after the party’s over (“shivering in the junk-sick morning,” as Burroughs would have it)—not to images of automatons or puppets but, instead, to a figure of monstrous biology: “the massive mother of / Illicit spawn.” Decadence, here, finds in biological maternity itself—in the very engine of the natural—its master image. Not only is human maternity translated into the language of (mere) animal reproduction (“dugs,” “spawn”), but the figure of the “massive mother” seems poised to crowd out whatever we take “the others” (other mothers? other children? other people in general?) to refer to—they “shrink” while the “massive mother” expands alarmingly. The final two lines are punningly polysemous. “Shrink in virtue” might on first reading appear to mean “shrink by virtue of,” though the direction of the sentence after the line break will not permit this reading to stand. Do we hear “born” (i.e., “birthed”) in “borne,” so that, with fine decadent irony, the addressee’s “spawn” is itself the bearer of virtue? Or do the “others” shrink in the virtue that the poem’s addressee has overcome or suffered (“borne”) in order to produce her “illicit spawn”? Only the last reading is fully reconcilable with Barnes’s syntax and spelling, but the lines are deliberately ambiguous nevertheless; they are struggling, it seems, to articulate some complex paradox about the relationship between “spawning” and virtue.
Whatever their exact sense, they leave us with that impression of disproportion that is one of decadence’s hallmarks. As discussed at greater length in the previous chapter, when applied formally “decadence” usually denotes, as Regenia Gagnier has it, “a decomposition or deformation of the relationship between the part and the whole.”48 Such decadent themes find exemplary form in Nightwood’s long, strange sentences. Weir sees Nightwood’s style as enacting the passage from a decadent to a modernist aesthetic: “[Nightwood] is a kind of modernization of decadence in which decadent material is subjected to the narrative and stylistic procedures of modernist fiction. . . . As extended by Bourget, Nietzsche, and other writers, the theoretical paradigm of decadent style has come to describe a manner of writing that places the greatest degree of artistic emphasis on the smallest unit of a literary composition.”49 I want to build on Weir’s argument with three goals in mind. First, I will attempt to define “decadent style” as it operates in Barnes with as much formal specificity as possible, taking up Weir’s observation that Nightwood “can be used to illustrate the emergence of a modernist literary aesthetic out of the style of decadence” by articulating the means of this emergence at the level of the sentence. For Barnes, a nineteenth-century “decadent style” will be crucially rerouted through the conceptual and syntactical grid of the Renaissance conceit. Second, I will suggest that the decadent archaism of Barnesian style achieves its effects via what Carolyn Williams, writing of Pater, has called “aesthetic historicism.” Barnes’s own version of this aestheticist appropriation of historically marked forms—what I call her “decadent historicism”—will fully exploit degeneration theory’s fascination with the bestial in the human, and Nightwood’s animal motifs can illuminate the decadent formal texture of its prose. Third, I will briefly consider Barnesian decadent style in terms of the broader phenomenon of modernist engagement with parody.
Nightwood brings to perfection the taste for stylistic pastiche which Barnes had begun with Ryder (1928). In the earlier novel, various phases of English literary history—Chaucer, the King James Bible, Renaissance prose generally, and a certain Irish-inflected rollicking demotic—are lovingly, and expertly, imitated. Though the pastiche is not as systematic as in Ulysses’s “Winds of Aeolus,” it is usually not too hard to identify a source. Here, for instance, Barnes describes a father and newborn in prose recognizably derived from the King James Bible: “And he saw that it was small and red, and that its flesh was dry in the ear and the navel, and between the hands and between the feet; and between the nates it did perspire and give off a heat and a sourness.”50 The pastiches are distinct enough never to resolve into a default idiom—there is no solution to the heterogeneity of the prose’s ingredients.
In Nightwood, decadence itself will provide the rhetorical solvent in which the diverse targets of Barnes’s pastiche come to stylistic equilibrium. The resolution of diverse stylistic precedents within the common idiom of decadence makes sense, since the repeated staging of a curatorial fascination with the high aesthetic production of a distant cultural past is one of decadence’s most recognizable tendencies. Like Ryder, Nightwood’s most obvious precedents are the styles of the Renaissance. T. S. Eliot recognized this debt when he famously declared that the novel attains “a quality of horror and doom very closely related to that of Elizabethan tragedy.”51 Certainly Nightwood’s effects—its “doom” but also its humor—depend on its deliberate plundering of archaic idioms, though its extended comparisons and hypertrophic similes have to my ear more in common with the conceits of the Metaphysicals than with Elizabethan tragedy.52
The peculiar effect of Barnes’s prose depends on the mediation of markedly “old-fashioned” sentential rhythms by an (equally marked) decadent style.53 Michael Riffaterre has analyzed the formal mechanisms by which decadent writing, in his view, re-scripts Romantic writing, subjecting it to the ironizing operations of “paradox”:
[Paradox] first proposes an object, and then offers an aberrant point of view that falsifies the representation of that object. The effect of surprise caused by an expression that seems inadequate, or even by a systematic mismatch between form and content, is a consequence of the combination of the two stages. The first, prior to the paradoxical transformation, is the given. The second, following the transformation, is the derivation, the form of the incongruity.54
Decadent writing, therefore, forces on the reader a kind of consciousness of the operations of style and form related to that of parody. With this in mind, we can see Dr. Matthew O’Connor’s transvestism as an emblem of Nightwood’s far broader skepticism about the relationship between style on the one hand and essence or truth on the other.
This skepticism—a loving skepticism, a skepticism charged with affection for its object—results in a kind of stylistic pastiche that cannot but be a kind of literary-historical inside baseball; like so much modernist irony, you have to know a lot to get the joke. As Riffaterre concludes, “Everything lies in the internal games of writing, and this provides an extra point of interest in the decadent text . . . the power they have to make this truth visible through their formal eccentricity, and to require of us a reading that demands full awareness and complete participation.”55 What Riffaterre says of decadence is doubly true of Barnes’s “neo-decadent performance,”56 which famously demands such “full awareness.” Barnes’s parodic style imitates decadent imitation. Its “given” is both decadence proper (with its own internal parodied given, Romanticism) and the Renaissance rhythms Barnes loves. Barnes’s derivations are double: faintly parodied decadence and faux seventeenth-century at once. And the particular aspects of Renaissance style to which Barnes is most drawn—the long, accretive sentences of Burton and the baroque surprises of the Metaphysicals’ complex metaphors—resonate nicely with the familiar profligacy of nineteenth-century decadent prose, what Riffaterre calls its “acceleration towards superlative summits—an acceleration entirely pertinent to the decadent quest for excess and satiety.”57
Burton’s “loose free style” is usually thought of in contradistinction to the intricate conceits of the Metaphysicals, though in Barnes’s hands, these two ostensibly opposed means become reconciled.58 The most famous definition of the Metaphysical conceit comes, of course, from Samuel Johnson’s essay on Abraham Cowley in The Lives of the Poets. Johnson identifies a characteristic
combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike. . . . The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.59
Helen Gardner defines a “conceit” as “a comparison whose ingenuity is more striking than its justness.” A Metaphysical conceit is distinguished by the presence of a kind of argumentative intellection, “an appearance of logical rigour.” The Metaphysical conceit is further distinguished by its conclusion, what Donne famously called “the impression of the stamp”; this epigrammatic thrust reflects its argumentative character.60
Nightwood’s outlandish figures and comparisons not infrequently reflect Donne’s call for an “impression.”61 Barnes is fond of yoking her elaborate imagery to some point, often a generalizable claim about eros or human nature. Here is an example:
Love becomes the deposit of the heart, analogous in all degrees to the “findings” in a tomb. As in one will be charted the taken place of the body, the raiment, and the utensils necessary to its other life, so in the heart of the lover will be traced, as an indelible shadow, that which he loves. In Nora’s heart lay the fossil of Robin, intaglio of her identity, and about it for its maintenance ran Nora’s blood.62
The epigrammatic thrust of the conceit—the deposit of the heart (love) is like the remnants in a tomb—precedes its fuller development, though the “impression” here can be thought of as the application of the lesson to the novel’s dramatic situation enacted by the final sentence. It would also be possible to read the first, epigrammatic sentence—the most compact statement of this particular conceit, elaborated on in the sentence that follows—as the “impression,” in which case the comment is not on Robin and Nora in particular but on love in general; Robin and Nora become mere instances of a broader phenomenon.
Nevertheless, there is a sense in which this conceit simply will not cohere satisfactorily. Where, for instance, is the “other life” of either the corpse in the tomb or the “deposit of the heart”? Heaven or the afterlife in the first instance, and the beloved’s real existence in the second? Or, rather, is it the beloved’s ideal existence as beloved that depends on the “deposit”? The narrator insists that the two sides of this comparison are “analogous in all degrees”—but in that case, what, in the tomb, corresponds to the heart’s “blood,” which “maintains” the “fossil” of Robin? The point is that the difficulty is not merely a matter of complex syntax but of cloudy logic: far from being “analogous in all degrees,” this conceit is evocative but, on inspection, untenable: two things are placed side by side, but the machinery by which they are linked together is faulty, deliberately imperfect.
I am suggesting, then, that Barnes’s metaphoric imagination courts solecism intentionally. In a line of dialogue that might be taken for a metacomment on Barnes’s method, Nora at one point tells the doctor, “In the beginning, after Robin went away with Jenny to America, I searched for her in the ports. Not literally; in another way.”63 Nora, here, calls attention to the ontological instability effected by excessive figuration. Tenor and vehicle can become confused. Alan Singer observes that an “asymmetrical relation between tenor and vehicle [is] the foundation of Barnes’s style.” He finds this asymmetry “catachrestic” in the specific Renaissance sense of “a trope that stray[s] beyond the field of contextual determinations warranting its usage.”64 When confronted with a metaphor that has apparently left its context behind, the reader becomes confused, unsure how to focus her attention and concerned that she has lost the thread. In some cases—as in the “remnants” example above—confusion will remain, even with care and attention. This confusion accounts for a large part of the difficulty of reading Nightwood: it is cognitively taxing to keep track of the direction of a figure. The blurring of tenor and vehicle for the fatigued reader should be understood as a deliberate effect of Barnes’s poetics; and, in some cases, even the most vigilant reader might find herself unable to resolve local difficulties.
Barnes’s conceits often begin pithily but then refuse to stay that way, as if the compulsion to proliferate comparisons gets the better of them, or as if the satisfaction of a neat figure or an epigrammatic stamp must be denied or deferred. Here is Doctor O’Connor on his special topic, the night:
The darkness is the closet in which your lover roosts her heart, and that night-fowl that caws against her spirit and yours, dropping between you and her the awful estrangement of his bowels. The drip of your tears is his implacable pulse. Night people do not bury their dead, but on the neck of you, their beloved and waking, sling the creature, husked of its gestures.65
“The darkness is the closet in which your lover roosts her heart” is clear enough, but trouble begins in the second clause. Is “darkness” also the night-fowl’s antecedent, so that “darkness” is a “closet” and a “night-fowl”? Grammatically it would seem so, though the sense is somewhat dubious. Alternatively, the night-fowl could be a second object of the verb “roosts”: your lover roosts both her heart and the night-fowl in the darkness. (More normally, a night-fowl would roost itself, but “to roost” can function transitively.) In any event the night-fowl has, by the sentence’s end, taken over the conceit; the two following sentences continue to be controlled by it: the drip of tears is the night-fowl’s pulse, and night people sling the night-fowl on the necks of their beloved. In this most radical instance of the asymmetry between tenor and vehicle in Barnes’s style, sense recedes almost to the vanishing point as the night-fowl—standing for what, exactly?—takes on an uncanny life of its own. “Husked of its gestures,” the bird is also shorn of its function within a comparison. It risks standing for nothing but itself. It’s as if Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” were actually about a compass.
The most prominent conceits in Nightwood, if not in fact the most frequent, entirely give in to the compulsion to reiterate and multiply comparisons and to grant the vehicle a startling independence, though they are rarely as difficult to parse as the figure of the night-fowl. As with the night-fowl above, in the conceit below “corsage” takes on a life of its own, an effect heightened by the introduction of the tenor only at the end of the paragraph:
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 the reddest was to be the rose of the doctor.66
By the time one has finished this passage, it is easy to feel that the doctor has bestowed a literal red rose upon Felix.67 Horticulture was a favorite topic of decadence—as Riffaterre observes, its paradoxical “artifice in nature” was irresistible to decadent writers—but the “decadent” character of Barnes’s “corsage” conceit goes beyond its citation of the botanical topos.68 It inheres instead in the formal imbalance between tenor and vehicle. Recall the formal definition of decadence offered by Paul Bourget and discussed in the previous chapter.69 For Bourget, language and literary style develop and decline in a manner analogous to the life processes of animal organisms. Bourget’s notions of organic deterioration and its literary corollaries rhymed with contemporary theories of hereditary degeneration as propounded by thinkers like Nordau and Lombroso. Just as a degenerate human specimen possesses some traits in preposterous disproportion to others, so too in literary decadence “the page decomposes to give way to the independence of the sentence, and . . . the sentence decomposes to give way to the independence of the word.”70
Weir refers to this well-known definition of decadence in explicating T. S. Eliot’s comment that “only sensibilities trained on poetry can actually appreciate” Nightwood: “The word or phrase is polished to a point that the reader’s attention is attracted to such smaller units at the expense of the whole.”71 This is insightful but imprecise; a poetic prose is not, after all, necessarily a decadent one. As the foregoing analysis of Barnes’s conceits suggests, a major aspect of the “decadence” of Barnes’s style (as distinct from the “decadence” of her thematic preoccupations, which I will return to at length below) obtains in the perverse autonomy granted to a metaphoric vehicle. If “decomposition” is Bourget’s master trope—a “decomposition” that organicizes the experimental disarticulation of the formal parts of a work of art—then we might think of Barnes’s severing of vehicle from tenor as a signal instance of such decadent decomposition. Furthermore, and to stay with Bourget’s insistent organicism, we might think of the uncanny growth of the vehicle, its eerie metastasization, as involving Nightwood’s decadent modernism in a genre often associated with decadence but not usually with Djuna Barnes: the fantastic tale of terror. I will return to this possibility below.
The lover who “knows two times” might apply as much to a lover of English sentences as to anything else, though does Barnes stop at two? I have already mentioned the self-reflexive temporal multiplications involved in Barnes’s parodied decadence, the vertiginous sense that her sentences occupy (at least) three periods: her own, modernist one; the fin de siècle proper; and a more distant past, replete with the aura of the Renaissance and of the canon. Kannenstine has observed that Barnes’s work draws on diverse threads both late Victorian and modern (he names “fin de siècle decadence, expressionism, imagism, surrealism, stream-of-consciousness, and possibly others”) but that “the late books form a body of work which seems both innovative and traditional. . . . Various critics, working backward from contemporary references, have called them Gothic, Jacobean, and Elizabethan.”72 The vagueness Kannenstine perceives in the criticism is a deliberate effect of Barnes’s method in Nightwood, a method marking something of a break with that of Ryder. Whereas in Ryder period pastiche can be identified with some degree of precision (there is no doubt about the faux Chaucerisms, say, of “The Occupations of Wendell”), in Nightwood, the effect is rather one of generalized archaism, as if textures of various literary pasts have been stitched together or overlaid such that any too specific referent is obscured. But these archaisms are always recognizably filtered through the idiom of decadence.
Nightwood’s decadent texture is derived above all from the palimpsestic wistfulness of Pater, a debt rendered explicit in Felix’s appreciative ruminations on Robin Vote’s appearance:
She was gracious and yet fading, like an old statue in a garden, that symbolizes the weather through which it has endured, and is not so much the work of man as the work of wind and rain and the herd of the seasons, and though formed in man’s image is a figure of doom. Because of this, Felix found her presence painful, and yet a happiness. Thinking of her, visualizing her, was an extreme act of the will; to recall her after she had gone, however, was as easy as the recollection of a sensation of beauty without its details. When she smiled the smile was only in the mouth and a little bitter: the face of an incurable yet to be stricken with its malady.73
Impossible not to hear, here, echoes of Pater’s description of the Mona Lisa, whose “eyelids are a little weary,” who “is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times.”74 But Barnes’s debt to this most decadent moment of Pater’s oeuvre goes beyond the rhythmic echoes of his prose or the doomful tolling of an aestheticism half in love with death. Barnes shares with Pater a certain aesthetic approach to history, what Carolyn Williams has called Pater’s “aesthetic historicism.”75 Williams suggests that Pater’s authorial voice, so instantly recognizable, paradoxically depends on the masterfully managed echoes of past styles: “His prose feels haunted, as if the spirits of the dead come out when no one else is home.” This feature of Paterian prose is the formal expression of his theory of “aesthetic poetry,” which, as Williams has it, “strategically alludes” to “earlier poetry” even as it insists on its “historical difference.” A certain tragic and, from our perspective, protomodernist shoring of fragments attends this aesthetic historicism, since “Pater’s sense of time passing in the flux of present consciousness works both within and against his conservative desire to recontain fragments of time in some imaginary place.” This “place of transhistorical unity is most often embodied as the personal figure of an infinitely capacious mind.”76
For all his clownish excess, is not Dr. Matthew Dante O’Connor precisely such a “capacious mind,” however parodied? His transvestism is therefore an emblem for an even larger kind of capaciousness; his is a total self that can resolve or contain opposites, binaries, contradictions—just as the Barnesian conceit both enacts and refuses identity between vehicle and tenor. O’Connor’s transvestism therefore becomes, as it were, a metaphor for metaphor. For Garber, “the compelling force of transvestism in literature and culture comes . . . from its instatement of metaphor itself, not as that for which a literal meaning must be found, but precisely as that without which there would be no such thing as meaning in the first place.”77 O’Connor’s cross-dressing is the condition of his endless yarning; both point toward a kind of infinite discursive prolixity, the ground and horizon of all verbal meaning. If Nora is Nightwood’s emotional heart, O’Connor is its condition of poetic possibility.78
This capaciousness is why, with respect to Dr. O’Connor’s desired biological sex, size matters—he wants “a womb as big as the king’s kettle,” from which all of culture might issue.79 The stylistic correlative of such capaciousness is Nightwood’s decadent style itself. “The reason I’m so remarkable,” the doctor says, “is that I remember everyone. . . . It’s the boys that look as innocent as the bottom of a plate that get you into trouble, not a man with a prehistoric memory.”80 Even down to his middle name, the doctor—like the two novels in which he appears—is a vast repository of past literary styles, the alchemical synthesis of which produces his own unmistakable “voice.” But the element of parody is crucial, and helps distinguish Pater’s “aesthetic historicism” from Barnes’s “decadent” one. (Of course, historical allusiveness of the sort Pater finds in “aesthetic poetry” is always proximate to parody—just as aestheticism is always proximate to decadence.) Kannenstine writes that Barnes “seeks to erase the line drawn between past and present” and that “her final achievement is a manner and style of no particular era, and thus of any era.”81 This is finely observed, but requires a qualification: the very medium of Barnes’s transhistorical prose is a historically marked decadent style for which the dissolution of historical boundaries is, as Williams shows of Pater, a constitutive theoretical and formal feature.
There is pleasure in the allusions to past styles, a pleasure exemplified by O’Connor once he gets going, but there are risks, too: that the past might engulf the present, drown it out, like a gothic curse or the appearance of a hereditary disease. As Daniela Caselli puts it, “The constant exhibition of linguistic corruption accounts for the obsessive, torrential, and self-destroying quality of the narrative in this novel that is never able to forget its own status as writing.”82 A literary harkening back becomes conflated with the threatening harkening back dwelt on by the late Victorian pseudoscience of degeneration theory, a dead end as far as the life sciences went but endlessly productive aesthetically, as the scores of naturalist novels dramatizing it attest. “Decadence” and “degeneration” were conceptually closely linked, with the latter drawing, through the language of science, on the broader cultural logic of the former. When, of aristocratic lineages, O’Connor says, “The last muscle of the aristocracy is madness . . . the last child born to aristocracy is sometimes an idiot,” he is merely voicing a degenerationist cliché.83 Nightwood’s slightly belated engagement with degeneration theory is part and parcel of its slightly belated engagement with aesthetic decadence.
Such decadent—or degenerate—historicism draws, rhetorically and conceptually, on the urtext of degeneration theory, Max Nordau’s Degeneration. “Among the women,” Nordau writes of fin de siècle degenerates, “one wears her hair combed smoothly back and down like Rafael’s Maddalena Doni in the Uffizi at Florence”; another “has hers cut short in front on the brow and long in the nape, waved and lightly puffed, after the fashion of the fifteenth century, as may be seen in the pages and young knights of Gentile Bellini, Botticelli and Mantegna.”84 The inflection of characteristically modern decadent/degenerate human types (medicalized and pathologized in Nordau’s scientistic account) by recognizably Renaissance aesthetic styles is the most Barnesian note in Degeneration, and Nordau’s description of fin de siècle aesthetic degeneracy might double as a description of Barnes’s own style: “The unity of abiding by one definite historic style counts as old-fashioned, provincial, Philistine, and the time has not yet produced a style of its own.”85
Degeneration at the level of plot can be seen most clearly in the description of the Volkbein line, with its sad culmination in Robin and Felix’s abnormal son Guido, but all of Nightwood’s characters are haunted by atavistic returns—returns which seem to illustrate Nordau’s insistence that degeneration involves “the unchaining of beast in man.”86 In her robust analysis of degeneration theory in Nightwood, Dana Seitler reads the novel alongside Frank Norris’s Vandover (1914), a far cruder, and far less ironic, degenerationist allegory. Seitler finds in Norris a normative, bourgeois vision that “recast[s] the homosexual dandy as the atavistic brute”; Barnes, conversely, achieves something less repressive: “[I]f the bestial is the most clarifying index to what degenerationism seeks to police, the ironic reappropriation of this thematic . . . constitutes a very different kind of imaginary; it layers its representational economy with bodies that are not so much subversive as they are contradictory and hybrid . . . in a state of spiritual ascension and a position of human-to-animal collapse.”87
Seitler recognizes that far from merely “subverting” degenerationist tropes, Barnes gets a great deal of creative mileage out of them. Indeed, much of Nightwood’s eerie intensity depends on its characters’ uncanny flickering between their hypermodern (and modernist) poses and the grinning animal underneath—two poles that become, as in post-Stoker representations of the vampire (Dracula being a classic instance of degenerationist fantasy), thrillingly identical. “[Robin] yet carried the quality of the ‘way back’ as animals do,” we are told early on; she is an “infected carrier of the past.” Nora, likewise, contains the past within her, a past figured as beyond even the advent of the animal, as aligned with the mute materiality of plant life: “[T]here could be seen coming, early in her life, the design that was to be the weather-beaten grain of her face, that wood in the work; the tree coming forward in her, an undocumented record of time.”88
What is the relationship between Nightwood’s obsessive imagination of the bestial in the human on the one hand and its interest in transvestism and cross-gendering on the other? Paul de Man’s gloss on “catachresis” and “mixed modes” offers a clue: “They are capable of inventing the most fantastic entities by dint of the positional power inherent in language. They can dismember the texture of reality and reassemble it in the most capricious ways, pairing man with woman or human being with beast in the most unnatural shapes.”89 For Barnes, likewise, “man with woman” and “human being with beast” are potential conjunctions arising out of the deployment of the impossible possibilities offered by metaphor. Writing of Barnes’s representation of Robin, Clare Taylor observes that Nightwood’s “conceptualiz[ation of the] masculine woman” depicts her as “an ‘impossible,’ or excessive, subject”: “The text, pushing Robin to the limits of representation, subjects her to the bestial.”90 The “impossibility” Taylor perceives is a function of Robin’s female masculinity, but the equation between cross-gendering and the bestial had already been proposed in the scene in which Nora mentally compares Dr. O’Connor in drag to the wolf from Little Red Riding Hood. Indeed, we might think of Dr. O’Connor’s drag as a kind of transposition of the cross-gendering of Robin—the “impossibility” of representation that Taylor perceives of Robin finds its compensation in O’Connor, in whom transvestism and the bestial are posited as co-constitutive. Drawing energy from degeneration theory’s peculiarly poetic phobias, Barnes yokes transvestism to the bestial in order to make a more comprehensive statement about the animal substrate of human sociality—a statement she shares with the Darwinian sci-fi of H. G. Wells before her and with William S. Burroughs after her.
Nightwood is not, of course, “Darwinian sci-fi.” But its version of modernist interiority, of modernist psychology, is so extreme as to offer something like a generic revolution. As Emily Coleman said in a letter to Eliot, “Can you read [Nightwood] and not see that something new has been said about the very heart of sex?—going beyond sex, to that world where there is no marriage or giving in marriage—where no modern writer ever goes?” (emphasis Coleman’s).91 In her apparently retrograde reliance on the tropes and clichés both of decadence and of degeneration theory, Barnes in fact pushes the novel of modernist interiority toward its limit, a limit approached via the destabilizing, weirdly literalizing force of her metaphors, which insist so relentlessly and so eerily on the presence of the animal in the human. As Bonnie Kime Scott observes of Nightwood’s “beasts turning human,” for Barnes, “nature does not stay conveniently separate or ‘other’ from culture, and . . . evolution has not safely or permanently delivered human beings to civilization.”92 For Barnes, metaphor is the trope whereby beasts turn human, and humans bestial.
Nightwood’s fascination with human-beast hybrids occasionally approaches not just sci-fi but horror fiction (Eliot’s “quality of horror”?). Its famous concluding scene, in which Robin and a dog square off on all fours, gathers together the various threads from which Nightwood derives its uncanny effects: cross-gendering, degeneration theory (Nordau himself insists that one of the “stigmata of degeneracy” is “zoöphilia, or excessive love for animals”),93 and the curious independence granted the metaphoric vehicle in Barnes’s poetics. Robin’s imitation of a dog—an imitation that results in a transformation—literalizes the human-animal motif threaded throughout the novel:
Her pose, startled and broken, was caught at the point where her hand had reached almost to the shoulder, and at the moment Nora’s body struck the wood, Robin began going down. Sliding down she went; down, her hair swinging, her arms held out, and the dog stood there, rearing back, his forelegs slanting; his paws trembling under the trembling of his rump, his hackle standing; his mouth open, his tongue slung sideways over his sharp bright teeth; whining and waiting.94
This is the most exhaustively interpreted passage in all of Barnes; it seems to hold the key to her entire poetics, though no one can agree on just what it means. As Tyrus Miller observes, there is a fundamental “undecidability” between two competing interpretive programs: on the one hand, Robin’s performance looks pathetic, degrading, an instance of “abject breakdown.” On the other hand, there is something hieratic in her transformation—think of Zeus turned to a swan, or any number of comparable classical precedents—in which case perhaps this is an instance of “divine communication.”95 Such “undecidability” is a hallmark of decadence proper, with its visions of excremental transcendence. Though he doesn’t invoke decadence, Kenneth Burke reads Nightwood as manifesting a “transcendence downward”; in Robin’s canine mimicry “corruption and distinction become interchangeable terms.”96 Alan Singer grounds these interpretive ambivalences in a compelling formal analysis that finds in Nightwood’s final scene not the “climactic development of a latent image pattern” but instead something like the exposure at the level of theme of the novel’s experimental imbalance between tenor and vehicle. For Singer, Nightwood’s final scene
incurs self-consciousness about the relational hierarchy that conditions the significance of such patterns in the first place. In effect, the metaphoric dog (beast), which has been lurking within the doctor’s monologue as a second-order meaning, leaps dramatically into the foreground of this narrative to rout those meanings constraining metaphor to a purely heuristic role. What was figurative in previous contexts becomes literal, thus inhibiting a reader’s attempt to value one over the other.97
The movement of the “metaphoric dog” to the narrative “foreground” accomplishes the victory of vehicle over tenor always implicit in Barnes’s extended conceits. Understood in terms of Nightwood’s debt to decadence, we might take the ascendance of second-order meanings to first-order meanings as indicating the potential for a decadent style of metaphor, in which the vehicle expands endlessly, to give rise to a decadent genre: the Darwinian horror novel, in which the continuity between man and beast is always more than merely figurative.98 Robin Blyn finds Barnes’s “neo-Decadence” “challeng[ing] the equation of Decadence with degeneracy,”99 but this is not quite right. Barnes, in fact, doubles down on the equation of decadence with degeneracy, but not in order to use degeneration theory to impugn decadence. Rather, degeneration theory offers an index of decadence’s truths. Barnes’s felicity with parody permits her to harness the energy of degeneration theory without endorsing its phobic stigmatizations—she knows that it’s potentially very silly stuff, but she takes it just seriously enough to get its images of atavism and the bestial to work in the service of her decadent vision. Indeed, degeneration theory’s thematic preoccupations are productive of decadent style itself. Like such late Victorian fantastic tales as The Island of Dr. Moreau or Dracula, the conclusion of Nightwood shows the beast actually, not figuratively, turning human—or, more precisely, it takes a figurative metamorphosis and pushes it to its most extreme point: if it goes any further, it tips into sci-fi.
Contemporary readers, as well as later critics, have not infrequently read Nightwood’s final scene as describing a human-animal sexual encounter, an interpretation Barnes rejected: “The dog is not being romantic towards Robin! It is furious at the mystery of her drunkenness, a kind of exorcism of what it does not understand.”100 But the attractiveness of the bestiality reading reflects the sense that what the scene literally describes—a woman imitating a dog, and a dog growling back at her—is inadequate to its poetic radicality. There is a felt need to insist that the scene goes further than it does, because, although taken in isolation it merely describes a woman pretending to be a dog, in the larger fabric of Barnes’s decadent conceits it performs a kind of magic trick: it dissolves the logic of metaphor. Or, to put it differently, the scene allows metaphor to come to a complete resolution—a resolution normally denied it—so that the vehicle finally takes over, supplants its tenor, and becomes real.
Nightwood’s evocations of temporal return, of the biological hauntings of the past, can be illuminated by its most Paterian sentence: “When she smiled the smile was only in the mouth and a little bitter: the face of an incurable yet to be stricken with its malady.” “Degeneration” wasn’t part of Pater’s imagination, but his discussion of the Mona Lisa certainly figures the aesthetic past as a kind of titillating illness, perverse, appealing, and dangerous—not unlike the evolutionary past whose return degeneration theory tracks with appalled fascination. For Barnes, the insistent rhythms of the past do indeed represent a kind of “degeneration narrative,” as Seitler has it, in which thematic decadence “shift[s] its terms from a case of ‘style’ to a biological condition.”101 Or perhaps, as I’ve suggested above, the order of operations runs the other way: perhaps degeneration theory granted Barnes the permission she needed to let her metaphors run free, unconstrained by the normal logic of tenor and vehicle. By articulating an admittedly ironized degeneration narrative within the medium of Paterian aestheticism, the biological “malady” itself becomes a kind of style, one more sampled literary template with which, and within which, the modernist can play. The style of decadence is Nightwood’s master code, a gauzy medium through which Barnes effects her persistent filtration of the idioms of the past, “as if,” as the Baron says of the Baronin, “the past were a web about her, as there is a web of time about a very old building.”102 Or, as Paul West has written, “There is a Chaucer inside her Baudelaire.”103
“Every science-fictional world,” writes Seo-Young Chu in a brilliant analysis of science fiction’s relationship to metaphor, “is a metaphysical conceit literalized as ontological fact within a narrative universe.” For Chu, “science fiction” means “a mimetic discourse whose objects of representation are non-imaginary but cognitively estranging.” Science-fictional genres and aesthetic tendencies can be taxonomized according to their referents, which are in every case difficult to imagine, at least in comparison to the world of familiar people and things treated by realism: “Surrealism, for example, is a type of science-fictional mimesis whose cognitively estranging referent is the phenomenon of dreaming . . . . Detective fiction is a type of science-fictional mimesis whose cognitively estranging referent is the mystery of ratiocination.”104 Following Chu’s lead, I would suggest that the generic templates drawn on by Barnes involve the following cognitively estranging referents: degeneration theory is a type of science-fictional mimesis whose referent is the fact of evolution and descent by natural selection; decadence is a type of science-fictional mimesis whose cognitively estranging referent is the interpenetration of biological and social drives in the production of human culture, including the vexing question of the relationship between biological sex and gender roles. One way decadence points to its referent is by projecting metaphors of organic decomposition onto textuality, which is why decadence has a privileged relationship to the mode of parody. Like parody, decadence is always about the deterioration of linguistic, cultural, and textual scripts into their ingredients. Like William Burroughs after her, Barnes’s “science fiction” is obsessed with demonstrating the interpenetration of parody as an experimental mode with science fiction (or magical realism, or the metaphysical conceit stretched to its breaking point, or whatever else one wants to call it) at the level of both theme and language.
Barnesian prose, then, is constructed out of a tissue of other styles, other voices. We might take “tissue,” here, quite literally. Like Burroughs after her and H. G. Wells before her, Barnes takes from “decadence” in general a permission to stretch figuration to its limit, to replace metaphor with metamorphosis. As Chu says, expatiating on trope’s etymological link to the verb “to turn,” literary tropes can seem uncannily similar to an “organism turned by mutation into something else.”105 “Madame Collects Herself” (1918), one of Barnes’s early short plays, renders this logic very explicit. Madame Zolbo, visiting her hairdresser, Fifine, and a barber, Monsieur Goujon, makes a remark about what we might now call patriarchal gender constructs: “Shaw says—I’m perfectly sure it’s Shaw—that a woman is only what a man, or men, make her.”106 In Madame Zolbo’s case, this is literally true: she is, as we discover over the course of the play’s few short pages, constructed out of the discarded body parts of various men from her past—a lock of hair from one, blood from another, a patch of skin from a third, a finger from a fourth. When, aghast, Fifine the hairdresser stabs Madame Zolbo through the heart, the wound proves nonfatal—Zolbo’s heart, too, is imported. Fifine, in what might seem a general statement about the unlocatability of human essence, is also asking a very specific medical or anatomical question: “Where are you, Madam, in what spot are you yourself?”107
MADAME ZOLBO: Ah, Monsieur, that is a very elusive thing. Can I call it my soul, a blithe atom, a canary at song in the wilderness of my body?
MONSIEUR GOUJON: [turning to his wife] This is a woman’s job. Strip her of her gifts, unravel the horrid spool until we reach the end—let us see what she is like.108
The hairdresser, aligned with surfaces, masks, and externality, is enemy to the forces of baroque interiority obsessed over by decadence. As the barber and the hairdresser finish removing all of Madame Zolbo’s parts, she “disappears and a blond canary rises up toward the ceiling.”109 This transformation bears some obvious affinities with Robin’s imitation of a dog in Nightwood, although it goes further and, for that reason, cannot attain to the same uncanny ambiguity. (With Madame Zolbo in mind, we might say that the power of Robin’s “transformation” is that it comes so close to being a literal metamorphosis, but stops just short of it—it is like a fantastic tale, but it is not one.) Madame Zolbo appears to compare her soul to a canary, but as we discover, she is not, in fact, making a comparison at all. She is speaking a literal truth. Nor is this metamorphosis unidirectional: the play ends with Zolbo’s canary-soul reacquiring the grisly materials of her prosthetic humanity, turning back into Madame Zolbo.
Unlike Nightwood, then, “Madame Collects Herself” is, generically, a fairy tale. But its representation of a literal transformation—from human to canary and back again—partakes not of the literature of magical enchantment but, rather, of the materialist fantastic tale. Degeneration theory is again in the background—Nordau describes fin de siècle degenerates as “dummies patched together at haphazard, in a mythical mortuary, from fragments of bodies, heads, trunks, limbs, just as they came to hand.”110 Like the creatures in Dr. Moreau, the construction of Madame Zolbo is medical and surgical; she is made of “a pint of blood,” a “little square of skin,” a transplanted heart, and so on. Like one of Dr. Moreau’s vivisected beasts, Madame Zolbo is assembled piecemeal—but, if their essence is in the larynx, hers is even harder to pin down. Like Moreau’s creatures, though, she too is just a creature inside: a lovely blond canary, aspiring to the higher air of metaphor.
The “mechanistic aesthetic” of Chanel’s dandyism is meant to discipline nature, at least the “bad nature” that Barnes, in her interview with Chanel, finds the fashion designer condemning. But for the Barnesian female decadent, all nature is “bad” nature, and there’s no point in condemning it or trying to bring it into line. The task of Barnes’s decadent style is to render bad nature gloriously excessive, to transform the recesses of decadent interiority into a highly formalized, richly allusive rhetoric. If Chanel, to recur to Hulme’s dichotomy, is “classical,” Barnes’s answering “romantic” interiority is positively animalistic: the soul is a beast, but that beast is a Renaissance poem.